Garth Harries Leaves DOE as Ed Notes Helps Pass Klein Lemons

What do you do when you get a call from a top official at the New Haven school system, as I did two weeks ago, asking your opinion on the NYC ed reforms?

You let it fly.

At least until he reveals they are thinking of hiring Garth Harries, whose appointment as Deputy Superintendent in New Haven was announced on June 8. Harries is one of Joel Klein's chief non-educator/business characters. The New Haven official ran across my Education Notes blog and wanted to know what we thought of Harries. Asking the editor of a digital rag his opinion? I must be living in an alternative universe.

"Hmmm," I think, "Klein always talks about he urges principals to stop passing on teacher lemons to others. Here's an opportunity to pass along a Klein lemon."

Of course, there are Klein lemons spawning all over the place: Washington, Baltimore, Delaware and who knows where else? They're like the swine flu virus.

"Nice guy I hear," I say. "Very personable. Smooth. Doesn't know all that much. Doesn't think class size is important. Often uses the lame expression, ‘Research shows that teacher quality counts more than class size, but when challenged to cite the research, says, I'll get back to you with that.'" Sure, in another life.

"What he actually knows is not important," the official says. "We have a reform movement already that focuses on the classroom and he won't get to impact much on that, but there is thinking here that if we tie into the Joel Klein reform effort by hiring one of his top people, we'll have a better chance of getting some of that stimulus money. And Yale University, who we partner with, is very interested in that aspect."

“In that case, Garth Harries is the perfect guy for you. Great for public relations," I say.

If they wanted a DOE connected guy for PR, they could have done better with PR chief David Cantor for much less money.

Harries was recently put in charge of special ed in NYC despite knowing nothing about it. Nice time to leave in the midst of reorganization.


Related:
I referred the story to a parent activist who knows more about Harries than I do who said she would also help pass the Klein lemon by praising Harries to the sky.

Ed Notes had this story for 2 weeks but sat on it out of courtesy to the caller.

All that’s missing is a few hookers

Aaron Pallas fact checks the Klein/Sharpton Education Equality Project over at Gotham Schools.

Leonie Haimson talks about that was the week that was in NYC with the Klein/Sharpton/Bloomberg/Duncan/Biden/Fenty caravan in town at the EEP convention, renamed, "We're Not Really Crooks, at least as long as you can't prove it."

Read this in full to get a sense of the depth of corruption in education under BloomKlein control.
Posted at Norms Notes: Leonie Haimson on: That was the week that was!

A few choice tidbits from Controller Thompson on no-bid contracts:

CTB McGraw budgeted for $1 m; spent $4.2M.
Continental Press – textbooks etc; budgeted $15 K, spent $6.5 M! an increase of 43,000%!!!!
Creative Media Agency to place ads (for what?) was contracted for $589K and yet spent $6.9 Million!!!
According to the Comptroller’s office, in FY 07 and O8, there were 372 contracts – which exceeded the contract amount by 25% or more – w/ DOE spending over $1 billion on these contracts. 127 of these contracts had little or no competition – amounting to $525 million in all.

This year (FY 09) the rate of overspending on contracts is already at 27% -- with three months yet to go.

Follow the No-Bid doins from Columbia School of Journalism Students:
No Bid Tip Sheet Public Eyes on Public Schools

Chaz has a few comments:
Tweed Just Continues To Spend More Money On Non-Educational Items While The Schools Suffer

ELL Students Deprived of Educational Opportunities in NYC Public Schools

Steve Koss writes to the NYC Education News listserve:

English Language Learner students, regardless of their non-English language talents, are virtually excluded from access to NYC's nine specialized high schools.

The number of ELL students attending Stuyvesant HS according to their October 15, 2008 DOE register is 1 (out of a total of 3,250 students), at Bronx Science 1 (out of 2,816), at Brooklyn Tech 2 (out of 4,677), at Staten Island Tech 1 (out of 958), at H.S. of Science, Math, and Engineering at City College 1 (out of 452), at Queens H.S. for the Sciences at York College 0 (out of 404), at LaGuardia H.S. 6 (out of 2,507), at the H.S. of American Studies at Lehman College 0 (out of 346), and at Brooklyn Latin School 0 (out of 183).

In total, that puts a total of 12 ELL students (half of them at LaGuardia HS) in the City's specialized high schools out of 15,593 students, thereby representing just 0.077% of the students in those schools. At the six specialized high schools focusing on math, science, and/or engineering, it's just 6 students out of 12,557, an even more depressing 0.048%.

How Will Crisis Impact on Market Based Ed Reform?

For one who worked in the schools through the catastrophic financial crisis in NYC in 1975 and 1976, these times seem very familiar. The impact on schools then?

About 13,000 layoffs with excessed people from schools bumping people all over the place.

Of course with the current contract, that won't happen. Just a mass of ATR's. Or not. Remember that "no layoffs" clause in the contract? I think there's some small print along the lines of "Unless there's a fiscal crisis." Hmmm.

Now would they lay off $45,000 a year teachers while keeping people making 80- 100 grand? Hey, the law says they have to. I wonder how those mad dogs from the Leadership Academy (costing us $50 million over 5 years and one of the numerous pet projects of BloomKlein that will survive class sizes of 80) will take to that? Maybe Bloomberg can do a 2 for 1. While buying the city council to extend term limits and the state legislature to continue mayoral control, he can get them to change other laws.


They hit the elementary schools in '75 and the secondary schools the next.

My elementary school lost 15 people from a staff of about 70. All cluster teachers except one was left standing. Our preps were cut from 5 to 3 a week. How did they manage that? We got one prep a week and they sent kids home 45 minutes early 2 days a week for 2 years. (The only benefit was the wine and cheese Friday 2:15 parties.) A freeze even of the salary steps we were to get. Basically, a total suspension of many of our contractual gains. Class size? Forget about it.

Oh yeah. And we went on a strike to supposedly resist. Al Shanker's "We won't go back 'till we all go back," still resounds. Then the next thing we know is he is giving away our pension money to bail out the city. I was with the Coalition of NYC School Workers and we stood outside Madison Square Garden pleading with people to vote the plan down to no avail.

For you newbies used to the capitulation of the UFT (the one bulwark that could organize resistance) the Unity Caucus leadership has had a lot of practice.

Other than special ed (which exploded in the late 70's) over the next 10 plus years, I don't remember one regular ed addition to our staff.

Schools were closed and later sold off to private interests - in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) there are still 4 large former public schools being used by the Hasidic community that they bought for about a buck. (They DID have 3 members of the school board.)

Pretty much all long-term maintenance on schools was stopped for 15-20 years and that caught up with them in the 90's when serious problems cropped up in many buildings that they are still addressing today.

So, how will the current crisis that can turn out to be worse than the one 33 years ago impact on the schools in NYC and the BloomKlein program that puts a premium on high priced executives and extremely expensive private schemes while shortchanging classrooms? What about all those frills floating on the pond of market-based ed reform?

We'll speculate on the future of the extended day (can you see them cutting this - and the salaries that go with it?) small schools movement, merit pay schemes, after school programs, etc. a bit in an upcoming blog.

But here's an early warning shot from a Chicago teacher:

The Chicago High School Redesign Intiative (CHSRI) layed off all of its employees last Monday who were working with small schools. CHSRI managed the Bill Gates grants that help fund additional money to the small school movement. This will be the last school year that there will be a small school AIO. Next school year the small schools will return to the area offices AIO's or to the turnaround school AIO. CPS will be closing small schools and turning them back to "one" whole school. Small schools cost too much money because of higher administrative costs and CPS will be able to save money by going back to one principal instead of three or four principals per building. In a small school you must have at least 600 students per school, for the staffing formulas to work economically.

(jargon translation: AIO is Area Instructional Officer--small schools have had their own separate area, rather than being organized like the other schools into geographic areas. Turnaround schools are run by an outside agency headed by "venture capitalist" Martin Koldyke and also have their own "area".)

BloomKlein Model in the Land of Oz

I received an email from Trevor Cobbold, a parent activist, who is based in Canberra, Australia's capital and is involved with Save Our Schools Canberra.

He wrote an article for the Canberra Times addressing the situation in New York in terms of school reporting:

Ideology win in school reporting

The Rudd Government's ''education revolution'' is looking more and more like an extension of the Howard government's school policies. All the same elements are there choice and competition, reliance on markets, and now public reporting of school results.

The model for the new school reporting scheme comes direct from New York. Julia Gillard has been enthusing about the New York system ever since her audience with the New York schools chancellor, Joe Klein. She says she is ''inspired'' and ''impressed'' by Klein's model.

If Gillard had looked more closely, she would have seen major flaws.

The New York system produces unreliable and misleading comparisons of school performance and student progress. It is incoherent, can be used to produce league table,fails to compare like with like and is statistically flawed.

He goes on to cite Diane Ravitch and Jennifer Jennings (Eduwonkette) and concludes with:

Australia and Finland are two of the highest-achieving countries in the world in school outcomes according to the PISA surveys conducted by the OECD. Neither country got there by reporting school results.

Why the Rudd Government is choosing to emulate the reporting policies of much lower-performing countries such as the United States and United Kingdom can be explained only as a triumph of ideology over evidence.

Read the entire piece here.

Trevor also sent this blog site for reference.

http://www.futuredforum.blogspot.com/

I have disagreements on an article he wrote on class size at Save Our Schools where he talks about cost effectiveness and teacher quality as excuses not to jump into class size reduction across the board. While praising the STAR project, he also cites research on teacher quality, which no one seems to be able to define:

There is evidence that improving teacher quality contributes more to increasing student outcomes than class size reductions. Recent studies by Doug Harris and David Plank at Michigan State University and by Dylan Wiliam, Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, show larger improvements from increasing teacher ability and skills than by class size reductions.

Too many researchers have agendas based on where their funding is coming from and the TQ people have a lot more money than advocates for class size. I find it interesting that the "quality" issue is not raised when it comes to putting more police on the street to reduce crime or firemen on the job to cut down fires or doctors in emergency rooms.

I have to ask him what he thinks about all those Aussies Klein hired (at up to $1000 a day) to run around schools in NYC as consultants.


Personal Aussie Note
We visited Canberra in the early 90's to attend the Scherr scion's Bar Mitzvah. We had to smuggle in the yarmulkes - apparently it's tough to get them engraved in Canberra but I did manage to get them through customs despite the yarmulke sniffing dogs. The Scherrs, now living in Perth/Freemantle, stayed with us for 3 weeks last summer (and we're still talking.) Their son Sam is now 30 and a founding member of Capital City, a rock band in Australia. Dan Scherr, a native of the TenEyk housing project in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, keeps me informed of ed events in Western Australia.

Diane Ravitch on Andy Wolf Piece in NY Sun

Wolf should have spoken of state scores in this context. The gains under Crew and Levy from 1999-2002 were larger on the state tests in both reading and math, than under Klein from 2003-2007. On the NAEP, there was a large gain from 2002-2003 in fourth grade reading. From 2003-2007, the reading scores in fourth grade and eighth grade have been flat.

Bear in mind that the NAEP tests of 2002 were administered prior to Bloomberg takeover, and NAEP tests of 2003 were administered in January-March 2003, before implementation of Klein program. --- Diane Ravitch

I'm not going to jump on board in elaborate praise for Crew and Levy as their "reforms" so lauded by the UFT, were no more than bandaids.

The Wolf piece is posted at Norms Notes.
Wolf's negative comments on City Council Ed Committee chair Robert Jackson as compared to a favorable view of his predecessor, Eva Moskowitz, resulted in much comment on Leonie Haimson's listserve:

Robert Jackson is the opposite of somnolent – he is the most active, energetic and committed critic of the DOE and has held countless hearings to point out the flaws of their policies. Moreover, he also provides tremendous support to parents and advocates. On the other hand, Eva was and remains brilliant at getting publicity.

Leonie Haimson