Pics From Fightback Friday at Lyons School/Cops Arrive Over Teacher Writing With Chalk/Pics From Lehman HS Rally

I got back at noon from my 3 day trip to FIRST HQ in New Hampshire for the annual robotics conference just in time to head into the city for the Fight Back Friday press conference at City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's 30th St. offices (video will be up tomorrow). There were lots of activities going on simultaneously. Here are pics from 2 locations:

The Lyons School (East Williamsburg - actually at the old IS 49 building a few blocks from where I taught. As these pics came into the Blackberrys there were rumors a teacher was arrested for writing in chalk on the sidewalk mailbox (and erasing it).  (there goes Skelly and other chalk-driven memories of childhood.)
 
Pics below the fold

October 31, 2009 - Lehman Story Gets Legs, DOE Investigations of Teacher Whistle Blowers Gets Trashed by Sullivan as DOE Throws Child Under Bus

If you've been following the Lehman HS scandal exposed at Gotham Schools here and here and our follow-ups at Ed Notes, Lehman HS, School for Scandal, What Did Klein Know About Lehman and When Did He Know It? the story is gaining legs. CBS picked it up, closing with this:

Investigators are also looking into whether teachers who blew the whistle on the scandal improperly shared student records.

The back story is that teachers notified Joel Klein last March and he supposedly ordered an investigation - a very s----l----o----w investigation. When the school year began and they hadn't heard from investigators (I say investigate the investigators), teachers felt they were facing the same crap this year and went to the press with the phonied up student records. Now the DOE is investigating them for releasing student records (though phony, were they really student records?) I bet the teacher investigation takes priority over the cheating scandal.

Manhattan member of the Panel for Education Policy Patrick Sullivan pointed to the hypocrisy by comparing it to the case of the release of the test results of a 4th grader:

The Bloomberg administration has a double standard on student privacy.

On Wednesday, the Daily News covered the story of a 4th grader who was told she couldn't be in her school's dance program because she instead needed to attend test prep sessions.

DOE spokesman Will Havemann, in a feeble defense of the decision, proceeded to broadcast to the News readership that the girl scored "a low level 3" on her ELA.

By their twisted internal logic, releasing student data to smear a nine year old in defense of the Bloomberg administration is acceptable, yet furnishing transcripts with redacted personal information requires an investigation. This from the people who tell is their mission is to "put the needs of the children before the needs of the adults".

If anyone is interested, I plan to raise these issues with Chancellor Klein on the record at the Nov 12th PEP meeting.

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2009/10/28/2009-10-28_student_forced_to_study_not_dance.html

Leonie Haimson followed with:

Why is this acceptable behavior David [Cantor]?

To reveal confidential test score information on a little girl, while investigating teachers who exposed major corruption? Not to mention the absurdity of barring a girl from taking dance classes because she tested at a “low level 3” – which by the way, means she is on grade level.

Over and over again, the administration has claimed that the emphasis on testing has not led to a decrease in arts education, yet we know this has happened. This case is a perfect example of the insanity that has taken over our schools.

In the response put out by the Bloomberg campaign to the candidate survey put out by the Center for Arts Education, asking about his elimination of the dedicated funding called Project Arts, they wrote: “rather than tying the hands of school leaders by dictating their budgets for them, we need to give principals control over their resources and hold them accountable for learning outcomes.

”http://www.scribd.com/doc/21817208/Bloomberg-CAE-Mayoral-Candidate-Questionnaire-FINAL.

In other words, as long as those test scores go up, arts education be damned.

What Did Klein Know About Lehman and When DId He Know It?

Gotham Schools is reporting that the whistle blowing teachers at Lehman HS will be investigated over the fact they allegedly sent student records as proof of the cheating, apparently a violation of some law that does more to protect cheating admins that students.

City officials will investigate whistleblowing Lehman HS teachers

The teachers approached Gotham Schools with students’ transcripts after some of them had submitted the same transcripts to the Office of Special Investigations, but had not heard back for months and assumed the investigation was dead. Former Lehman teachers stood by their decision to share the documents. The principal “has a three-year contract and it takes the DOE an average of two years to complete any investigation,” one teacher said. “So she gets her bonus for increasing graduation rates and we’re supposed to keep quiet?”

The DOE sees fit to allow all sort of info to be released to charter school operators. And can phony grades manipulated by the principal be considered real grades being released?

I sent this to the NYC Education News listserve re: the Lehman HS cheating scandal, which I wrote about yesterday: Lehman HS, School for Scandal

What needs to be pointed out is that Klein was told Lehman and did nothing. He is as complicit as can be and the investigators should include him. What did Joel know and when did he know it?

My old buddy David Cantor, Tweed press chief, responded:

From: david cantor
To: nyceducationnews@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thu, Oct 29, 2009 9:18 pm
Subject: Re: [nyceducationnews] Now playing at ed notes: Lehman HS, School for Scandal

Norm, I don't know why you say the chancellor "did nothing" after learning of the allegations at Lehman. He was contacted by a teacher at Lehman in late March and asked general counsel Mike Best to follow up. Within a few days, I believe--I can get you the dates--Best met with teachers from the school, after which he referred their allegations to the Special Commissioner of Investigation (who in turn referred them to the Office of Special Investigation). The investigation began in April and has continued since. I'm not aware of any lack of timeliness around the DOE's response to the charges.

David Cantor

My response:

David, The smoking gun.

Let's see now. It seems to be almost November. Let me count the months. Hmmm, 7. I didn't get to the point where I had to take my shoes off to count past 10, but if the story didn't come out at Gotham I believe I would have had to take off both shoes before we knew anything.

If Klein knew about Lehman in late March and many of the issues reported were going on in relation to graduating students, then nothing was done to interfere in a process that just happened to lead to "improved" grad rates that June. Boy, these investigations seem to take so long. Maybe it will be completed by the end of Bloomberg's 4th term.

By the way, even little ole me knew about it months before that and was linking to the barely disguised 19 credits blog. I see the teachers will be investigated and I would bet much more effort will go into that aspect and they will suffer much more than the cheating administrators, just as happened at JFK HS a few years ago when the whistle blowing teacher was sent to the rubber room and the admins got off scot free. We know you have your priorities.

And if the principal tampered with student grades, can they really be considered true student grades and therefore did teachers violate any law in releasing phony grades? Should make an interesting court case.

Oh, yeah, what about all that student info charter school operators are allowed to access in recruiting kids?

Best Norm


Related:
As this story goes citywide and beyond, we want to point out that Ed Notes, due to our impeccable sources, had the story for months and worked with the teachers to get the story out to the press. Why didn't we break the story last spring? Because the teachers were feeling their way as to the best route to take and we were there to help in any way possible. I was asked my opinion and I and the teachers thought Gotham Schools was the way to go. And of course we love Gotham's Anna Philips over here at Ed Notes. And not only because she treated us to dinner, but listened to the entire history of Ed Notes and ICE for two hours without falling asleep into her dinner plate (though I thought I saw a few yawns being stifled).

Lehman HS, School for Scandal

We've been hearing stories since last year out of the Lehman HS in the Bronx, one of the few large schools remaining, about how the new principal, Janet Saraceno, who replaced the legendary ogre principal, Robert Leder, was considered even worse.

I was tipped to the 19credits blog when it first began last February and put a link on Ed Notes. It started out as somewhat cryptic with a fictional motif, calling Lehman "Herman High". I spoke to one of the authors, who is known as moral obligation, last March. We discussed giving the blog more of a direct link to Lehman to get more traction. This year they did so. And it is paying off.

I was slipped a letter of resignation from a fed up Lehman teacher in late June which I passed on to Anna Philips, Phylissa Cramer and Elizabeth Green at Gotham at the time. With summer coming on, nothing was done. But today, the stuff should start flying out of the fan.

Gotham just published an explosive report on the Lehman situation written by Anna Philips. Congrats to Anna and the crew for sticking with the story and putting together this excellent in-depth report.

Our sources report that Joel Klein has been directly informed about the situation at Lehman for quite some time, making this quote from David Cantor a total joke: “The Office of Special Investigations is investigating allegations of grading improprieties at Lehman,” said a spokesman for the Department of Education, David Cantor. “We’ll comment once we have findings.”

Sure David. You should have asked Joel about Lehman, since he's known about it for a long time. Send the investigator over there and ask why Klein sat on the information he received.

Excerpts from Anna Philips' report:

As part of a Department of Education program to lure principals to the city’s most challenging schools, she was given a bonus and the title “executive principal.” At the time, this perplexed more than a few parents and teachers, who told the city’s daily newspapers that they couldn’t understand why a school with a “B” on its latest report card needed to offer its new principal an extra $25,000 a year.

According to current and former teachers, Saraceno methodically set about increasing the school’s 47 percent graduation rate by changing students’ grades from failing to passing over the objections of their teachers and, in some instances, in violation of state regulations.

“Leder was not a perfect human. We had hoped that anybody would have been better,” said a current teacher. “It turned out his replacement was much much worse. She has changed Lehman into a diploma mill.”

Grade changing is not an entirely foreign phenomenon at Lehman. Teachers who worked under Leder said he sometimes asked them to change student athletes’ grades if their grade point average slipped below the minimum required for them to play, or if a student was mere points away from passing a class. But that process involved conversations with teachers in which Leder persuaded them to sign the paperwork, they said. Today, failing grades disappear from transcripts without warning, teachers said.

“Leder’s corruption was at least confined to a cohort of 50 kids,” said a former teacher who was one of eight math teachers to leave Lehman last year. Former and current math teachers said their department has borne the brunt of the grade changes, as it has the lowest pass rate within the school.

“Saraceno is actually worse. It’s sickening that I would take him over her,” said the teacher, who now works at a charter school.

Our sources at Lehman, who while admitting that Leder was a tyrant, felt he was the tyrant you knew. "He had an educator's mentality and if he believed you were serious he left you alone," said a teacher. "If he said he was going to consult with teachers and let them run the ship he meant it. There was no bull." Saraceno, on the other hand was described as duplicitous, going through phony charades to make it look like she was consulting with teachers, but still pushing her own program in a dictatorial way that at times made Leder look mild mannered. Well, maybe not exactly but maybe it was the devil you know factor operating. Her move to break Lehman into Small Learning Communities (SLC's) was fraught with manipulations and fear mongering against recalcitrant teachers. The SLC situation caused as much consternation as the credit recovery game.

Make sure to check out the 19credits blog to get the full background scoop.

There is a pro-admin blog, 19stepsahead, that has 2 posts so far. If you have nothing good to report, say nothing but make sure to put down the critical blog that says it all. This sounds familiar when shills come out:

For months conversation about Lehman High School, the new direction of the administration, and its development into SLC's has been dominated by what it would appear are a minority of loud complaining people... with lots of time on their hands to write "creative" stories, but with little real steps being offered to make effective change.

Hmmm. Joel Klein could be writing this.