The Truth About Social Promotion

This was posted by Leonie Haimson at the NYC Public School Parent blog on August 10 when the mayor again played politics with the lives of children.

With tonight's Panel for Educational Policy due to vote on the extension of grade retention to the 4th and 6th grades, today is a good day to repost. Hopefully some people will sign up for 2 minutes tonight to emphasize some of the points Leonie makes.

As part of the Grassroots Education Movement's "The Truth About...." series of brochures, we may pamphletize (okay, so I made up a word) this post. Or include the concepts in a pamphlet on high stakes tests.

[Section added after posting
I know, I know. Many teachers want to be able to hold kids back when they deem it necessary. I do think there are times it is necessary. But that decision should not be based on some politician looking to make points. The blanket policy imposes policy from without but should be in the hands of the teachers and school administrators. What happened to school and principal empowerment? As a teacher I even resented my principal's takeover of this policy for her own political ends - holding kids back en masse as a way to game the high stakes tests so as to make the school look better. But gaming the test is what this is all about.]

Some myths and open lies about social promotion:

• Bloomklein ended social promotion (see credit recovery and drive-by diplomas)
• Children benefit from being held back (dropout rates rise)
• Research shows it works (BloomKlein cannot site one single research supported study)

The Mayor commits educational malpractice, once again

by Leonie Haimson

Today, the mayor announced he would extend his grade retention policies to 4th and 6th grades -- meaning that all NYC students through 8th grade would now face being held back on the basis of a single test score. According to Gotham Schools,

Asked about researchers’ claims that retention policies can raise the dropout rate, Bloomberg said he was “speechless,” adding, “It’s pretty hard to argue that it does not work.” Klein said that since 2004, when the DOE ended social promotion for third graders, support for its end has been “unanimous.”

In fact, the consensus among experts is overwhelmingly negative -- that grade retention hurts rather than helps students and leads to higher dropout rates. When the City Council held hearings the first time the Mayor proposed this policy, they could not find a single education researcher who supported it.

Yet the mayor and Klein manage to inhabit their own universe of spin; reminiscent to the manner in which Karl Rove described the Bush administration:

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

See the 2004 letter, signed by over 100 academics, heads of organizations, and experts on testing from throughout the nation, in opposition to the mayor's policy, when he first proposed 3rd grade retention, explaining:

"All of the major educational research and testing organizations oppose using test results as the sole criterion for advancement or retention, since judging a particular student on the basis of a single exam is an inherently unreliable and an unfair measure of his or her actual level of achievement. ...Harcourt and CTB McGraw Hill, the two largest companies that produce standardized tests...are on record opposing the use of their tests as the exclusive criterion for decisions about retention, because they can never be a reliable and/or complete measure of what students may or may not know."

Among the letter’s signers were Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, renowned pediatrician and author of numerous works on child care and development, Robert Tobias, former head of Division of Assessment and Accountability for the Board of Education and now Director of the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning at NYU, and Dr. Ernest House, who did the independent evaluation of New York City’s failed “Gates” retention program in the 1980’s.

Other signers included four past presidents of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s premier organization of educational researchers, as well as three members and the study director of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Appropriate Use of Educational Testing, and two members of the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council.

According to Dr. Shane Jimerson, professor of Child and Adolescent Development at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of over twenty publications on the subject of retention,

“The continued use of grade retention constitutes educational malpractice. It is the responsibility of educators to provide interventions that are effective in promoting academic success, yet research examining the effectiveness of retention reveals lower achievement, more behavior problems, and higher dropout rates among retained students. It is particularly disconcerting that a disproportionate number of students of ethnic minority and low income backgrounds are retained. Moreover, children’s experience of being held back is highly stressful; surveys indicate that by sixth grade, students report that only the loss of a parent and going blind is more stressful. “

The second time the DOE pushed through this policy, for 5th grade retention, Klein agreed to commission an independent research study of the results. RAND has been analyzing the data since 2005 and has produced several interim reports which the public has not been allowed to see, as reported in a chapter in our book, NYC Schools Under Bloomberg and Klein: What Parents, Teachers and Policymakers Need to Know, by Patrick Sullivan, member of the Panel for Educational Policy:

"....the reports contained the results of extensive surveys with elementary school principals, summer school administrators, and Academic Intervention Services (AIS) specialists. Summer school leaders were coping with the latest DOE reorganization and complained they could not get any specific information on the students assigned to their programs. AIS leaders found that small class sizes were the most effective tool to help struggling students but less than a third of at-risk children had access to smaller classes. Principals felt the retention policy relied too much on standardized tests and was damaging to student self-esteem. Most troubling of all: none of these findings had been made public."

Now, as Patrick points out in Gotham Schools,

"When we voted on the 8th grade retention policy last year they said the release date for the RAND study was August 2009. Now it is “sometime this fall”. Would that happen to be “sometime after the election this fall?” What are they hiding?"

According to the DOE spokesperson, " Preliminary results of the RAND study, which looks at the performance of third and fifth graders affected by the Mayor’s promotion policy over time and will include data from the 2008-2009 school year, were delivered to the Department of Education last year...."

If Bloomberg and Klein were really so convinced that their retention policies have been successful, they should be obligated to release the RAND findings before the vote of the Panel to approve their extension to even more children.

Jeff Kaufman on ATR Wrinkle

From JW's Email listserve:

The ATR pool, with the so-called hiring freeze, is actually being used to fill hard to staff schools. As my old school closes the excessed teachers are being transferred to schools that could not attract open market applicants and still have vacancies. The ATRs will be given full schedules and look like they are appointed but the principal still has the ability to have the teacher reassigned without resorting to 3020a charges. When the principal finds an ATR that he/she likes they can appoint. Until that time the ATR remains on the original schools table of organization and is paid by central.

Jeff

My naive, really facetious, question is:
With some class sizes being large, why not make use of the ATRs to.....never mind!

Too logical, but more important, using them in a rational way would undercut the political nature of the closing schools/ATR creation issue that BloomKlein use to create a public call for the firing of these people after one year.

Related:
NY Post's Susan Edelman's decent story in ATRs

Three Events This Week

Monday Sept 14: First PEP (bogus NYC board of Ed) meeting at Tweed, 6pm. Sign up for speaking time at 5:30. There will be lots of people there for a number of reasons. CPE Coalition for Public Education) and some GEM people (handing out and possibly speaking) The Truth About Charters, people addressing social promotion since the new policy will be voted on and no-bid contracts. Ed Notes will be there to take some video.

Wed Sept 16: The UFT has changed the chapter leader meeting into a delegate assembly (these never take place in Sept) to discuss contract demands. That means they are getting close or going through the motions of getting an agreement between Randi and the mayor ratified. 4:15 at 52 Broadway.

Thurs. Sept 17: CEC dist 15 meets at The Patrick Daley School (PS 15) in Red Hook over the PAVE charter school attempt to extend its stay - they say they couldn't find other space but in reality always had their eyes on that building. They even lied about the number of students they have as a way to get more space. The DOE backs PAVE in every shenanigans they pull. We will be there to take some video.

Bloomberg Race Pandering on School Funding Bounces Back

Mayor distorts school funding for black audiences

The history of the BloomKlein administration is littered with mistruths and misdirections. The debate over school funding has seen these characters at their worst.

It has always been commonly accepted that the whiter school districts had higher payrolls because they attracted and held onto their senior teachers who made much more money. (Aside: the immense gap between teacher salaries at the top and I won't say bottom, but let's say the 5th-10th year career teacher is shameful.)

Aside from teacher salaries, the poorer neighborhood schools received more money from the state and the feds (Title I). Not nearly enough to close any gaps, achievement or not. But anecdotes did come in about class sizes being lower in these schools and more services delivered.

When I first started teaching in 1967, a prep period gap was instituted, where elementary school teachers received 5 preps a week in Title I school, while the teachers in white schools only had 2 preps a week (Title I middle schools teachers also had 2 or 3 less teaching periods). With the extra preps, there was a need for lots more teachers to cover these preps. So there were certainly lots more teaching bodies in the poorer neighborhoods, even if the average salary was lower. (The prep period gap was equalized, in the late 70's I believe.)

Maybe they expected teachers in Staten Island to have a mass exodus to central Brooklyn so they could get those 3 extra periods off. Didn't happen. Here's some news: teaching in many of these schools is damn hard.

My friends who did transfer to white schools - and it took many years - found a country club attitude and teaching so immensely easier. They called it "white glove" teaching. The biggest issue for them was the level of parental interference. For so many years they had lamented the lack of parental involvement. Watch out what you wish for. They saw active PTAs that raised money galore. And the gifts they received. I remember my mother, an immigrant who had never gone to school and was barely literate, spending an enormous amount of time worrying about the Christmas gift to give my teachers, thinking my entire future depended on her making the right choice.


When Joel Klein became Chancellor he railed against the UFT contract's seniority rules as being the biggest block to progress in the schools. He claimed the UFT seniority transfer rule drained good (senior) teachers out of schools in poor neighborhoods. There were about 600 of these transfers a year, a relative drop in the bucket, but this opening salvo on teacher unions was used for a long time. It was bogus.

The second attack on the UFT transfer rule was that principals in the better neighborhood were forced to accept these senior teachers, who in this attack were now considered dregs instead of those good senior teachers deserting the poor neighborhoods so they could be closer to home. (Don't think that housing end educational issues are not interrelated.) Of course this line of attack totally contradicted the first line of attack.

Unfortunately, Randi Weingarten bought into both of them and the 2005 contract sunk seniority in favor of open market. This is capitalism, isn't it boys and girls? And these are neoliberals who do not believe in restrictions in the market place.

In fact, many schools under the old system managed to keep positions hidden from these awful/wonderful senior teacher looking to transfer. By the way, they had to put down 5 choices and if they didn't like the school they were assigned to they could not reapply for 2 years.

Those of us who taught in high need schools for many years were given some kind of double seniority and still had trouble. They used to wonder how they could keep getting turned down for Staten Island, yet saw enough young teachers in the SI schools to make them wonder what was going on. It was called nepotism and who you know.

After BloomKlein got Randi to scrap seniority, the next line of attack was to go after the very same senior teachers with high salaries - remember them? - the ones Klein claimed in his first attack were so necessary to the poor school districts. They did this with the fair funding formula, where schools for the first time would be charged for their teacher salaries, giving the totally empowered principals (when it comes to teacher matters - again, thanks Randi) an incentive to get rid of the high salaried people.

Then came the mass closing of schools and the current ATR crisis. But they and the UFT will figure out a way to deal with this annoyance.

Erin Einhorn's Daily News article, "Critics of Mayor Bloomberg say he panders to black voters on school issues" touches on this issue:

Mayor Bloomberg tells black voters he wiped out political favoritism that gave "white" schools more money than "minority" schools - but education experts say his facts are sloppy. Even a deputy mayor admits his comments go too far. "He may have overstated it to emphasize the point that a lot of schools in poorer communities did not get as much as they should," Dennis Walcott said.

I'll close with this comment from Rob Caloras, a parent leader in Bayside Queens, a majority white district, posted to the NYCEducationNews listserve:

...based on my experiences in District 26, the article accurately reflects the funding situation. Mayor Mike's claims to minority audiences have offended many in D26 as inappropriate class and race based baiting. Our schools receive very little money other than the student allotments. There have been through the years extra money given to our schools through various State programs, for example the Talented and Gifted program. This program brought, at most 250 thousand to the District. Through other such small programs, our District has obtained enough money to have a dance program at a school or an arts program or an enrichment program. But, this money is peanuts.

As the article reflects, the lion share of the budgets at middle class school, like those in D26, go toward paying teacher salaries. Had the weighted funding plan of Klein gone through without a hold harmless amount-which kept teacher salaries covered regardless of the new allocations-our schools would have had to fire many teachers. The hold harmless money merely kept in place pre-existing allocations for teacher salaries. To do otherwise would have been grossly unfair to our students and teachers.

Teachers making 80 thousand and up-a large portion of D26 teachers-would not have found many schools willing to hire them as principals sought to reduce budget pressure by hiring teachers without as many years in the system. For over ten years I have heard from non-D26 parent leaders that I am lucky to be in such a rich school district. I have always responded that our schools receive considerably less money per student than just about every other school. I have yet to see proof that refutes this, yet, ten years later, the misperception continues.

Are We Close to a Contract?

UFT Changes Sept 16 Chapter Leader Meeting into a Delegate Assembly

The usually somnolent early September chapter leader meeting has been converted into a Delegate Assembly to discuss contract demands. Is it possible that a contract will be handed out 10 minutes before the meeting and people will be asked to vote on it? This is the usual modus operendi of the UFT. But with the million member Unity Caucus dominated negotiating committee having met a few times and having some of the members (at least the non-Unity Caucus ones) kept in the dark about this DA, all balls are in the air.

Many people believe that the entire committee was a sham from day one and that Randi had negotiated a contract before she left on August 1. One thing was clear: the UFT folding on any opposition to mayoral control, term limits, and staying neutral in the mayoral race is part of the factoring in the contract.

Here is the UFT announcement, which asks chapter leaders to report on over sized classes. One thing we can bet our pensions on is the sure bet there will be no class size relief in the contract.

Special DA to discuss contract demands

The first Delegate Assembly of the year, Wednesday, Sept. 16, starting at 4:15 p.m. at 52 Broadway, will be devoted to discussing the UFT’s demands in the current negotiations for our new contract. All delegates are encouraged to attend. Chapter leaders should report to their district rep at the DA how many oversized classes in each grade they have in their schools (see To Do item on class size grievances for further details).

Candi is Dandy in DC But Will Rhee Have All the Glee?

Bill Turque in the Washington Post reports:

Rhee, Union May Be Close to Deal

While making it appear that Rhee has backed off on some of her more radical proposals, we in fact see this as a win-win for her due to this provision:

Under a proposed "mutual consent" provision, principals would have more power to pick and choose teachers. Teachers who failed to find new assignments would have three options. They could remain on the payroll for a year, accepting at least two spot assignments as substitutes or tutors or in some other support role. If they can't find a permanent job after a year, they would be fired. Teachers could also choose to take a $25,000 buyout or, if they have at least 20 years' service to the city school system, retire with full benefits.

This is the Chicago model of getting rid of ATRs after one year. What needs to be understood here is that Rhee will find reasons to close as many schools as necessary to create large numbers of ATRs who will be gone in a year.

This is what BloomKlein want for NYC where there are still over 1600 ATRs. With a UFT/DOE contract imminent, people will be looking for some kind of wedge that will be disguised as something innocuous in the contract that will allow them to cut into the ATR pool. Maybe a buyout offer of some kind this time.

Some people at the ICE meeting yesterday thought Bloomberg is focused on getting elected and will wait to try to get the hammer out in two years, at which point the charter school movement will be beginning to have a greater impact and the UFT will be even weaker than it is today. There might even be an agreement (under the table) that the UFT will back off on stopping the growth of charters. One idea floated is that even if the charter cap is not lifted, charters under a management group will be counted as one. Thus the 5 KIPP schools and the 4 Evil Moskowitz schools would count against the cap as 2 schools. Then it's Katy bar the door.

Turque gives a shout out to our favorite DC teacher, Candi Peterson, who has revealed provisions of the supposedly secret talks on her blog, The Washington Teacher. (I borrowed Candi's hangman graphic.)

The proposals have triggered new tensions within the union's leadership. Executive Vice President Nathan Saunders, a longtime critic of Parker's, said the proposals all but eliminate job security for teachers.

"This contract looks to be another approach to diminishing teachers' employment rights," Saunders said.

Peterson's decision to publish draft documents from the contract negotiations drew an unusual public rebuke from Parker, who sent a letter and a voice mail message to members denouncing her for having "maliciously undermined" the confidentiality of the talks.

Peterson, who said she is not bound by any confidentiality agreement, said teachers have grown frustrated with the lack of information available about the protracted negotiations.

"He's promised to tell members about the contract, but he never follows through," she said.

Of course, Randi Weingarten and the AFT have been up to their ears in these negotiations, tutoring Parker with their hand crafted best selling manual "Slick Sellout Tactics for Union Leaders: Or how to sell a sellout to your membership while making it look like a great victory."

How does this relate to us here in NYC? The UFT 3 million member negotiating committee, by estimates 75% dominated by Unity Caucus members (who don't advertise their ties) has a cone of silence over it, so that even the two ICE people who are on the committee cannot talk about what is going on so we as a caucus can take action to forestall the sellout aspects of the contract. As you will read in my upcoming post, there is a possibility we there may be a contract voted on this Wednesday. Back later.

Related

Accountable Talk also deals with this item

Obama Calls for Public Option in Healtcare While Undercutting Public Option in Education

If you've been following the Obama/Duncan support for the Ed Deform plan, the headline pretty much says it all.

But you might want to check Diane Ravitch's first post of the school year at Bridging Differences, where she in The Start of an Interesting and Dangerous School Year she says:

Nationally, the most important event was the release of the federal government’s regulations for the “Race to the Top.” Those regulations made clear that the Obama administration has fully aligned itself with the edu-entrepreneurs who favor market-based reforms. As I predicted on this blog, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are now the spear carriers for the GOP's education policies of choice and accountability. An odd development, don’t you think? The Department of Education dangles nearly $5 billion before the states, but only if they agree to remove the caps on charter schools and any restrictions on using student test scores to evaluate teachers.

What is extraordinary about these regulations is that they have no credible basis in research.

Nine Eleven, UPDATED

I guess this is a day of reminiscence.

On 9/10 I had a melanoma removed from my side. It wasn't a serious operation. It was at Northshore hospital, with anesthesia that put me out, but I walked out around noon, woozy but standing. The surgeon, a Korean woman who looked to be around 12 years old, told me to stay home the rest of the week. But at that point I was working out of an the District 14 Multimedia office at PS 84 in Williamsburg and didn't have to teach, so I went in, still a little spacey, on that beautiful Tuesday. My partner, Maria, suggested we go to breakfast at a place on Bedford Ave.

We were just finishing breakfast when the waiter came over with the check and said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I figured it was something like a small plane that lost its way. Soon after he told us a second plane had hit the building. My first reaction was that they had collided with each other first. "No. It's terrorists," said Maria. I laughed.

We walked the two blocks to the East River and watched the smoke stream out of the buildings. "My God, I think people are jumping," Maria said. I didn't believe her. I don't know how she saw that because I didn't. Of course, she was right.

We watched for a while and she suggested I go back to the office and grab a video camera. It took me some time to get it set up. On the way back to the river, people on the roofs started screaming, "It fell down." When I got there a few minutes later, there was only a puff of smoke where the building had been.

I shot about 5 minutes of video but just couldn't go on. (I still have it somewhere, but have never looked at it.) We went back to the office to watch it on TV. One of the teachers' husbands worked around there and she hadn't heard from him directly, though one of his co-workers told her (before the building came down) he was all right but had gone down to watch. Of course she was extremely upset, but had to try to hide it with a group of special ed kids in front of her.

It was clear the other one was going to come down too. I couldn't watch and went back to my office. About 1PM I was out in the hall when I saw the teacher's husband, who had walked all the way over the bridge, come down the hall. She ran out of her room and they just hugged and hugged.

I drove home that afternoon. The Belt Parkway was empty. And I mean empty. It seemed that it was closed as I saw no cars. And this was around 4pm. I was flipping the radio dial to get as much information as I could, but still spent the most time on my favorite station, WFAN, where Mike Francesa did as good a coverage as was possible for hours. I was feeling real tired and woozy from the operation and hit the sheets when I got home in a semi dreamlike state, still not sure if I had come out of my operation yet.

Update:

Francesa is talking about it now. I forgot that Dog wasn't there. Mike was on the air until later in the evening, with Charles McCord there with him most of the time. Now my memory is coming back about why that coverage was so good between the two of them. They both brought so much to the table, with Mike making many guesses about what was going on using his intuition and intelligence. He also talked about his trip home where he didn't see one car on the road.

I remember meeting a first year teaching fellow a few months later. Her school faced the city and when moving her class they could see the towers burning. Having recently gone through a traumatic personal experience, that sight froze her and she freaked and panicked. This was the first few days of the school year. The administration at her school was always notoriously oppressive and came down on her. Hard. They took away her class and gave it to another fellow and it just about ended her career as a teacher, though she hung on at the school as a sub for the rest of the year.

While I'm updating, I want to make a point about the relevance of that day to our history in comparison to other events in history. I was moved in recent trips to London at what it must have been like in the blitz in WWII. This went on for a long time, sometimes every night with lots of people dying, mostly civilian. How does that play compared to nine eleven?

There are lots of factors in why that one day had such an impact. Maybe it was because it was one day. Imagine if there were a 9/11 every day for years? No one day would stick out. Or maybe just the nature of the act and what was behind it, though the terror of Hitler's war machine was not light stuff. But every time 9/11 comes up I can't help reviewing walking the streets of London trying to imagine the terror of the bombers coming every night. America has never experienced anything like it and should try to keep things in perspective.

Goldstein Tells a Tale of Two High Schools

At Gotham Schools' Community Center, Francis Lewis HS chapter leader Arthur Goldstein compares his school to underutilized Jamaica HS, whose chapter leader is James Eterno (ICE/TJC candidate to run against Mulgrew for UFT president). James has done some amazing work at Jamaica as chapter leader in trying to defend the school from the DOE onslaught. He organized a large group of parents and teachers to a PEP meeting that certainly made a point.

But Jamaica is prime meat to be squeezed out of existence to make way for small schools and charter schools in central Queens. So don't expect anything rational. This is all about political ideology, not education. When Francis Lewis tops 10,000 students and are running 'till 1AM they will also declare Francis Lewis an impact school and start steering students to the 10 small schools at Jamaica. But not the ELA and special ed students as these schools will not have the resources to handle them.

The UFT and the Gates Project to Evaluate Teachers

The UFT attempt to portray Bill Gates as some benevolent force just looking to find an innocent way to evaluate teachers is one of the great misleads in a sea of UFT/AFT/Unity Caucus obfuscations.

Mulgrew's response to a complaint from a teacher is priceless:

As you have so rightly stated public education is under attack but more importantly to me our profession is under attack.

He then goes on to say:

As for the Gates foundation they are funding the project but please don't confuse them with chancellor. When Gates finished the small school project they determined that it was not a success and that curriculum and school supports were more important than a school structure which was very ethical considering that the small school movement originated with them.

You mean the same Bill Gates who is one of the leading forces in undermining public education? Some think the union leadership is just stupid. Not so. They know exactly what they are doing. They soften the membership up and weaken their defenses to allow the virus into the ranks.

By the way, guess who also embraced the small school movement despite repeated attempts by Ed Notes, ICE and TJC to discuss the important aspect of undermining and closing the large comprehensive high schools? Your corporate friendly UFT. No mea culpas from the UFT on this one. Or any other of the ocean of disasters they have supported, including one of the mothers of all – allowing the use of high stakes test data to judge teacher performance.

There have been some interesting comments on our post "Teacher Evaluations: Bill Gates and the Unity/UFT,...".

Witness Melody, who seems to agree with Ed Notes on most issues:

"I think the UFT is right on this one. The teacher measurement & accountability issue is a train coming down the track, and I don't think laying our bodies down in front of it is a realistic option, because we WILL get run over."

The big problem with the neoliberal agenda when it comes to education is that it wants accountability on the cheap...

Melody doesn't really understand the full measure of the neoliberalism free market/government is bad philosophy, led by Bill Gates and his money. Gates, by the way, complains about the pubic school monopoly and calls for choice in schools while making his money by running the Microsoft monopoly and doing everything he could to deny choice in operating systems, browsers, data bases, spreadsheets, etc. And by the way, there's a great fortune to be made for Microsoft in the large urban school systems the Gates foundation supports. Check how many Gates supported schools have Apple computers (not based on any real knowledge like most conjectures here, but on my own paranoiac instincts.)

Anon responded to Melody (read all responses at the original post):

Re: the train analogy... In general, ICE and other opposition groups advocate fighting, which I would argue is the opposite of laying bodies down in front of an oncoming train.

It should be obvious to EVERYONE that there are massive problems with our union participating in a study funded by the Gates Foundation. The UFT’s position should be that, for a myriad of obvious reasons, we should not be using ANY student data to measure teachers. And once again, not only has the leadership capitulated to the idea of these measurements, but they are actively supporting the Gates Foundation's CONTROL of the measurement system!

It is extremely naïve to think that teachers will be allowed in ANY way to influence the results of a study sponsored by a private company with a vested interest in the privatization of education. If you read Mulgrew's letter carefully, the "participation" he asks from teachers amounts to nothing more than allowing them to be the subjects of the study. Nowhere does he mention any kind of input from the participating teachers. Instead, "Gates-funded researchers" will be "collect[ing] information about their teaching from a broad variety of sources." It seems, from this letter, that the teachers and the UFT leadership will have zero control over how students will be tested, let alone how the results are used – and the UFT leadership is perfectly fine with that.

Clearly, the main purpose of this study is to deal with the revealing fact that the majority of students in charter schools are performing equal to or worse than other New York City public school students on standardized tests. This must be humiliating for the privatization effort, because they are part of the same agenda that touts these tests as accurate measures of student achievement. If not for this fact, if kids in charters were doing as well or better than kids in other schools, you can bet that the Gates Foundation would be holding up the results of the ridiculous standardized tests we have now as "proof" that their schools (and their teachers) work better, and they would have no reason to even consider alternative methods of measuring teacher ability. Instead of exposing the charter school scam and supporting its own teachers, the UFT leadership embraces it.

I am not the tiniest bit surprised that the Unity caucus came on here and implied that their opposition is just a small group of petty teachers. Their goal is to make those who demand that they actually [gasp!] defend the membership feel that they are small in number and isolated. Ignore this particular tactic of theirs. It’s old, tired, and smacks of desperation… they know they’re fooling fewer and fewer people every day.

PS 123 Rally Update...and more

The protest/rally for 6:30 AM this morning is still on. For background read our report from the other day: Separate and Unequal Schools in NYC: Rally at PS 123 on First Day of School but the 3:30 follow-up event may not happen. I've got some family obligations today so I will be somewhat out of touch but Angel Gonzalez is back from organizing GEM branches throughout Italy and will be there to take some video and hang out afterwards. Angel doesn't Tweet or Twitter (that vegan diet, you know) so we will have to get updates later in the day. I am going to the Met game tonight - unfortunately - so will be out of the loop. Maybe they'll post updates from Angel on the scoreboard.

If you've been following the story here and at the GEM blog all summer, you are aware of the aggressive nature with which Eva (now officially being dubbed 'Evil') Moskowitz' people run roughshod over people. I don't have time to gather all the resources in this post but just do a search for PS 123 and PS 241.

GEM has been working with other groups to try to bring all the schools wanting to resist the invasion by charter schools into their buildings together. One of the focal points has been Moskowitz' Harlem Success Academy schools such as those at PS 241 and 123. If you read one piece, read this one from "Shocked in Harlem," a teacher at PS 241 about the impossible chaos of trying to get ready for the new school year in a school invaded by Moskowitz. SHOCKED IN HARLEM AT EVA MOSKOWITZ, HSA EXCESS

Teachers at PS 123 faced the same chaos, with halls loaded with stuff moved out by Harlem Success. Check out some of the videos I posted in the sidebar for more on this issue from early July when Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer toured the school (mayoral candidate Tony Avella also came up that day).

Were Teachers at PS 123 Told to Go Home?

Supposedly the UFT district rep told teachers to go home yesterday after teachers were trying to move things around to get ready for the first day of school today. Rumor is that a teacher got hurt and had to go to the emergency room. UFT president Mulgrew was called. One would expect him to be there today. But with the UFT having taken over space in two charter schools themselves in East NY, Brooklyn, they cannot claim any moral high ground and can only expect the massive HSA publicity machine to attack them with the consequent fawning NYC ed press quoting them widely.

Brooklyn Charter Invasion Resistance

Meanwhile, things are beginning to heat up in Brooklyn where CAPE (Concerned Educators for Public Education) is organizing around the charter school issue. Some GEMers will be going to a meeting with them this week and we will report on the activities over there. See their press release from our post in July.

I'll add updates to this post as they come in.

Report from PS 160 in Coop City

Here are some comments from parents at PS 160x

GEM you were right. Equality Charter School lied about only being at PS160 for 2 years. They said it at all the hearings and the DOE said they will only be there for 2 years. Now the Equality principal told the Co-op City Times yesterday, September 5,

"School administrators have been told by the DOE that there is a probability that the school will be moved to a new location within the next few years as the student body expands by one grade each year."

They LIED. You were right. They lied about leaving in two years. They're not ever gonna leave. They're gonna push out 160 students and take over. Their classrooms were also painted and their entire section refurbished!!! Please tell the parents. The truth is out. We need you to come back to our school and fight with us against privatization and pushing our children out of their own schools.

Which led to this response:

Anonymous, I like your enthusiasm. I am one of the parents who spoke out about this charter school being housed at PS 160. I must say that this upcoming school year will be a challenging one at PS 160. My advice to you as a parent is that if you see anything that you feel in your heart is not right report it to the Parent coordinator or the Principal immediately. It is our responsibility as parents to look out for our children. When there is an announcement about the PTA meetings and things of that nature, please attend. This will be the only way to stay informed and fight for your child/children’s education. Furthermore, just to speak about the article in the newspaper. What I want to know is how they are going to handle their students who are late or truant? The Prinicpal mentioned that the students who arrive after 9:00am will enter thru the front of the building. We as parents of PS 160 children age 5-11 years old...must demand that the Equality School Administrators send an "official employee" and not another "responsible student" to come down to the main lobby where Mrs. Cox will be seated and pick up the “late” student and make sure that they get placed in their respective class room. Their students must not be allowed to "freely" room the halls of our two floors. We must think to be PRO-ACTIVE and not be Reactive.

No school is safe

Here is a partial list of public schools being invaded:

PS 15K, PS 38M, IS 45M, PS 123M, PS 150K, PS 160X, PS 175M, PS 185M, PS 188M, PS 194M, IS 195M, PS 241M, PS 242M, PS 375M, PS 385X, HS 695M and many more.

Which schools will be next?

Principal gets around hiring freeze on ATRs

Changing the subject....but not really, since the ATR, rubber room, closing schools, charter school issues all connect to the free market neoliberal agenda....I received this note from a teacher at a large high school:

They found a way to hire teachers other than ATRs in my school. I don't want to post it on my blog, but others need to be aware this is going on. There is no hiring freeze on special education. They are getting the new teachers double certification and hiring them for the special ed department and then farming them out to math to teach. If this is going on in my school, it is going on throughout the city. One ATR in my school has been given a full program for a person on leave, but the school will not hire her full time.

Teacher Letter on New Yorker's Biased Aricle on Rubber Rooms

Laura Castro does a pretty good job here exposing the biased New Yorker articles on the rubber room and ATRs. Paul Simms wrote a biased follow-up commentary on Steve Brill's original article, which Ed Notes critiqued , Laura mentions the point about the ease with which the rubber room could be emptied if Klein only hired enough arbitrators, something the biased press doesn't raise and if they do, they accept Klein's "union obstructionism" argument. "Could this be because Bloomberg wants a wedge issue in his showdown with the union" Laura asks? It's more than a wedge. Klein loves the runner rooms, which are his creation, intentionally, so he could get articles like Brill's to create outrage . He'd rather spend that money as an investment in anti-teacher PR. And it works like a charm. Of course the fact that many people in rubber rooms are exonerated or are there for reasons such an argument with the principal gets buried in the avalanche. The union, afraid of attacks - and they get attacked anyway for doing little - does not make even close to as good as stand as Laura does.

Dear Editors,

Paul Simms article "The Rubber Room" in this week's New Yorker zeroes in on what appears to be an Achilles heal for the teachers' union, but fails to ask important questions. It thereby exhibits disturbing bias. For example, if the "rubber room" is a disgrace, why doesn't the city spend additional money hiring arbitrators, so cases don't wait years to be concluded? And why not give rubber room teachers desk jobs as in other cities? Could this be because Bloomberg wants a wedge issue in his showdown with the union? Simms never asks. (Not until the last page, in fact, do we hear that the 600 teachers accused of incompetence or malfeasance are in a system of 87,300 teachers - the largest school system in the country.)

The salient issue here is not the so-called rubber room, however, or even the union, but that the article pushes the overall Bloomberg/Klien agenda without consulting progressive educators for a different perspective. Simms appears to scoff at Democratic lawmakers in Albany for not renewing mayoral control of the schools more quickly, and apparently accepts without question the Bloomberg administration line on student achievement and improved graduation rates. Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that there have been serious concerns that mayoral control has left parents out of the educational equation. Nor does the article mention testimony by Ann Cook (Performance Assessment Standards Consortium) at the mayoral control hearings in Albany that, alarmingly, students of color have been dropping out of public school at a higher rate under Bloomberg/Klein.

Simms' article concludes by touting Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's decision to deprive states of stimulus money if their schools do not attach teachers' pay to their students' standardized test scores, and laments that New York may loose money on this account. Yet the article never questions the popular dogma that continual testing of children is the answer to good education. (If standardized testing is really so conducive to learning, why is it, one wonders, that students in New York's elite private schools, whose graduates grace the halls of Ivy League colleges, don't take city or state tests – not even the Regents??)

I hope that The New Yorker will balance this article with one that probes the issues of education from a more progressive point of view. This would include investigating the issue of standardized testing by interviewing some of the country's leading progressive educators – like Linda Darling Hammond, reputedly on Obama's short list for Secretary of Education, or Ann Cook of New York's own Performance Assessment Standards Consortium. As an educator, I challenge The New Yorker to bring to light some of the successful alternatives to standardized testing right here in New York's schools and to ask whether the educational dogmas de jour adhered to by Bloomberg/Klein, and even Duncan, really serve our children.

Sincerely,

Laura Castro

Brooklyn, NY 11218

Separate and Unequal Schools in NYC: Rally at PS 123 on First Day of School

This the first in a series, with a focus on the tactics of Eva Moskowitz and her Harlem Success Academy machine.

Join our Protest!
Eva Moskowitz and Her Charter School Must Go!
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
6:30am in the Morning! (and at 3:30PM)
West 141st Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard (8th Avenue)
For more information please contact William Hargraves (718) 812-1102.

Click to enlarge. Pdf available on request.


Here is an email from Mark Torres of the Coalition for Public Education:

Support on the struggle being waged by students, parents, staff, administrators and community of P.S. 123 in Harlem. they have been fighting theft of space and many other injustices perpetrated by Eva Moskowitz and the Bloom/Klein dictatorship.

The P.S. 123 community has worked hard, for over a year, to reach out and resolve problems forced upon them by the charter school invasion of their building. However, Eva Moskowitz and the Bloom/Klein dictatorship have not resolved any problems and are only concerned about pushing more and more private charter schools into public school buildings.

P.S. 123 is now ready to stand up for all public schools in our city and they need our help.

Please support P.S. 123 and defend our public school system.

Teacher Evaluations: Bill Gates and the Unity/UFT, Perfect Together

I'm just getting to the issue of that study on teacher evaluation being sponsored by Bill Gates in partnership with the UFT. At the bottom of it all is the neoliberal agenda.

We're certainly not surprised that they are in bed together. Bringing business practices to the classroom is part of the neoliberal agenda. And coming up with a way to measure teachers - for the purpose of weeding out certain types, like the ones who teach humanism and democratic principles instead od test prep - is a basic tenet. Neoliberals see democracy as an alien concept. Thus schools need dictators. As do unions.

We've been connecting the UFT to the neoliberals for a generation, especially since Al Shanker signed onto it in the mid-70's when the budget cuts hit deeply into the ranks, followed by his jumping on board the Business Roundtable's "independent" study, A Nation at Risk.

Unity Caucus is trying to play this as somehow being good for teachers. "Let's have a seat at the table." Just like the UFT/AFT had at the origins of NCLB. Nice job.

James Eterno put up an informal poll on the ICE blog, How Should Teachers be Evaluated?

There have been 25 comments so far. A Unity flack is wondering why James doesn't sign up. "Try it before you criticize Unity all the time." These cloying games by Unity ignore the basic fact: They are the enemy. Of course Ed Notes and ICE and so many other teacher blogs see through the games they play.

Unity flacks and the leadership play the bait and switch game as cover for the real agenda. New UFT President Michael Mulgrew responded to a teacher:

Almost all of the "reform" ideas that are being discussed both here in NYC and nationally are ideas that are brought from people who are outside of the classroom. I felt it was imperative that we engage in research that truly looked at what happens inside of a classroom and worked with teachers as the main part of the research. It is a way that allows us to control what happens in our profession instead of waiting for those on the outside to pound us with their ideas when they have never walked in our shoes. [The full letter from the teacher and his full response is below.]

Does anyone think the UFT/Unity Caucus leadership represents what happens inside a classroom?

Mulgrew's original letter to teachers claimed the study was "being conducted by independent third-party researchers." Sure. Just like The New Teacher Project's attacks on ATRs were viewed by the NY Times as "independent" studies. I'll bet someone has a dog in the race. And I bet there's some Gates money going to flow to some elements at the UFT. I mean, where could Gates buy a better partner to peddle his junk?

Mulgrew also said:
we all recognize that the work of teachers must be measured in ways that are fair and valid. Nationally, current measures of teaching rarely take into account the full range of what teachers do (no single measure really can), or the context in which they teach. The Measures of Effective Teaching project, on the other hand, begins right in the classroom and will explore an array of teacher measures: video observations, surveys, and student growth. It will compare these measures to each other, and to nationally recognized standards, and it will look at their inter-relatedness. It will be informed by actual teacher practice.

Measured, Mike? What if we measured the performance of the UFT leadership over the past decade? What the UFT is covering for here is the concept that we need ways to measure teachers quantitatively. A major plank of the neoliberal agenda to privatize education is to quantify students and teachers. Do we see this occurring with other jobs? Police/fire/ lawyers/ doctors/politicians? Imagine saying that we will never bring down crime rates until we improve the performance of the cops? Or cut the number of fires unless we get higher quality firemen? Or win a war without better soldiers? Why not set up charter police stations and alternative military? Wouldn't the war go better if there was some competition? Shouldn't Afgans have some choice in the army they get to come into their villages? Shouldn't they be able to chose from competing organizations as to which missile get to kill their children? Come on, they need choice.

Here are a few words from the introduction to a book sent to me by former teacher Louis Bedrock: Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools by Kenneth J. Saltman:

In education, neoliberalism has taken hold with tremendous force, remaking educational common sense and pushing forward the privatization and deregulation agendas....the shift to business language and logic can be understood through the extent to which neoliberal ideals have succeeded in taking over educational debates...

The "TINA" thesis (There is No Alternative to the Market) that has come to dominate politics throughout much of the world has infected educational thought as omnipresent market terms such as accountability, choice, efficiency, competition, monopoly, and performance [outcomes] frame educational debates. Nebulous terms borrowed from the business world, such as achievement, excellence, and best practices, conceal ongoing struggles over competing values, visions, and ideological debates. (Achieve what? Excel at what? Best practices for whom? And says who?)

The only questions left on reform agendas appear to be how to best enforce knowledge and curriculum conducive to individual upward mobility within the economy [education only has the goal of preparing for jobs, not as productive citizens in a democratic society - something neoliberals really abhor] and national economic competition as it contributes to a corporately managed model of globalization as perceived from the perspective of business.

This dominant...view of education is propagated by.. Thomas Friedman...and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation...[add Broad and a horde of others.]

Saltman bases his book on Naomi Klein's "Disaster Capitalism" but focuses on education as he lays out the nuts and bolts of it in his intro and then zooms in on 3 examples: New Orleans, Iraq and Chicago. I will post more as I read more.

Now, I've said it time and again that the only force capable of organizing resistance to these attacks are the teacher unions. And they've punted.

Why does the UFT go along with the people who have been aiming the blame darts at the very people the UFT is supposed to represent? There are a few explanations, which we'll get into another time in depth. But for now I will list two reasons: 1) the UFT basically agrees with neoliberalism and 2) what I often refer to as the "Vichy mentality" - if we don't cooperate with the Nazis they will destroy all of France, especially Paris, so we cooperate with the idea of preserving what we can." I am not equating this to cooperating with Nazis, but as a way of thinking the UFT engages in. For a while they called it the New Unionism - we'll cooperate with management - or Randi's favorite word, "collaboration." Pretty interesting since collaborators in WWII got their hair sheared off - or worse.

Here is the letter from teacher (T) to Randi, who forwarded it to Mulgrew, followed by Mulgrew's response, followed by an excellent post by Marjorie Stamberg.

Randi

I was wondering why the UFT is collaborating with the Bill Gates foundation in collecting data on how to establish an effective teacher. Over the past few years all in the name of educational reform, Bill Gates has undermined public education by opening up charter schools, he even went as far as opening up charter schools in public school spaces essentially taking over the school and displacing public school teachers. So with the growing number of schools being closed and then reorganized and ATR and senior teachers being harassed, it's no wonder why a growing number of teachers are becoming disenfranchised and only see our union as a dues collecting machine.

T

There are many good reasons but I have referred your email to the new President, Michael Mulgrew. -Randi

Mulgrew response:

Thank you for sending your concerns. As you have so rightly stated public education is under attack but more importantly to me our profession is under attack. The research project that we are entering into is one that starts and ends inside of the classroom. Almost all of the "reform" ideas that are being discussed both here in NYC and nationally are ideas that are brought from people who are outside of the classroom. I felt it was imperative that we engage in research that truly looked at what happens inside of a classroom and worked with teachers as the main part of the research. It is a way that allows us to control what happens in our profession instead of waiting for those on the outside to pound us with their ideas when they have never walked in our shoes. As for the Gates foundation they are funding the project but please don't confuse them with chancellor. When Gates finished the small school project they determined that it was not a success and that curriculum and school supports were more important than a school structure which was very ethical considering that the small school movement originated with them.

Thanks again,
Michael

Marjorie Stamberg lays out the position many of us are taking:
Greasing the skids: UFT participation in a teacher evaluation studyMarjorie Stamberg to ICE-Mail listserve:

Any "teacher measurement project" funded by the Gates foundation should start ringing alarm bells. What on earth is the UFT doing participating in this "study," as UFT president Mike Mulgrew just announced?

The UFT's "participation" reminds me of the" time-motion" study guy coming to the factory assembly line, and you're asked to help him out as he measures arm movements and clocks your bathroom breaks so they can use it for speed-up. No way.

What makes an effective teacher? We do not accept the premise that individually evaluating teachers' "techniques" is relevant to improving education. The whole emphasis on "teacher evaluation", tied to students' test scores, is part of the corporatization of American education.

The UFT Teachers Center is an excellent resource that works with teachers to be more effective in the classroom. They do some excellent PD, workshops, cooperative modeling and team-teaching. This is NOT what the Gates foundation study is about.

We need good professional development, and we are committed to teachers' lifelong learning, and use of the most modern technology and methodology in the classroom. But that is very different from what is going on here.

The education "business" aims to "cut costs" in the classroom. Beginning in the 1980s, nationwide the education budget as a percentage of the GNP was sharply reduced. These corporate chiefs wanted to get more bang for their buck. This means attacks on teacher tenure, getting rid of senior teachers to drive salaries down to the level of teaching fellows. It means, not "spending time" in the classroom on enrichment activities, on general topics, reading, discussion that goes anywhere except how to pass standardized tests so kids can be useful for the employers. Now, it means the proliferation of charter schools which by getting rid of union contracts sharply increase teacher time, and regulated salary increases.

How do you "measure" a good science teacher? I've seen superb science teachers teaching high school kids in the Bronx, without a science lab, without the most minimal equipment, standing up on a chair in the hallway and dropping a ball to demonstrate gravity! If you want to measure what makes a good science teacher, how about giving him or her a decent science lab and then comparing the results before and after? If you want to help kids learn, have decent equipment in every high school, smart boards in every classroom, give every student access to computers that don't belong in a junkyards.

Coming from Mike Mulgrew, as with Randi, this offer to "collaborate" on a "teacher measurement" paid survey is typical of how they now operate. Instead of just saying "no", and opposing something outright, they cooperate with it and try to "make the best of a bad situation." Then we're stuck with the bad situation, and they say, "Well, it could have been worse."

The same thing happened when seniority transfers was given up in 2005. Instead of holding on, they traded it for a raise and the result ...... up to 2,000 teachers now in the Absent Teacher Reserve.

The answer is a union leadership that demands massive new investment in school facilities, training, and resources. Can't do it because of the economic crisis? Wrong, this is exactly when they ought to be investing. They find trillions to "rescue" the banks. Right now, a quarter of NYC schools don't have gyms, and 70 percent don't meet state requirements for hours of physical education' Of all schools in the Bronx, 22 percent don't have outdoor physical education activities at all?

Where are the art and music teachers? In the ATR pool or on the unemployment line.

Related
The Labor Notes article on organizing charters in Chicago posted on Norms Notes.

The Truth About Charters Brochure and Brian Jones Debates Charters

I can't what I love best about this exceptional trifold brochure being distributed by the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM). The design. The content laid out in such a clear way. Or the fact it was written and designed by a 4th year Teach for America alum. We have thousands of copies and will send you a batch. Or get the pdf. Just fold each page and put back to back and run it through a copy machine and Voila, you have something to give to all your pro charter school friends. Send an email to Gemnyc@gmail.com.

Click to enlarge.








Jones vs. Merriman


From the GEM blog

GEM member Brian Jones was on the Laura Flanders show Thursday debating James Merriman IV, the new CEO of the NYC Center for Charter School Excellence. Brian is just a teacher, not a CEO, but he more than holds his own.

VIEW the PROGRAM HERE.

For a flowery press release on Merriman's appointment, view here.
Also included, a voice from New Orleans.

DON'T MISS THIS AS BRIAN LAYS IT ALL OUT - GIVEN THE SHORT TIME PERIOD HE HAS.

Charter Schools: Tracking is Alive and Well

Most people think of tracking satellites in space.
The use of the term "tracking" in education has shifted over the years. Now it means tracking student progress. In the old days it meant putting students from their earliest years onto a track based on some factors of perceived intelligence.

Under the BloomKlein administration, setting up classes based on tracking was supposed to be eliminated and classes grouped heterogeneously. Teachers are supposed to use differentiated instruction to meet the needs of a diverse group of kids. But at some point, the kids at the top suffer to varying degrees. People have gotten around these in many ways. Talented and gifted and specialized performance based schools have created pockets of very workable schools. When I was mentoring teaching fellows I covered one such middle school in Bushwick that gathered all the top kids in District 32 - and beyond- and I was amazed at how well that school worked. Reminded me of the junior high I went to as a kid - JHS 166 - Gershwin- not being partly occupied by the UFT MS charter school. I'll get back to the charter issue in a minute.

I taught in a completely tracked system where classes were grouped homogeneously by reading scores. Even in a poor almost 100% free lunch school with a relatively small population where we had 2 or 3 classes on a grade, there were major differences between the top class and the bottom class in terms of family stability, poverty- more poor, or less, behavior and other factors.

The one exception was the year I filed a grievance when it was my turn to get the top class and my principal declared my grade only as heterogeneous, which was a farce because she totally believed in severe tracking. The real issue was not just political (I was an leading union advocate) but that she hated my teaching style which ignored test prep all the time and I took too many trips. We had a very good year and the kids did very well - and yes, I took them on many trips.

The most active parents used their influence to make sure their kids were in the top classes and many teachers sold their souls to the principal to get these classes every year, in violation of the contract which called for rotation. (We had one guy who would drive miles out of the way to take the principal home.) The principals catered to these showcase classes, which were pushed hard exotically when they got to the graduating grade so they could get into one of the favored middle schools, instead of the locally zoned dump.

Sound familiar? That is exactly what is happening with the charter school movement and the element of creaming. Those very same parents who made sure their kids were in the top class and who pulled strings to get to the special middle school (many districts seemed to have them) are the ones today rushing to charters. In other words, the old system of top, in some cases called "eagle" classes, were the equivalent of today's charters, as they segregated the better performing students from the rest.

Thus. we are heading for a dual school system where kids are segregated, not by race, but by their level of performance. Ironically, these systems are used around the world where kids are tested out of the academic program, sometimes as early as elementary school and then tracked into the working class.

Accountable Talk has some interesting thoughts on tracking where he commits what is today considered a big no-n0 by making predictions on his kids, even though all teachers fully understand the reality. One very good teacher I know spent over a year in the rubber room for making a casual comment like this to a spy for the principal. (Suddenly a kid made a charge the teacher called him an idiot and said black kids can't learn, whereas what was said was, "You didn't get it and if you don't pay attention you will never learn.") Luckily AC is anonymous.

AC talks about the farce of measuring teachers when they get top, middle and bottom classes. Of course the answers from the data munchers is "value added" where the starting and ending grade of your students are looked at and you are expected to bring each one up by one year. Thus if you have an 8th grader reading at mid-4th, he should be at mid 5th grade level after one year with you. Of course, the fact that he learned at half the rate of the so-called average kid is not relevant. It is always the teachers' fault.

AC says:
I already know where my students will end up on next year's exams!

How do I know? Am I some kind of genius? Of course, but that's not how. It's just a little bit of data from ARIS mixed with a lot of experience. Here's how it breaks down:

• In my top class, only two of my future students failed to make their AYP last year. They are readers and achievers, and when I work with them this year, they will continue to be so.
• In my middle class, it's more a mixed bag. Only ten failed to make AYP, but at least ten others made it by a hair's breadth. These students need to be worked hard and motivated to make real progress. I'll do that, and some will have great years while others have to dragged kicking and screaming to get them to read.
• In my bottom class, no one made their AYP. That's right--NO ONE. That's not a surprise to me, as that is what makes them a bottom class. They have very limited skills. Most have progressed about half a year for every year they have been in school so far, and it will be a miracle if I can get more than a handful to make a year's progress now.

Read it in full at:
Mr. Chips vs. Buffalo Chips

Also check out this post on tracking from new blogger Teaching and Politics:
Heterogeneity vs Tracking - Is the pendulum swinging back?


NOTE: Things have been slow on the ed notes output end due to too many meetings (heading off for a 10am now - and there are 2 of them to choose from ) and getting used to my brand new MAC Pro laptop, which I love so much, my wife has to drag it out of my hands when I fall asleep.

To all of you all still teaching in the NYC schools, have a great Labor Day weekend and good luck going back. Try to join in some of the organizing activities this year around GEM and ICE and the upcoming UFT elections. There's plenty of positions available (800) if you want to run against Unity.

So???? Does anyone on this list think the school grades have any meaning or value?

This question was put to NYC Education Listserve.

The entire concept of school grades has been ridiculous from Day 1. I even find progressive ed reformers falling into the trap of giving them legitimacy by saying things like, "My school got an A." I gently remind them that the grades are invalid whether they are good for your school and bad for others.

But leave it to parent leader Lisa (Donlan) to respond in full.

How could they?

As per usual this gang can't shoot straight.

Even when they start with a good idea, or perhaps good intentions, it gets twisted around in the educrat mill to meet some other list of politically expedient needs.

The result is often a counter intuitive, miss the mark, harmful sham.

Like the large scale up of small schools, or the Stalinist imposition of child centered pedagogy, or the unfettering school decision making from bureaucracy, this is but one more example.

Thus, even a simple dash board style "report card" of schools to inform parents of their ever increasing "choices" for schools that have themselves been pitted against each other in an environment of competition, for students and their funding dollars, gets botched.

Never a simple tool, the report cards have been a black box of metrics and statistics that most people can not begin to understand, never mind evaluate.

The result in the "marketplace" has been confusion, derision, skepticism.

So no- I can not imagine any one can believe in these letter grades that:

• are based largely ( 85%) on test scores that themselves are more than suspect;
• that measure "progress" on increasingly meaningless test scores so that schools that start out way behind and teach to the test end up with better grades than more competent, popular schools that communities know serve them and their children well,
• 
  
• fluctuate wildly from year to year at individual schools (just as the test scores do) and the metrics are modified to accommodate some external need
• contradict other standards and measure such as NYS SINI and SURR or Federal Blue Ribbon Status, flat NAEP score and declining SAT's or increasing college remediation rates, etc.
• are largely ignored when they do not support the real estate grab to accommodate the ever expanding parallel charter system.

Just to name a few of the reasons the report cards are a huge waste of money, time , energy resources and attention that could be better used to PUT CHILDREN (and learning) FIRST!

Lisa Donlan
CEC One

Related:
Leonie Haimson's "The absurd, silly, ridiculous school grades"

On Bloomberg's Plane: Randi in Select Company

Randi caught a ride from the Hamptons with Bloomberg, his girlfriend Diana Taylor, and top aid Kevin Sheekey. Think they were talking contract? One proposal is for ATRs who do not get a job to wipe bird gunk off Bloomberg's planes.



The great David B strikes again. Click to enlarge - check book titles.

And see Gary Babad's GBN News Report.

Was it the Bird? Was it the Plane? No, it was Super-Mayor!

LA's charter school giveaway

http://socialistworker.org/2009/08/31/la-charter-school-giveaway

Analysis: Sarah Knopp

Sarah Knopp, a member of United Teachers Los Angeles, looks at the looming threat of privatization--and the potential for resistance among teachers, parents and students.

August 31, 2009

IN A progressive city, with a progressive mayor and one of the most progressive teachers' unions in the country, the floodgates were opened August 25 to private control over education.

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) board voted 6-1 to authorize opening up over 250 schools to bids by charter schools and other outside entities.

Many of these schools have been "program improvement" schools for three or more years--that is, schools that are failing under the test score criteria set by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Fifty others, though, are brand-new, shiny, multimillion-dollar complexes, built with public bond money in the largest public works program any city has undertaken since the 1970s.

These new schools have state-of-the-art facilities--all the best science labs, art rooms, cafeterias and common space. They stand in stark contrast to the crumbling and often-poisoned schools that most LAUSD students attend.

Now, these newly constructed, publicly funded buildings could be turned over to private operators--though the original bond offering that voters approved said nothing of the sort.

The schools haven't been turned over yet--under the terms of the school board's resolution, the board and the superintendent will consider competing proposals for each of the schools and make a decision in the future.

But the direction is obvious. As Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte, the sole dissenting vote on the board, pointed out incredulously, "This motion means that Los Angeles Unified School District has to bid for control of our own schools!"

The board member who raised the motion, Yolie Flores Aguilar, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's ally on the board, painted the proposal as matter of "choice" and "competition." Ironically, though, students, parents and teachers won't get to vote for the "choices" that will be presented for the schools starting this winter.

Some progressive organizations and individual teachers have argued that we can make our own proposals for running the schools that have been opened up to bidding. But there is no mechanism for communities or teachers to ensure that their opinions will get taken into account. And the charter school operators have big advantages--including pockets full of private-sector cash--to push their ready-made plans.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WHY WOULD a school board vote to give up control of its own schools, including 50 brand-new buildings? The process of passing the resolution revealed another motive: breaking the power of teachers' and other employees' unions.

School board member Steve Zimmer raised an amendment to the resolution that existing employees' unions would have to be the sole representatives of employees in the new schools. But this amendment was watered down to say that existing unions would only represent workers in schools that remained under the control of LAUSD.

So the amendment did nothing to counter the clear threat to unions at the schools opened up to bidding. As has happened in other cities where charter schools got a foothold, the union could be forced out altogether, employees could be fired en masse or required to reapply for their jobs, and collective bargaining agreements might have to be renegotiated with a hostile employer.

Zimmer, who just began his term on the board this year after being elected with the overwhelming support of the teachers' union, voted for the proposal. Despite his claim to oppose privatization, his strategy for dealing with the motion was to support it and try to amend it.

That strategy failed, as the amendment on workers' representation illustrated. Another amendment proposed by Zimmer--that parents, teachers and high school students should have to vote for a reform proposal at individual schools--was also watered down to the point of meaninglessness, by making the vote by parents, teachers and students "advisory."

The worst part of this story is that it didn't have to go down this way. I was part of the effort to organize opposition to the giveaway proposal. In the two weeks before the motion was raised in the board, LAUSD held "town hall" meetings all over the city to hear community input about improving existing schools and visions for the 50 new schools.

Activists from our Progressive Educators for Action (PEAC) caucus in the LA teachers union attended the town hall meetings to talk to parents about the motion, the issues at stake, and the possibilities for building coalitions for progressive school reform. In one of the town halls in the predominantly Latino suburb Maywood, 37 of the 40 speakers spoke against privatization of the schools.

Opposition in this particular neighborhood can be attributed to well-organized parent and community groups, such as Maywood Unidos, which have fought not only to make Maywood a sanctuary city for immigrants, but also for community access to schools. At a brand-new school built in the neighborhood, Maywood Academy, only 40 percent of the students last year were actually from Maywood. Students who lived right across the street couldn't get access.

Similarly, a self-organized group of parents at Garfield High School has been fighting against a takeover of their school by the charter schools operator Green Dot. And the community organization ACORN organized opposition to the privatization resolution.

In contrast to these groups, other organizations claiming to represent "the community" supported the motion. For example, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inner City Struggle and Community Coalition all took positions in favor of the proposal, probably hoping that they will be able to gain full or partial control over some of the new schools.

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OUTSIDE THE school board meeting, both supporters and opponents of the motion held rallies.

Green Dot, which has been funded with millions of dollars from the Eli Broad Foundation, supports a "parent organization" called Parent Revolution that held a demonstration, complete with Mayor Villaraigosa speaking. Over 1,000 people attended, wearing pre-printed blue shirts.

Some of the attendees reported that they had been offered $10 or community service hours to attend the rally. But among attendees, there were certainly parents who sincerely want to fight for school reform and believe this proposal will help them to do it.

Our union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), wrote an open letter to these parents explaining our opposition to key aspects of the motion, and many of us spent time talking to parents. Among those whose genuine concern is for social justice for their children, there is huge potential for building alliances when we point out that the only way to get real reform is for parents, teachers and students to unite and fight for more resources and democracy.

With this goal in mind, PEAC activists have set out to formulate a vision for reform that we can build with parents and students. This vision includes the basic principles of access, equity, excellence, public management, local control, sustainability and commitment to collective bargaining rights.

UTLA has also formed a "reform committee." Inside this committee, debates exist about some of the pilot school and innovation division projects already existing in LAUSD. At some schools, special agreements with the mayor, extra resources, more local control over budgets and curriculum, and special partnerships with community organizations have been traded for thinned-down union contracts. The jury is still out on whether these schools are really providing more "innovation" and local control.

Though the union as a whole did not commit fully to the kind of alliances with parents that we should have in the first round of this fight, the potential to organize around the issue of equal access to excellent education is very strong.

If we attempt to include parents and students in the fight for access for all to quality public schools, we could stop the mayor and his charter school allies from privatizing our schools, and fight to shape those schools according to the visions of parents, teachers and students. We now have to counter their agenda with ours, school by school.

The Washington Teacher: Are You Ready For Performance Based Excessing Of DC Teachers ?

A must read on my blog about the WTU contract proposal. I even have excerpts thanks to an informant. I hope you will read it and respond on my blog. Thanks,

Candi Peterson

Are You Ready For Performance Based Excessing Of DC Teachers ?

I have been anxiously awaiting the inside details of the status of our DC Teacher contract proposal as I am sure you have. On this past Saturday at the WTU Building Representative training at the AFT office- WTU president George Parker stated he still does not have a contract proposal to deliver to DC teachers despite his letter to union members that we were awaiting a feasibility study by the Rhee administration. So it seems according to Parker that now there are sticking points which in his words could lead to an impasse. I think we have heard this before and it is unclear what games Parker and Rhee are really playing. I thought the issue was determining whether there was the money to fund the most recent contract proposal. Now Parker states that it's more than that.



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