Former NY St Ed Comm David Milton Steiner Opines in NY Post as StudentsFirstNY Quotes Randi

I pledge allegiance to ed deform

After Cathie Black does Milton have any credibility left? This Milton is has less vision than the real one. What a NYSED Commish crew over last 18 years. From Dickie Boy Richard Mills through John King. These people are a joke.

Leonie posted this tidbit:

On disastrous scores StudentsFirstNY cites Randi in defense of the Common Core (!!)  & misquotes Diane in one of the silliest most incoherent pieces  I have EVER read.   http://shar.es/yCy96

And in the NYPost, David Milton Steiner (yes he is now using his middle name) says this is necessary pain (for whom?)  and writes:  http://shar.es/yCKlJ 

The new Common Core standards are even more demanding than the ones we contemplated, and could cause an even more precipitous drop in graduation….

Ideally, we would have more prep time, more Common Core-aligned materials available sooner, more professional support for teachers. But New York rightly makes the same decision that John Silber and his team made for Massachusetts: that only by moving the stake in the ground, right now can we ensure that we all get serious about reform.

John Silber was an intolerant anti-gay bigot.  Amazing that he would cite him as a hero.  I would put the stake elsewhere myself --

Leonie Haimson

Executive Director

Class Size Matters

 Oh, and let's celebrate Eva's great scores. We know how these stories usually end up.

GEM Statement on Cathleen Black, David Steiner, and the Appointment of Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott

Posted at the GEM blog.
(Last modified, Friday, April 8, 11PM)

It is Time to Break the Cycle

Since 2003, public school parents, children, educators, and community members have endured a dictatorial public education reform agenda that has ignored and marginalized their voices and has undermined and destabilized the schools they depend on, love, and serve. The departure of Cathleen Black highlights the incompetence, arrogance, and political nature of Bloomberg’s educational agenda; this is not about children first, but rather a blind belief in the corporate reform movement propelled by a centralized, top down system that has been destructive for our schools and our children.


It is time for a break in the power structure that has a strangle hold on our public education system; it is time for parents, children, educators and communities to have a say in the education of their 1.2 million school children.

The departure of four Deputy Chancellors in the last 100 days along with the admission by Mayor Bloomberg that the appointment of Black as Chancellor was a mistake, followed by the announced departure of the State Commissioner of Education on Thursday, makes it clear that the almost decade long mayoral control and corporate reform experiment that has ignored the voices of parents, teachers and community has been a failure for the entire educational community. The growing movements against school closings and the privatization of education have helped to expose these failures.

In the coming months our schools face severe cuts, testing is raging out of control, charter schools will attempt to expand by invading more schools, a campaign to close schools continues, dedicated educators are under attack, and our children’s education is at stake. Decisions about the lives of children, like the choice of leaders of the school system, should not be made without their parents, their communities and their teachers. We have little confidence that newly appointed Chancellor Dennis Walcott will be any more than the extension of the same policies with a different face. It is time for Mr. Bloomberg and the Department of Education to engage with parents, treat them as partners and provide the leadership and policies that truly do put children first.

The Grassroots Education Movement supports the Deny Waiver Coalition in their preference for a transparent and nationwide search process for a qualified Chancellor to run our school system. We believe that Mr. Bloomberg and our future Chancellor should fight for real reforms that will transform our public education system. They could begin with a moratorium on school closings, turnarounds, and charter co-locations. Reforms should include parent and teacher empowerment, more teaching, less testing, and the equitable funding needed to make sure our schools are responsive to, and the centers of, the communities they serve.

The Bloomberg ship is sinking. The last nine years under Mayor Bloomberg has been a sea of destructive and misguided educational policies. It is time for our children to be thrown a life raft. It is time for Bloomberg to be held accountable. It is time for a sea change.

______________
See Leonie Haimson on Walcott  posted on Norms Notes where she says:

unless Walcott (and the Mayor) change course, show that they are willing to follow the law, listen to parents and other stakeholders, and alter the policies that are damaging our kids, I do not  believe that the mayor’s abysmal approval ratings will increase substantially.  I hope that this appointment means a real shift in direction, rather than simply a PR move, but we will have to see.

AfterBurn
While I agree with the tone of both Leonie's and GEM's statement, I have a different slant and won't wait and see if it's not simply a PR move because no one changes teams in the middle of the game and Walcott is on the wrong side and will not change. I don't want Bloomberg to have a final say in choosing a Chancellor or if possible, any say at all. We need separation of politics and education. Mayoral control must end ASAP. Better no chancellor than one appointed by Bloomberg. Our old friends at the UFT, which took no stand opposing Black - as outrageous as the appointment itself from my point of view – support and will continue to support mayoral control forever - with just some tweaks added. We are fighting a 2-front war. Ed deformers on one side and the UFT/AFT at our backs. Really, a 3-front war - corporate, government and our own union. We need more air support than the Libyan rebels.

Oh, and good ridence to that Meryl Tisch suck-up David Steiner. The day he was appointed I attacked him and people chastised me for not giving him a chance. They don't get that the person doing the appointing is the key, not the appointee themselves. No one appoints someone who will change the direction they want to go in. Tisch is Bloomberg's next door neighbor and had Joel Klein ask the 4 Questions at her Passover sedars. Guess which side she is on?

Ravitch debates Canada on NY1 - Oh, what a bullshitter he is.

Andy Wolfe nails them in a piece at the Daily News.
"Bloomberg seems to believe that those who toil at the hard business of educating children are the problem. He is wrong."

____________
Check out Norms Notes for a variety of articles of interest: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/. And make sure to check out the side panel on right for news bits.

Steiner Declares Dewey Dead

Yes, I attacked David Steiner the day he was appointed by Merryl Tisch. I was criticized for not giving the guy a chance. My response was that I did not need to know a thing about him. I knew who chose him and that was enough. We live in the DiMedici era where patrons determine everything and scholars owe allegiance to their patrons, not to the truth or a moral vision.

Excerpt from Gary Anderson at HufPo

Steiner's vision for school reform draws on a corporate model. I recently spoke on a panel on Long Island in which Dr. Steiner was the respondent. I lamented that it had become impolitic to mention John Dewey's name in public, so under attack were educators and Dewey's notions of democratic and experiential education. I expected and received the standard response that giving urban kids any thing other than a skills-oriented, high stakes accountability-driven education was to undermine their future. What I wasn't prepared for was his assertion that Dewey, late in life, recanted all of his life's work. With the wave of his hand, he dismissed the most important educational philosopher of the 20th century. This kind of thinking, even by credible academics, is responsible for hollowing out our public schools of creativity, critical thinking, and grounding in the richness of students' experiences and local communities.

Some of this notion that inner-city kids need a more "skills-based" approach was attributed to Lisa Delpit's critique in, Other People's Children, of largely white, progressive teachers who failed to understand the scaffolding of skills needed before providing poor children with progressive teaching methods. This has often been translated into the "back to basics" notion promoted by conservatives like The Fordham Institutes' David Whitman. In his book, Sweating the Small Stuff, he argues that poor kids need paternalistic, boot camp schools that protect them from the pathologies of their surrounding communities. But Delpit was clear that this was not what she meant, when she wrote,

Students need technical skills to open doors, but they need to think critically and creatively to participate in meaningful and potentially liberating work inside those doors. Let there be no doubt: a "skilled" minority person who is not also capable of critical analysis becomes the trainable, low-level functionary of the dominant society, simply the grease that keeps the institutions that orchestrate his or her oppression running smoothly. (Delpit, 1995, p. 19)

This was another of Dewey's ideas that is apparently no longer valid: the notion that schools prepare students for citizenship and participation in a vital and equitable democracy. There is nothing wrong with cross-sector borrowing of ideas, but as long as educators continue to indiscriminately borrow leftover ideas from the corporate closet, they will fail to provide poor and working class students with the rich, motivating, and critical education they have a right to.

But Cathleen Black is not even part of this conversation. Under a chancellor with no particular loyalty to public schools, no understanding of education, and no public vetting, the largest public school system in the country and thousands of low-income students of color may be placed at even greater risk.

READ THE ENTIRE ANDERSON PIECE

Check out Norms Notes for a variety of articles of interest: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/

Ed Notes Exclusive: Break In at UFT Headquarters

Anyone with information leading to the recovery of Michael Mulgrew's spine, please notify the UFT ASAP

Insider sources at the UFT have informed Ed Notes that an unknown party broke into UFT headquarters. So far the only item that has been known to be taken is UFT President Michael Mulgrew's spine.

While there has been some suspicion that something was amiss from the day Mulgrew took office, the clincher came with this item in the NY Times:

...Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city teachers’ union, said, “All of these people have heavy-duty backgrounds and success in education, so obviously David Steiner is clearly looking at this from the educational side, as he should be.” 
- NY Times, Nov. 19, 2010 - Panel on Pick for Schools Has Close Ties to Bloomberg

The reporters from the Times, having analyzed the panel and interviewed numerous people who raised issues with the members of the Steiner panel to review Cathie Black's waiver, were so incredulous at Mulgrew's comment, one of the lone voices in the article supporting the panel, they immediately called 911 suspecting something was amiss.

An all-points bulletin has been issued in an attempt to recover Mulgrew's spine. This may turn out to be a wild goose chase as some doubt there ever was a breakin in the first place.

Inside UFT sources claim that former UFT president took Mulgrew's spine and other parts of Mulgrew's anatomy when she left to go to the AFT, along with and her stapler.


Excerpts from the NY Times article:

New York State’s top education official on Friday named an advisory panel of eight experts, at least half of them with strong connections to the Bloomberg administration, to help him decide whether to approve Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s controversial choice to run the city’s school system.

Three panelists selected by David M. Steiner, the state education commissioner, worked as senior officials at the city’s Department of Education.

One of those three now works at a foundation that was, for many years, the vehicle for Mr. Bloomberg’s personal charitable donations.

A fourth panelist is the head of a museum that has received almost half a million dollars from Mr. Bloomberg in donations since he took office. 

Three panelists are in charge of sizable urban school districts: Andrés A. Alonso, the chief executive of the Baltimore school system and a former deputy chancellor under Mr. Klein; Jean-Claude Brizard, the superintendent in Rochester and a New York City native who has been a teacher and principal and was a top aide to Mr. Klein; 

The other panelists are: Ronald F. Ferguson, a Harvard economist who focuses on the achievement gap between minority students and white students; Kenneth G. Slentz, a top aide to Mr. Steiner at the State Education Department; Louise Mirrer, president and chief executive of the New-York Historical Society, which has received regular donations from Mr. Bloomberg, and a former top official at the City University of New York; and Michele Cahill, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation of New York and a former senior educational policy adviser to Mr. Klein. 

 Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat who has long been critical of Mr. Bloomberg’s education policies, questioned the panel’s makeup, saying, “It appears that the deck has been stacked in favor of granting the waiver in a manner that will further undermine public confidence in the appointment of Ms. Black.” 

So kiddies, let's review the panel: Brizzard, Alonso and Cahill all worked for Klein, plus Louise Mirrer who heads a museum receiving donations from Bloomberg.  Hmmm. Let's do the math. 4 is half of 8 and that makes - gee, only one more and Unchatty Cathie gets her waiver.

And let's review Mulgrew's comment:
“All of these people have heavy-duty backgrounds and success in education, so obviously David Steiner is clearly looking at this from the educational side, as he should be.” 


The clincher that Mulgrew was missing something was his classification of Michelle Cahill as "having a heavy-duty background and success in education". The Times piece has this to say:

As one of Mr. Klein’s most trusted aides from 2002 to 2006, she played a crucial role in reorganizing the school system and developing new schools, and was the driving force behind new programs for students most at risk of dropping out. But in 2004, she was denied a state waiver to serve as deputy chancellor, because while she had a dozen years of teaching experience and a master’s degree in urban affairs, she lacked traditional education supervisory credentials. 

Cahill was the much maligned agent of Klein's first deputy chancellor, Diane Lam, and was much vilified by many teachers over her rigid micro-management policies of force feeding the workshop model.

Steiner and Tisch: Race To The Top Hostage Photo

A Scary Thought: These People Run the NY State Ed Dept.

Let's see now. Meryl Tisch - yes that family - owns Giants and all kinds of stuff. Also Bloomberg next door neighbor - we picketed her too at our January '10 demo a Bloomberg's house. She also does Passover with Joel Klein. Very non-partisan.

And David Steiner who used to be at Hunter College - you know the place. Lower 4 year grad rates than some high schools that were closed. And remember how Hunter and Joel Klein tried to team up to take over the Julia Richman complex on 2nd Ave and 67th St - one of the multi-school buildings that has actually worked since the early 90's.

Photo from Gotham Schools