Girls Prep Charter, Hedge Funds, and Space Wars in District One

Sunday's NY Times had an article called "Scholarly Investments" which talked about Hedge Fund millionaires and billionaires and the push for charter schools, mentioning some of the charter invaders we have been covering: Harlem Success, PAVE and Girls Prep.

The Tiger Foundation, started by the hedge fund billionaire Julian Robertson, provides a large chunk of financing for several dozen charters across the city. Mr. Robertson’s son, Spencer, founded his own school last year, PAVE Academy in the Brooklyn, while his daughter-in-law, Sarah Robertson, is chairwoman of the Girls Preparatory Charter School on the Lower East Side.

Ahhh, synergy. And good cash flow.

Still, Mr. Curry has been “knee deep in educational issues” since his 20s, he said. He co-founded two Girls Prep schools and is head of the board of the newer one, in the Bronx. The schools are “exactly the kind of investment people in our industry spend our days trying to stumble on,” Mr. Curry said, “with incredible cash flow, even if in this case we don’t ourselves get any of it.” The reference is to the fact that New York State contributes 75 to 90 percent of the amount per student that public schools receive.

Of course hedge fund characters love charters. We're paying for most of them and they get to raise private funding so they can pay Eva Moskowitz $370,000 a year. "These guys get it," said Moskowitz. They sure do get it. And Moskowitz makes sure to get her share. Why doesn't the reporter question the logic of us paying up to 90% of the costs and charters using the extra money coming in to pay such high salaries and who knows what other perks? These sharks aren't only in this for the kids. Edu-business, indeed.

The reporter, as we usually find, mentioned the tainted Caroline Hoxby (see Ed Notes' Nov. 13 Hoxby Hocked) study on charters in NYC outperforming public schools:

A study released in September by researchers headed by Caroline M. Hoxby, an economist at Stanford who is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, concluded that on average New York City charters outperform local schools. But another study by a different group of Stanford researchers last summer suggested that nationally the numbers are muddier.

What's muddy is the press' insistence on harping on Hoxby despite the flaws and questioning why the data munchers in hedge funds would be so enamored of faulty data.

Make a wish, Mike

And then there's this weak-kneed comment from our fearless UFT leader Mike Mulgrew:

“I think it’s all good and well that these people are finally stepping up to support education,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, referring to wealthy hedge funders. “But I would wish they would do it in a more foundational way, a way that would help all the children instead of just a small group.”

Mike has got to be kidding. Stepping up to the plate? Sure, to kill any remnant of teacher unionism.

Below find reports from parent activists Lisa Donlan and Leonie Haimson regarding Girls Prep charter school and the impact of its attempt to grab more space on the schools and students in District 1 on the lower east side. Sorry but the chart of D. 1 demographics did not come out and trying to fix it did not work. Email me if you want a copy.

From Lisa:

The hedge fund-spawned Girls Prep Charter in District One recently mentioned in a number of news stories wants to add on Middle School grades, by pushing 300 additional seats into one of the local "underutilized" ( offers small class size and more than 3 cluster rooms for enrichment for several hundreds of students) school buildings.

if we compare the demographics of GPC and the schools being targeted for space, it seems that the GCP is not equitably serving students in the local community despite the legal mandate to do so.

GPC serves NO ELL students, offers no CTT or self contained classes and serves no BOYS in a district whose students arew 12% ELL on average and 23% special education ( CTT/SC) and 8% SETTS ( push in pull out)

District One is an all choice district that allows any family to apply to any school in the district.

There are currently a dozen middle school options available to all District students, including the GPC students who are largely from out of district.

see below portions of the DoE's memo:

To: District 1 CEC

Fr: Community Superintendent and the Office of Portfolio Planning

Re: District 1 – Scenarios around Space Needs

Date: November 15, 2009

The following memo outlines the needs as identified by the Department of Education (DOE) in District 1 and the process by which the DOE has engaged with all schools to understand more information about school needs as well as the available space. The memo also outlines potential scenarios to meet these needs. This is a follow-up to the September CEC meeting which underutilized space was discussed.

District Needs:

1. Girls Preparatory Charter School of New York (“Girls Prep”), a charter school currently serving grades K-5 with two sections per grade, is in need of space for their middle school. The Girls Prep middle school will serve grades 5-8 with three sections per grade. Girls Prep is currently housed in M188. There is sufficient space for the K-4 elementary school in M188, but the current configuration of the building does not have enough space for Girls Prep to serve its middle school grades long-term. At scale, Girls Prep requires 10 sections for its K-4 elementary school and 12 sections for its 5-8 middle school (22 total sections).

Available Space

The original list of buildings discussed at the September CEC meeting was as follows:

· M015 (houses P.S. 15 and D75 program; hereinafter referred to by building code “M015”)

· M020 (houses P.S. 20; hereinafter referred to by building code “M020”)

· M056 (houses Henry Street School for International Studies, University Neighborhood Middle School, and Collaborative Academy of Science, Technology & Language Arts Education; hereinafter referred to by building code “M056”)

· M137 (houses P.S. 184; hereinafter referred to by building code “M137”)

· M188 (houses P.S. 188, Girls Prep, and D75 program; hereinafter referred to by building code “M188”)

Since September discussions were held with all principals, Network Leaders, SLTs, and building surveys were conducted of M020 and M137 to understand the space and the current situation in each of the building. Based on those conversations and surveys the following buildings were removed from consideration for having space:

· M015- Given the standard instructional footprint that allocates cluster space there is not additional space in the building for a new program or school

· M056- Due to the high need Special Education population located in the building and the existing programmatic needs in the building it did not make sense to add another organization into the building

Furthermore the following building was added to the list as potentially having space:

• M025 (houses School for Global Leaders, Marta Valle Secondary School, and Lower East Side Preparatory High School; hereinafter referred to by building code “M025”)

GIRLS PREP CHARTER

On its website, the school makes extraordinary claims regarding its success and rights to public school space:

http://www.girlsprep.org/

Girls Prep Closes the Achievement Gap for Latina and African-American Students! Number 1 school in District 1! The results are in! Girls Prep students excelled on this year's English Language Arts exams. 98% of our third graders and 92% of our fourth graders met or exceeded standards. These scores place Girls Prep as the second highest scoring charter school in New York City! We are thrilled that our girls scored so well on the assessment! These results are just one amazing outcome of years of collaboration, hard work and thoughtful planning. Parents, students and teachers, please take a moment to congratulate yourself, each other, and the third and fourth grade students. Save Girls Prep are parents and supporters of Girls Prep Charter School who believe every child must have equal access to a quality education. Girls Prep's ranks among the top 1% of NYC public schools, traditional or charter, in terms of the achievement of its students.
Save Girls Prep believe all children in District 1 should have access to a high performing school such as Girls Prep. Charter Schools are Public Schools and have every right under NYS Law to share space in a public school building.

On the website GPC also offers transportation to parents to the December PEP meeting to make a show of strength for their cause.

---

Let's repeat Lisa's statement we extracted earlier in this post:

Yet, if we compare the demographics of GPC and the schools being targeted for space, it seems that the GCP is not equitably serving students in the local communityt despite the legal mandate to do so.

GPC serves NO ELL students, offers no CTT or self contained classes and serves no BOYS in a district whose students arew 12% ELL on average and 23% special education ( CTT/SC) and 8% SETTS ( push in pull out)

District One is an all choice district that allows any family to apply to any school in the district.

There are currently a dozen middle school options available to all District students, including the GPC students who are largely from out of district.

DISTRICT 1 SELECT DEMOGRAPHICS 2009

	District One	P.S. 184	Girls Prep	P.S. 188	P.S. 15	UNMS	CASTLE	HSISS	P.S. 20
Total enrollment	11,653	640	263	400	235	180	292	525	590
% Charter Students	11%
SC Classes		0	0	1	3	2	2	3	3
CTT Classes		1	0	6	1	2	3	1	5
IEPS	23%(ES) /29%(MS)	2% = 11 stds	8%	21%		36%	27%	30%	16
SC/CTT	15%(ES) /21%(MS)	.7%= 5 stdts	0	15%	18%	20%	21%	22%	10%
% ELL	12	5%	0	16	21	15	7	15	18%
% Title One	80.1	77.8	68.0	92.6	96.5	89.6	80.8	69.9	97.1
#/ %STH	4%		4=2%	51stdts =13%	24stdts =11%	6=3%	3=1%	9=2%	3=.5%
% in district			43
% out of district			57
% Hispanic	48	5%		64	58	65	62.3	58	60%
% Black	19	6%		33	30	26	18.5	28	10%
%Asian	19	80%		3	8	2	15.1	10	26%
%White	13	7%		1	3	6	3.4	3	2%
%Am Indian	1	.9%		0.3	0.5	0.4	0.7	0.4	.7%

Sources and References:

- DCEP 2009-10, p.5, author Sarah Kleinhandler, school district improvement liaison

- ‘Girls Prep at a glance’, author Miriam Raccah, executive director Public Prep

- 8/10/2009 ATS snapshot K students D1

- DOE D1 K-8 Special Ed Percentages base on 2009 projections (08/04/09)

- D1 poverty percentage, author Jean Mingot, budget officer Manhattan integrated Service Center 10/26/09

- School portals DOE website Aug. - Nov 2009

- ATS website 10/23/09

- STH report from ATS 09/22/09, author Cecilio Diaz, Office of Youth Development Manhattan ISC

Lisa Donlan

CEC One

Leonie follows up with: more reasons to reject expansion of Girls Prep: lack of space

More on District 1:

1. The total student population is growing faster in D1 Elementary school buildings between 2007 and 2008 than any other district in the city, according to DOE’s blue book data (which include charter schools already housed in their buildings).

Total student population in elementary school buildings is up 4.1% -- by far the fastest growth anywhere.

(Second fastest growth is D25 at 3.9%; D 20 at 3.2%; D 24 at 3%, D26 at 2.9% and D28 at 2.5%, all in Queens, then D31 Staten Island at 2.4% and finally D2 at 2.3%.)

2- Gened/CTT/G&T Kindergarten enrollment increased in D1 by 10.9% between 2008 and 2009 (not even including charter schools), according to the DOE class size reports. (They are tied with D5 as second fastest Kindergarten growth in Manhattan).

3- Kindergarten class sizes are up 22% since 2007 – probably the sharpest increases in the entire city. Now, more than 51% of Kindergarten students in D1 schools are in classes of 21 or more.

Their schools simply don’t have the space for this expansion, unless in the future they want class sizes to continue to increase even more sharply and/or kick out their preKs.

Meanwhile, the small classes and the access to preK were probably the main reasons that achievement in District 1 schools improved more than any other district in the state between 2001 and 2008, according to the DOE’s own calculations.

For the DOE power point showing this, check out http://www.scribd.com/doc/20954070/New-York-City-School-Performance-October-2009

Rather than further damage the opportunities of students in D1, the lesson should be that whatever D1 is doing, the rest of the city desperately needs: more space, so that schools can provide smaller classes and more preK, not less.

Leonie Haimson

Will Maxwell and Jamaica HS Announced Closings Lead to New UFT Policy?

Here is a link to a very effective piece at the NYC Parent blog exposing the failures of the BloomKlein administration:

Schools slated for closure -- resulting from the failure of the administration's policies

Interesting that some parents in NYC can be so much stronger, analytical and educational than the union supposedly defending educators.

The UFT/AFT, hungering for recognition as a "reformist" minded union over the last 25 years, has never taken a strong stand over the closing of schools. Oh you have heard stuff like "Let’s invest money and resources into our existing schools and make them better. It can be done." But it has all been lip service. No line in the sand demanding that things like reduced class size be attempted before closing schools and adding real support for kids who are struggling academically and personally.

The ATR situation (mostly created by closing schools), exacerbated by the UFT's abandonment of the seniority system and promotion of the Open Market System, along with the other attacks on teachers from all directions, has created an internal pressure cooker within the UFT.

The two most prominent school closing announcements this past week were those of Maxwell HS just a few blocks north of my alma mater, the now broken up Thomas Jefferson HS on Pennsylvania Ave in East NY and Jamaica HS in Queens, long in the news through the efforts of chapter leader James Eterno, who will be running against Mike Mulgrew for UFT president.

A few conspiracy theorists have linked the closing as a backroom deal between the UFT and the DOE to put Eterno in a position of having to defend his school instead of being out campaigning, but Eterno has consistently said that the UFT has been supportive in his efforts. I don't always agree with James on this point as I look for deeds more than words.

See Chaz School Daze post and comments on the closing of Jamaica, where he, a former teacher at Jamaica says:

when I left the school was already struggling to survive the inept Principals running the school into the ground and their bosses who found any excuse to attack the school.

Only, James Eterno stood in the way between the dismantling of Jamaica HS earlier. However, unless Michael Mulgrew puts the power of the UFT into this fight, I hold no hope for Tweed reversing their decision.

we need to get rid of Leo Casey as HS rep. Many CL's have more serious school issues to deal with than hear from a union lackey with his double pension that supported the 2005 contract disaster and insulted critics who were proven right about he damage that contract did to us.

We already know that James Eterno is as good a chapter leader as you could find and we in ICE will do what it takes to assist him in this battle, which takes priority at this time over the UFT elections.

Ed Notes has been a persistent critic over the last 15 years of UFT policy towards closing schools and the entire baggage that goes with is: using test data to punish and reward and evaluate teachers and schools. I don't think the UFT can suddenly change its stripes and fight back in an effective way unless it mobilizes in a vast and consistent (no one-shot candle light vigils for instance) manner on all levels, including politically.

The Maxwell HS situation, where the activist Seung OK from GEM and ICE teaches, is an interesting case in point. It is one of the few vocational schools left and we certainly need these more than ever. Maxwell is the home of UFT District Rep Charlie Turner, one of the most despicable hacks in the union. We'll come back to that later.

The UFT has decided to make a big deal out of Maxwell, as indicated in this letter I posted on Norms Notes from special rep Anthony Sclafani that went out to chapter leaders cancelling their meeting this Wednesday and urging them to go to a rally at Maxwell instead. There is an urgency in the letter that might lead some to believe this is a sea change in how the UFT will respond in the future. I'm not so sure.

It begins with:

"Wednesday’s Chapter Leader Meeting is cancelled. That’s right. You have to feed yourself on Wednesday, December 9th."

That's a pretty arrogant way to start, with a demo of union hack resentment over having to feed people to get them to a meeting. But let's give Tony the benefit of the doubt and call it a bad attempt at humor. He continues:

The three of us, [Brooklyn HS District reps Charley [Turner], Charlie [Friedman] and I are taking this very seriously, especially Charley Turner since this is his school We are concerned about many things and some of these will affect you and your schools.

Well, now, Charlie Turner never seemed too upset when Tilden and Canarsie HS, not far from Maxwell and whose extra kids ended up putting pressure on Maxwell that may be a factor in giving the DOE an excuse to close it. But Turner and so many other UFT hacks never see a picture bigger than their next check. A teacher at Tilden left this comment at the ICE blog:

the staff fought back against the Principal and the D.O.E. but like Carnarsie H.S. where they kicked Charlie Turner out of the building when he came over there to comfort the Carnarsie Staff by telling them that you're lucky all you ATRS have jobs. "So what if they move you to another school which you have no choice in going and that it is usually an undesirable school. So what that you are forced to teach out of your licenced area! So what if you have taught at Carnarsie and Tilden for over 20 years. You're lucky. Randi and I(Charlie Turner) and her unity pals signed a great contract in 2005 so you still have jobs as ATRS. Well Charles Turner regretted those words and never stepped foot at Canarsie or Tilden again!

But let's get back to Tony's letter, which actually has nuggets of stuff that's pretty decent.

He defends Maxwell:

...statistically, Maxwell has been on a steady road to improvement over the past three years. We can prove that.....the grading system that determined this is flawed, as everyone in education agrees.

Then Tony asks the magical question:

where will the overflow go? Jefferson Campus? Madison? Wingate Campus? Transit Tech? School for the Classics? Lane Campus? Wherever these students go, it will have an effect on these schools since there is no one being admitted into Maxwell.

Yes, where will the overflow go? That question has been asked time and again but has been basically ignored by the UFT as almost all the large high schools in central and southeast Brooklyn have been closed down and organized into much smaller schools that can't or won't take the overflow.

Next, Tony hits another magic button

I believe that this closing is for one reason and one reason only – SPACE. Where else do we put those new Charter Schools? Or better yet, where do we create empty space to justify new Charters somewhere down the road?

Whoa. Guess what two charter schools are within a stones throw of Maxwell? Both UFT charter schools, with the middle school based at George Gershwin (IS 166 - also my alma mata) possibly one day expanding to 9th grade and beyond. Could it, would it....nah, even in bizarro land we would never see a UFT charter occupying space in Maxwell.

Now Tony hits his stride with some really good stuff:

who’s next on the chopping block? Flawed data, fake reasons, a determined philosophy to close large comprehensive high schools at any cost – all these excuses can be used against anyone of you , even some of the smaller schools. Let’s invest money and resources into our existing schools and make them better. It can be done.

Yes, Tony, it can be done. But never without a union putting its full force behind the battle.

See the document Seung Ok put together to be used in the defense of Maxwell at the GEM blog. Download the pdf to share with your colleagues.

WH Maxwell VHS-Injustice of School Closures

Text posted at NYC Public School Parent blog:

The case for keeping Maxwell Vocational HS open

Postscript:
The actions of Unity Caucus hacks undermine the ability of the UFT to galvanize the support needed to fight these battles because without trust in the leadership to engage in a fair process, the most active members who are also critics tend to hold back their support.

Yes, democracy does count in building an effective union and until we see signs the internal battles will rage. Mulgrew has not only not shown signs of reigning in the hacks but there are indications he will go in the other direction. Let's see how dirty they get in the elections.

I'll write more about this soon because we see what seems like a seductive (to a few) New Action line that we all have to unite to battle the common enemy BloomKlein popping up. Many of us see the UFT/AFT more often lined up with that enemy than with the members. My simple response it to call on Mulgrew to begin a democratic reformation of the union in a show of faith. GEMers and ICEers will be holding discussions addressing the issue of what such a reform might look like in the next few months.

Fiorillo on UFT and Mulgrew: We Need More than Words

Read ICE's Michael Fiorillo's guest post at NYC Educator: We Need More than Words

Michael opens with:

So, Michael Mulgrew finally found the time to respond to Mayor Bloomberg’s - and, given Arne Duncan’s smiling presence on stage, President Obama’s – declaration of war before Thanksgiving. Bloomberg presented the full menu of the privateers who are busy cannibalizing the public schools: merit pay, high stakes tests as a weapon, attacks on tenure, seniority, ATRs, accelerated public school closings and charter school colonization. Mulgrew’s response sounded good: the language was strong, direct and missing the saccharine tone of Randi Weingarten’s old missives to the membership. Nonetheless, I’d recommend that everyone watch what Mr. Mulgrew does, rather than what he says.

And closes with:

As currently led, the UFT cannot be reformed or made into an effective vehicle for defending teachers, and is in the process of bringing its members, the public schools and ultimately itself down in the deluded thought that it can maintain itself by collaborating - their term, not mine – with people who seek to destroy it. Only a revolt by an informed membership, then to ally itself with parents and students to oppose privatization and corporate control, provides any hope of saving public education and teacher unionism in NYC.

But head on over to NYC and read the entire post.

Michael didn't mention the Unity collaborators, New Action, which were handed seats on the UFT Ex Bd by Unity endorsement in order to keep the ICE/TJC dissident voices like Michael off the Board.

Michael Fiorillo will be amongst the 6 ICE/TJC candidates in this year's UFT election, along with Francis Lewis HS CL Arthur Goldstein and 4 other strong candidates.

Imagine these voices, though only 6 out of 89 on the Ex Bd. A small step, but a beginning of, as Michael says, "a revolt by an informed membership, then to ally itself with parents and students to oppose privatization and corporate control, provides any hope of saving public education and teacher unionism in NYC."

If you are in a high school, it is especially important to get your colleagues to check ICE/TJC slate when they receive their ballots in March as that simple act will be a vote for all of the above plus people like James Eterno for president and other excellent candidates who will be revealed soon. ICE/TJC needs people to distribute literature in schools and help promote the election slate.

Low Class Size is Precious

I saw the galvanizing movie "Precious" last night and it was riveting. I heard a lot about it but hadn't realized how much it was about teaching and education. Precious, a black teenager who had two children after being raped by her father and suffers from one of the most awful mothers imaginable (I saw a few myself- I'm working on one story which I'll post this weekend and link back here), is given an opportunity to go to an alternative school, where a dedicated teacher helps save her and her classmates.

Now we know all the ed deformers – and we have to make note that Oprah was a key person behind this film and her Chicago roots and attachments to Obama probably put her in that category – will make the amazing teacher, Ms. Blu Rain, the key element. But note how small the group she is working with and ask if she could do anything like that work with a full-size class. But just watch how this factor is ignored.

Contrast that situation to Precious' former school where her favorite teacher struggles to control a rowdy math class and is presented as being ineffective. But if he and Ms. Rain were to switch places, I wonder how things would work out? Would Ms. Rain be able to have 30 rowdy kids multiplied by 5 classes work on their writing and be able to read and comment on every one every day? Maybe. Maybe for a year or two before burning out. Could she take into her home the numerous kids in trouble she would face?

In all the hubbub over the film "Precious," don't forget one of the keys to the film is the extremely low class size and the support mechanism the school provides.

Think of the enormous effort on the part of one teacher to save this one child and add the multiplier effect. Too expensive will say the ed deformer Joel Kleinites as people like Christopher Cerf whine, "It has been shown that throwing cash at the problem doesn't solve it." Well they threw cash at GM, AIG, Bear Sterns, but alas not at Lehman Bros. The Precious people of this world apparently don't deserve to have cash thrown at an attempt to solve their problems by those deformers claiming to be fighting for civil rights.


The 4th season of The Wire also showed a troubled class of low class size and more than one adult in the room as being effective. Note how in all the discussion by the ed deformers for solutions to education, the idea of small groups is left out. Unless it involves charter schools, of course. BloomKlein with all the money they have been throwing around, never tried one case of inundating a poorly performing school with piles of teachers before closing it.

Expensive? Hell, yes. But they are throwing around 500 billion in stimulus money. Ask why they don't offer it to systems that figure out ways to reduce class size and you begin to understand how the true agenda is to move the control of schools out of public control and into private hands.

A Teacher Comments on Harold Ford Jr. as Ed Deformer

I received this email of outrage from a NYC teacher who is clearly making the connections between the ed deformers and the catastrophe public education is undergoing. Here it is, unexpurgated


Harold Ford Jr. former Tennessee Congressman and now head of the Democratic Leadership Council, co-wrote a piece of jive with Louis Gerstner and Eli Broad about the Race to the Top stuff at the WSJ on November 24. The piece contained the usual stuff - must add competition and accountability to education, data systems and tracking of student and teacher performance is essential to real reform. But Ford, who became a Congressman when his daddy retired from the seat, couldn't pass the most important standardized test he ever took in his own life - the Tennessee bar. To make matters worse, he referred to himself as a lawyer on the campaign trail when he ran for Senate in 2006. Now this shit burns me up - a hypocritical little wanker who has led a life of privilege and thinks he's pulled himself up by his bootstraps, now takes on education reform and pushes testing as the most important measurement of success, but couldn't pass his own fucking bar exam.

I called the DLC and left messages on two different lines. I was polite, asked nicely how Mr. Ford gained his expertise in education reform and wondered if his law professors should be fired because he failed his bar exams.

The bullshit coming from the neo-liberals on education these days - from Obama, from Duncan, from Ford and Bloomberg and Arianna Huffington and even comedians like Bill Marr and Jon Stewart, has me outraged. I have been dropping grenades at Gotham Schools every once in a while, but it just feels like the reformers are winning the message war and the real one too. I did like Diane Ravitch's last piece and Alan Singer has had some good push back at the Huffington post (surprised Arianna lets it go up - she's squarely in the "the AFT is evil" contingent), but otherwise it's all the Obama/Duncan/Bloomberg way in the media these days.


Here is Ravitch's piece referring to the little wanker Harold Ford Jr.:

One of the institutions that made this country a great haven for immigrants was its public education system.

Our public schools were never perfect. There was never a golden age when everyone graduated high school and learned to a high standard of excellence. Improving education and expanding equality of opportunity have been the slow, steady work of generations.

Yet now, we live in an age when it is the custom to bash the public schools, not to thank them for helping to build our nation. It has become commonplace for the president, the secretary of education, and the leaders of the business community to lament the terrible state of our schools and to demand radical, one might even say revolutionary, changes. We live in an age of data, and the data (they say) are awful. They look at NAEP test scores, international test scores, graduation rates, and anything else that is measurable, and they demand solutions, now.

Note that they never speak of the state of learning, nor even the state of education, because those words connote many intangibles that cannot be measured and converted into data. The politicians and business leaders do not speak about whether young people read in their spare time, whether their reading consists of good literature and non-fiction, whether they know how to write an engaging essay or a well-constructed research paper, whether they can engage in an informed discussion of history, whether they are knowledgeable about our governmental system, whether they perform volunteer service in their community, whether they leave high school prepared to serve on a jury and vote thoughtfully.

No, instead what we now hear from our business leaders is that the schools must be redesigned to function like business. They conveniently overlook the fact that business practices and the ruthless pursuit of a competitive edge nearly destroyed our national economy a year ago.

Last week, an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal by Harold E. Ford Jr. (chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council), Louis V. Gerstner Jr. (former chairman of IBM), and Eli Broad (founder of the Broad Foundations) enunciated the new wisdom about school reform. (Leave aside the fact that these three have never reformed a school; nonetheless, they know how it should be done.) Schools with low scores must be closed, and states must open the flood gates to unlimited numbers of privately managed charter schools. Schools must compete for students. Teachers must compete with one another for higher test scores. Everyone must be evaluated by those scores. Everything else is an "insignificant" idea.

Never mind that in many states the test scores are phony, doctored, and meaningless. We might start, for example, with New York and Illinois. The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago released a report ("Still Left Behind") earlier this year that documented the lowered cut scores on Illinois's state tests, which gave the illusion of progress in Chicago. Chicago students are still far behind, and progress during Arne Duncan's tenure was meager. The report reaches these key findings:

"Most of Chicago's students drop out or fail. The vast majority of Chicago's elementary and high schools do not prepare their students for success in college and beyond.

"There is a general perception that Chicago's public schools have been gradually improving over time. However, recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS elementary students who meet standards on state assessments appear to be due to changes in the tests made by the Illinois State Board of Education, rather than real improvements in student learning.

"At the elementary level, state assessment standards have been so weakened that most of the 8th graders who "meet" these standards have little chance to succeed in high school or to be ready for college. While there has been modest improvement in real student learning in Chicago's elementary schools, these gains dissipate in high school.

"The performance of Chicago's high schools is abysmal—with about half the students dropping out of the non-selective-enrollment schools, and more than 70 percent of 11th grade students failing to meet state standards. The trend has remained essentially flat over the past several years. The relatively high-performing students are concentrated in a few magnet/selective enrollment high schools. In the regular neighborhood high schools, which serve the vast preponderance of students, almost no students are prepared to succeed in college."

Similarly, the scoring of the state tests in New York was dumbed down dramatically from 2006-2009, and it became possible for students to reach Level 2 by random guessing. Proficiency rates on state tests soared dramatically at the same time that the state's scores on NAEP remained flat. As a result of the state's dumbed-down tests, New York City's accountability system crashed, and 97 percent of all elementary and junior high schools were rated A or B because of their alleged gains on the state tests. Having just launched its own "merit pay" plan, New York City was required to pay out more than $30 million in bonuses to teachers, triggered by the remarkable (and phony) gains on state tests. My friend Andrew Wolf, who wrote an education column for the now-defunct New York Sun, described the collision of the state tests and the city accountability system thus: "It is like two thieves trying to rob the same bank at the same time."

New York City and Chicago are two districts that adopted competitive business practices, aggressively closing down schools and spurring competition. What are the results? Grade inflation on state scores, but neither district saw significant improvement on NAEP since 2003. (NYC did get a gain for its 4th grade students in math in 2007, but not in 4th grade reading, 8th grade reading, or 8th grade math, and in 2009, the state's math scores were flat, which indicates that the city's were, as well.)

Living as we do in an age when test scores are so easily manipulated and so often fraudulent, we should proceed with caution before using them to determine the fate of students, teachers, principals, and schools. I give Mssrs. Ford, Gerstner, and Broad the benefit of the doubt: They think that school data are as meaningful as a profit-and-loss statement or a price-to-earnings ratio. Presumably, they don't realize that what is measured and can be measured may not be the most important things that happen in schools.

Where I do not give them the benefit of the doubt is that they assume that the Race to the Top is "enforcing academic standards." That is simply not true. In fact, it is sad or laughable, I am not sure which. The main themes of RTTT are privatization via charters and evaluation via phony test scores. How this translates into "rigorous standards" defies my understanding.

Nor do I admire their belief that schools will get dramatically better if they compete, just like businesses do. Maybe people in business win by competing, maybe competition produces better mousetraps, but that is not the way that schools function. Schools work best when teachers collaborate with one another to identify students who need extra attention or a different program or to mentor weak teachers; schools work best when they collaborate around common goals. Schools are not trying to build a better mousetrap. They are trying to educate our citizenry. Schools are not businesses, and we will continue to flounder so long as we put politicians and business leaders in the driver's seat on education policy.

Diane

Blogger "Under Assault" Takes Mulgrew to the Whipping Shed

UFT Prez Michael Mulgrew wrote us today about how terrible Bloomberg's recent speech in Washington was.

Sure enough, he talks a good line about ATRs, rubber rooms and test scores, but who can believe what these union managers say anymore?


When the ATR pool was created, he says, the union had "warned the DOE that faulty implementation of the process would leave hundreds or even thousands of teachers without permanent assignments."

There is no better example of the Department of Education’s mismanagement and failed leadership than this group of dedicated and experienced teachers.

Sure looks to me as if he's denying the union's role in negotiating a contract that handed us the ATR situation on a platter.

Let's be clear about this. Randi Weingarten, backed by her indefatigable Unity Caucus, signed a deal that gave principals the right to pass over any or all excessed teachers.
----

Unity management works behind our backs and lies to us.

As nice as Mulgrew's letter sounds — and it does sound better than Weingarten's claptrap — I don't believe anything Unity says anymore. Not one word.


The above are excerpts from a superb piece that exposes Unity (and don't forget their allies New Action- see if any of their literature is in any way critical of the UFT on so many of these issues - and they joined Randi at her wine and cheese party screwing the ATRs as Under Assault refers to).

I agree that Mulgrew is skating on his use of less cloying language than Randi. But the ice is getting thin and do not expect him to deviate one iota from her policies. He will get away with this for a time, certainly through the upcoming UFT elections, where many Randi-haters will argue they should give him a shot.

They shouldn't.

Read the full piece: MM Pinocchio

School Closings, ATRs, Charters, Rubber Rooms Are All Snakes in the Same Basket

Jeez, try to get away for a few days the all kinds of stuff start hitting the fan. More school closings - and the creation of more ATRs. Rubber rooms in the news and all kinds of other stuff on charter schools, using test scores to judge teachers, tenure and the Obama/Duncan Race to the Top to force the privatization model down the throats of state legislatures. These are all connected and one of the things we try to do here is link the various issues that may seem local to the big picture. Like it's not all about getting rid of Joel Klein as the UFT/Unity Caucus/New Action tandem would have you believe.

School closings and the creation of ATRs and rubber rooms are all part of the plan to privatize and de-unionize vast swaths of public schools, mostly in urban areas. And having a union leadership (the UFT/AFT is the only organization that has the resources to fight all of this) that either doesn't see the big picture (doubtful) or does see it, yet deliberately misleads the members and the public to think it is all about local stuff like BloomKlein puts people who want to resist things like school closings in a box. But more on school closings in a follow-up post.

For this post, let's start at the top and take a look at the overall plan in the use of charter schools as the wedge to break public control. I put this link at the top of the sidebar to a John Merrow (an ed deformer) podcast with Diane Ravitch, who savages Race to the top (listen carefully to some of Merrow's cloying questions).

Also check the link to the CAPE (PS 15, Redhook) piece (What Your Money Can and Cannot Buy) on the Medina article on charters sharing space in public schools.

Also keep an eye on the controversy over the charter school study of CMO's (Charter Management Orgs) being repressed by the Ed Sector (one of the leaders of the ed deform pack) and the excellent reporting coming out Alexander Russo's blog. This post there by Marc Dean Millot exposes some of the fault lines. Millot starts out with this:

Debra Viadero's article in today's online edition of Education Week ( Study Casts Doubt on Strength of Charter Managers) is worth reading if you are trying to determine the extent to which EdSector manipulated Tom Toch's Sweating draft, and whether it makes any difference. The gap was wide enough for Toch to disown EdSector's authorless Growing report, but Edsector argues that "the sort of editing process it went through would not be something out of the ordinary."

All I can say is that every research analyst should hope it is extraordinary, because if what has happened to EdSectors co-founder and co-director is the ordinary course of business in education policy research, the ordinary staff member is little more than an intellectual serf.

The first bit of new information in Viadero's report is Toch's accusation that EdSectorCMO Czar, Kim Smith, pressured management to excise financial and other insider information that cast doubt on the future of some CMOs as going concerns. board member, New Schools Venture Fund founder, and

Read more
http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2009/12/millot-ed-weeks-story-on-tochs-sweating-v-edsectors-growing.html#more

You can download Toch's original draft here. (Thanks to Leonie for putting the Ed Sector stuff together. If you are not on her listserve you are missing out on one of the best ways of getting educated on what's happening in NYC and beyond.)


Is the Battle Over Charters Just About Public Space?

This comment was posted on the Leonie Haimson moderated NYC Ed News listserve,

I have no problem per se with Charter Schools but great resentment when they go into used public school spaces, taking over libraries and science rooms, making public schools less effective. If they find/pay for their own space, then let them open… but not when they encroach on public space....

I find this argument all the time. That people think charters are ok as long as they find their own space. We need to look at the larger picture of the charter school movement even if in their own spaces as part of a plan to undermine the public school system and put most of the schools in the hands of privateers, where large chains of charter schools (through buyouts and consolidations - the next phase) will control the education system and drive out public schools. Think Walmart and how small businesses were driven out, leaving a monopoly in many communities. Mom and pop charters may seem cute. But so were the local hardware stores driven out by Home Depot and Lowes. That is the future of urban school systems. Capitalism capitalizes and leads to bigger and bigger. The competition will be between national chains of charters like KIPP, Victory, etc. If there is to be a monopoly, the public should control it.

My Nov. 9, 2009 post had links to The Plan to replace public school systems and other articles of interest.

Here, in a series of posts over the last few days at the Schools Matter blog, we see the plan to undermine public education (and of course to destroy teacher unions) laid out by a former Bushie in early 2008. Now ask yourself: exactly what is the AFT/UFT doing in response? Think: who needs public education, let's get our share. Thanks to Michael Fiorillo for finding this gem (and don't forget, GEM in NYC right now is the only organized opposition to THE PLAN.)

Kenneth Libby laid out the plan to eliminate the public option in education in this post:

From the Vault

This is part of an essay written in early 2008 by AEI/Fordham's Andy Smarick, a former Bush II Domestic Policy Council member tasked with K-12 and higher education issues:

Here, in short, is one roadmap for chartering's way forward: First, commit to drastically increasing the charter market share in a few select communities until it is the dominant system and the district is reduced to a secondary provider. The target should be 75 percent. Second, choose the target communities wisely. Each should begin with a solid charter base (at least 5 percent market share), a policy environment that will enable growth (fair funding, nondistrictauthorizers, and no legislated caps), and a favorable political environment (friendly elected officials and editorial boards, a positive experience with charters to date, and unorganized opposition). For example, in New York a concerted effort could be made to site in Albany or Buffalo a large percentage of the 100 new charters allowed under the raised cap. Other potentially fertile districts include Denver,Detroit,Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oakland, and Washington, D.C.

Third, secure proven operators to open new schools. To the greatest extent possible, growth should be driven by replicating successful local charters and recruiting high-performing operators from other areas. Fourth, engage key allies like Teach For America, New Leaders for New Schools, and national and local foundations to ensure the effort has the human and financial capital needed. Last, commit to rigorously assessing charter performance in each community and working with authorizers to close the charters that fail to significantly improve student achievement.

In total, these strategies should lead to rapid, high-quality charter growth and the development of a public school marketplace marked by parental choice, the regular startup of new schools, the improvement of middling schools, the replication of high-performing schools, and the shuttering of low-performing schools.

As chartering increases its market share in a city, the district will come under growing financial pressure. The district, despite educating fewer and fewer students, will still require a large administrative staff to process payroll and benefits, administer federal programs, and oversee special education. With a lopsided adult-to-student ratio, the district's per-pupil costs will skyrocket.

At some point along the district's path from monopoly provider to financially unsustainable marginal player, the city's investors and stakeholders--taxpayers, foundations, business leaders, elected officials, and editorial boards--are likely to demand fundamental change. That is, eventually the financial crisis will become a political crisis. If the district has progressive leadership, one of two best-case scenarios may result. The district could voluntarily begin the shift to an authorizer, developing a new relationship with its schools and reworking its administrative structure to meet the new conditions. Or, believing the organization is unable to make this change, the district could gradually transfer its schools to an established authorizer.

You can practically check off each of Smarick's suggestions for a pro-charter policy environment, particularly in places like Los Angeles. The general silence of Right-wing education "reformers" (hell-bent, in reality, on destroying and privatizing public education) is not a coincidence - they're largely happy with Obama/Duncan's education agenda.
Welcome to "third way" centrism.


More Schools Matter articles on charters:

After Years of "Innovation," NJ Charters Perform No Better Than Poorest Public Schools

The Real Effects of Corporate Charter Schools on Public Schools

CEO Pay in Charter School Chains

Gloucester Parents Stage Protest Against Crooked Charter School Approval



NOTE: Make sure to check the sidebar regularly for new snippets. I add to it every day, with the latest near the top.

PS 241, Portrait of a Harlem School, 2008-2009

This powerful summary of the last school year from an educator at PS 241 in Harlem exposes the predatory practices many of the charters schools and their partners the BloomKlein administration engage in and that many of their school closings are politically motivated, in essence a real estate grab for charters. A classic case of how the quasi stewards of the NYC public school system work as quislings to undermine the very institution they have sworn to fix. I'll just pull a few quotes as a preview to emphasize this point:

A charter school [Eva Moskowitz' Harlem Success Academy], had sent hundreds of their parents to the hearing to lay claim to our building. We were repeatedly referred to as failures throughout this hearing. The charter school representatives asserted that our school should be completely replaced with their school. There were many things disturbing about that hearing and its disrespectful tone, but nothing more so than the charter school's refusal to commit to enrolling all of our students if they did, in fact, take over our building. Some parents of PS 241 students attended school in our building as children themselves. They were now being told that, should the charter get our school building, their children would have to win a seat in a lottery to gain admission. No plan was offered for lottery losers.

In early April, the Chancellor of the NYC Department of Education sent letters to the families of PS 241, in an attempt to persuade them to leave our school.

In May, PS 241 again appeared in the New York newspapers. This time, however, it was announced that we had made the top 10 list of New York City’s MOST IMPROVED SCHOOLS that had the greatest test score gains.

The following 2009-2010 school year had over 200 students report for the first day of school. This was about 50-60 fewer students than the previous year. Nearly half of PS 241's staff are now gone. As we moved further into the month of September our community received the news that we had earned an A on our annual school report card for the previous 2008-2009 school year. It was a small consolation for the Department of Education's maltreatment of PS 241 and for the loss to our community. The news was taken in stride, there was work to be done, routines to set, students to understand and teach.

PS 241 continues to fight for its survival even though we are now considered an A school. The Department of Education is not only phasing out our Middle School, but it also denied us a pre-kindergarten class that we've had for the many years and for which we received 20 applications. They are now working more covertly to replace our school.

Related: The UFT, which helped file the suit, has since sat back and will allow PS 241 to be undermined. What weren't they allowed to begin a pre-k despite 20 applications? How about a suit about that clear sign the DOE would chop at PS 241 until Eva Moskowitz had the entire building for her empire? Harlem Success, by the way, which has no charter for pre-k, illegally has pre-k as part of their program by calling it something else.


PS 241, Portrait of a Harlem School, 2008-2009
by an educator at the school who for obvious reasons wishes to remain anonymous

[Meaning, this person will probably end up as an ATR, with demands he/she be fired if he/she doesn't get a job within a year and a google search of his/her name if out there would doom him/her - a perfect example of the real reason we have tenure - to defend the people who really stand up for kids and their community from reprisals.]


In December of 2008 the PS 241 community was informed by the Department of Education that our school would be closed down. This news was reported in most of the New York newspapers. What followed was a school year filled with confusion, anger, frustration, a lawsuit, intimidation and, at times, a little bit of celebrating.

During the 2007-2008 school year, PS 241 received a D grade on its annual school report card; this followed a B grade the previous year. The fact that our school needed to improve was understood by the teachers, students and families of our community. What caused great confusion was how abruptly the decision to close our school was made and that no input from anyone in our community was sought. The Department of Education had rendered their verdict and thought that would be the end of our story. They were wrong.

In January, a hearing was announced and presided over by the Department of Education. It quickly deteriorated into a yelling match that pitted charter school parents against the PS 241 community. A charter school [Eva Moskowitz' Harlem Success Academy], had sent hundreds of their parents to the hearing to lay claim to our building. We were repeatedly referred to as failures throughout this hearing. The charter school representatives asserted that our school should be completely replaced with their school. There were many things disturbing about that hearing and its disrespectful tone, but nothing more so than the charter school's refusal to commit to enrolling all of our students if they did, in fact, take over our building. Some parents of PS 241 students attended school in our building as children themselves. They were now being told that, should the charter get our school building, their children would have to win a seat in a lottery to gain admission. No plan was offered for lottery losers. We all struggled to understand what would happen next.

In early February and into March teachers, support staff, students and parents from PS 241 began to organize a petition to stop the Department of Education's plan to close our school. Several hundred signatures of support were collected.

In March one of our fifth grade classes and their teacher testified before District 3's Community Education Council about their anger regarding our school's closure, but more specifically their anger over being called failures. Many students stood up to speak on that night, but one fifth grade student put it this way, "I am not failing and neither are my classmates. So why are they calling me a failure and planning to close my school?" This question was never sufficiently
answered.

As we moved further into the month of March members of PS 241, the District 3 Community Education Council, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the UFT came together to file a lawsuit on behalf of the entire PS 241 community against the Department of Education and their plan. We weren’t willing to give up our school, especially to a charter school that wouldn't enroll all of our students. New York City is divided into zones and state law mandates that each of these zones have a public school, one where every child living in that zone can attend. The Department of Education could not replace PS 241, who accepts everyone in the community, with a charter school that would not. They did not contest the lawsuit and withdrew their plan to close our elementary school. The plan to phase out our middle school, however, would move forward.

In early April, the Chancellor of the NYC Department of Education sent letters to the families of PS 241, in an attempt to persuade them to leave our school. The Chancellor was essentially asking families to abandon our school community at a time when we needed to come together. We struggled to comprehend why he would encourage our families and students to abandon their school community. Why didn’t the Chancellor offer us real support and encourage us to work harder, smarter and to come together?

In May, PS 241 again appeared in the New York newspapers. This time, however, it was announced that we had made the top 10 list of New York City’s MOST IMPROVED SCHOOLS that had the greatest test score gains. We were one of only two Manhattan schools to make the list. The other, PS 150, had also been slated for closure by the Department of Education back in December.

Despite the test score gains and the lawsuit, the Department of Education continued to move forward with their plan to give the charter school operator, Harlem Success Academy, a huge part of our classroom space. They were in and out of our classrooms during the last month of the school year, analyzing our space for renovations. Teachers and students, who occupied future charter school classrooms, were made to relocate during the school day so that renovations could
be completed. Teachers boxed up their classroom supplies and materials during the last week of school for removal at the conclusion of the school year.

The 2008-2009 school year came to an end quietly and without the celebration that often accompanies the last day of school. Many from our staff had plans to teach elsewhere the following year, while other's futures were less certain. What we all knew was that our school would be drastically different the following year and that PS 241's future was in doubt.

The following 2009-2010 school year had over 200 students report for the first day of school. This was about 50-60 fewer students than the previous year. Nearly half of PS 241's staff are now gone. As we moved further into the month of September our community received the news that we had earned an A on our annual school report card for the previous 2008-2009 school year. It was a small consolation for the Department of Education's maltreatment of PS 241 and for the loss to our community. The news was taken in stride, there was work to be done, routines to set, students to understand and teach.

PS 241 continues to fight for its survival even though we are now considered an A school. The Department of Education is not only phasing out our Middle School, but it also denied us a pre-kindergarten class that we've had for the many years and for which we received 20 applications. They are now working more covertly to replace our school.

Unfortunately, our story is not unique. School closures are becoming standard operating procedure for our country's educational leaders, many of whom are not educators themselves. PS 241's story has introduced many interesting questions for further exploration. Here are a few of mine:

Is giving up on a community of children ever wise?

Does (prematurely) closing a school deny a community of the opportunity to persevere and grow?

Is struggle an inherent part of the learning process for students, teachers and for schools?

Do schools require the same nurturing guidance that works so effectively with students?

Conversely, is the punitive approach that is so ineffective with struggling students just as ineffective when applied to schools?

Does closing schools improve our public system of education or make it worse?

Should public elementary schools be permitted to exclude anyone from their local community?

Should an education be won in a lottery?


To learn more about what is happening in our public schools, please visit these informative web sites:

Grassrootseducationmovement.com,
ednotesonline.com,
gothamschools.org,
nycparentschoolblog.com,
Coalitionforpubliceducation

DC Teachers Union Criticized by Laid-off Teachers

Laid Off DC Teachers Criticize Union's Efforts to Help Them Keep Their Jobs

Are you surprised? Randi Weingarten has been advising them.

Follow the DC story at The Washington Teacher blog.

New Action Supported UFT Charter Schools

This comment

Thank God for New Action. The UFT needs change. The UFT needs to start to fight for its members who are fighting with all their might, all on their own against charter schools. It is terrible the UFT, the teachers unions, is sitting back and doing NOTHING! That is what teachers pay for and the UFT does absolutely NOTHING!

at the Gotham Schools posting that made it seem New Action was an opposition caucus led to my response below:

New Action at one time used to be for change, but as partners with the UFT leadership for the past 7 years that is all over. They used to actually have a decent platform calling the UFT leadership undemocratic and calling for democratization of the union. Now that they got theirs, all that has disappeared.

How can the UFT fight charter schools when they have two of their own? And occupying space in public schools. And New Action supported them all the way, with some New Action members volunteering in the charters. ICE and TJC were opposed to the establishment of the charters because it was clear what was coming down the line and having their own charters would make a fight impossible. The UFT strategy was to "show them we can do it with a union contract," which New Action has supported. Then they sign a contract with Green Dot charter, also not opposed by New Action. Now their strategy is not to oppose charters but to try to organize them. Sort of like going back to the 1950's. The charters will remove public schools and the UFT will try to sell charter school teachers on the concept of "look how incompetent we have been in defending NYC teachers, now give us a chance to screw you too."

I know. Some say better any union contract than nothing. But the idea is so ass backwards as to make your hair hurt. The tidal wave is coming and the UFT is using a thimble to bail. And New Action will be there with them all the way.

ICE, TJC, Ed Notes and GEM have been working on positions that place the charter attack on public education in context. We have also been on the front lines supporting public school parents and teachers in their struggles over shared space. It was no accident that ICE's Lisa North's picture was on the front page of the NY Times yesterday in the story on charters. Angel Gonzalez, other GEMers and I also were there to support them. New Action has had zero presence at any of these charter school battles, even less than the bare presence the UFT leadership itself has had.

Related:
The New Action blog doesn't allow comments.

Pallas Responds to Tisch on Teacher Quality Issues, Value-Added ---and more

When data rating teachers based on student outcomes comes up in conversation and on blogs, the first thing I hear teachers say is, "How can I be compared to teachers who teach at schools like Stuyvesant?" When I raise the value-added concept, most pretty much have no idea what I am talking about and I blame the UFT which does not do education, but propaganda.

Value-added attempts to remove the difference between kids' poverty levels and other issues by trying to compare performances by similar students - apples to apples. At some point teachers can even be compared to each other based on how the same kids performed in their particular classes. Supposedly. But all issues point to flawed models.

An excellent essay by Aaron Pallas at Gotham addresses many of these issues. (For those not aware, Pallas was a Jennifer Jennings (Eduwonkette) mentor at Columbia and blogged under the Skoolboy mantle.) There's so much meat here, that I pretty much took a few excerpts at random. Read it all.

"I trust that Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner Steiner are not seduced by claims that the single most important determinant of a child’s achievement is the quality of his or her teachers, because that’s simply not true. Family background continues to be the dominant factor. But the quality of teachers is, at least in theory, something that is manipulable via education policy initiatives, and it’s a lot more tractable than addressing the fact that one in five children under the age of 18 in New York State live below the poverty line.
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it’s striking that the recommendations single out value-added student assessment data as components of both the portfolios of candidates for professional certification and of the profiles of certifying institutions. Simply put, the technology for using value-added student assessment data for these purposes is not ready for prime time, and likely will not be for many years to come. One major obstacle is the lack of reliable and valid measures of student performance that can serve as the basis for value-added assessments of teacher effectiveness.
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I’m saying to Commissioner Steiner and Chancellor Tisch, “Clean up the state assessment system — and take the time to do it right. Then we can talk about value-added assessment.”

But beyond the many questions about value-added effects on students’ test scores, we should be asking, how do we assess a teacher’s contributions to other learning outcomes? Surely we care about more than test scores. What are good measures of a teacher’s contributions to preparing students to be competent citizens in our democracy? How much are the Board of Regents and the State Education Department willing to invest in creating measures that will capture how well teachers teach students to think, question and act?

A brief vignette may reveal the challenge. It’s January, and Ms. Bilsky, a fourth-grade teacher in the Bronx, is teaching a math lesson. The subject is geometry, and the lesson is about how to classify angles as either acute or obtuse. The topic is a standard from the state’s math core curriculum. In the middle of the lesson, Rashid, a boy in the class, audibly aims a racial slur at his classmate Javier. Ms. Bilsky hears it, but she chooses to ignore it, instead plowing ahead with the lesson. At the end of the year, the students in Ms. Bilsky’s class did a bit better on the state math assessment than the students in other fourth-grade classrooms in the Bronx.

Now, is that good teaching?

The value-added assessment will tell us that it is good teaching.

Now this essay is what I call good teaching by Professor Pallas. I hope Regent leader Meryl Tisch and new State Ed commish Steiner learned something, but somehow I doubt it.

I might also add this question: How come college professors like Pallas and parent activists like Leonie Haimson can do so much effective defenses of teachers than the UFT and AFT?

Gotham Schools seems to think New Action is an internal opposition group

Have I got a bridge to sell them.

I left a comment at Gotham after they posted a link to the New Action positioning statement. Yes, NA is all about political positioning for the upcoming UFT elections so they can hold onto the 8 exec bd seats handed to them by Unity Caucus. The "house" opposition.

Calling New Action an internal opposition group is like saying Christine Quinn stood up to Bloomberg. New Action has been the UFT's house opposition for over 5 years. Weingarten ran at the top of their ticket in the 2007 election and all 8 of their exec board members were endorsed by the UFT leadership Unity Caucus. In the 2007 election they got the lowest vote total of all groups running but only won their seats due to Unity Caucus votes.

So how are they an internal opposition when the party in power controls their fate?

Their original sellout in 2003 was based on the same premise they are advocating in this post: it is time to fight Bloomberg. That was their excuse for not running a candidate against Weingarten in the last 2 UFT elections and they will not run a candidate against Mulgrew in the upcoming elections. Since they owe their continued existence to the beneficence of the UFT leadership, they cannot be critical or they will lose their support. Thus they have to come up with the "mistakes were made by the leadership but let's not dwell on them" argument to justify their sellout.

New Action mentions charters but in fact backed the UFT all the way when it set up its own charter schools in public school buildings while ICE and TJC took positions opposed, knowing full well the charter dagger was squarely aimed at the heart of the union.

The New Action statement says:

Today we need a united stand. We will need to talk about the mistakes that we as a union have made: Mayoral endorsement, governance, term limits, but another day. This is not the time for recriminations. This is the time for a united fight against this corporate mayor.

When is the time to talk about the mistakes of a misguided UFT leadership that New Action has been uncritical of since the sellout? Note there is no mention of the other mistakes: the 2005 contract – which both members of New Action who served on the negotiating committee at the time voted for despite their attempts to rewrite history. Or the mistake of the end of seniority. Or the ATR problem that was created by the UFT and BloomKlein. New Action supported the leadership throughout these "mistakes."

New Action has supported the UFT leadership without dwelling on the mistakes for all these years. They act like there will be a change despite the fact that New Action has been around for decades and seen little change in the way Unity Caucus operates.

There was a time when New Action put up a fight to create a more democratic union. Now they are part of the problem. Progressive teachers looking to reform the UFT in no way consider them an internal opposition, but a former opposition that has sold out to the leadership for a few Executive Board seats and some minor positions on the payroll of the UFT.

NY Times article on charter school shared space

I'm looking forward to reactions to today's Jennifer Medina's piece in the NY Times on charters sharing space with public schools as she has been working on this story for quite a while and was having problems getting teachers to talk because of the assumption the NY Times would not do a fair and balanced piece and also because of fear of retaliation from the DOE.

My immediate reaction is that this should be a series with this piece an intro. It could even be a book.

Some first impressions:

Medina touched on all the hot spots: Dist. 1, Red Hook, Harlem, the MS 126 library story. I bet if we delve into PS 16K (I spent my first 3 years as a teacher there) as being so cooperative between charter and an elem school - they made no fuss when the charter expanded to 9th grade and took 4 more rooms - could use some elaboration. Of course the charter will have to go to 12 grade - 4 rooms more a year plus admin space. My guess is PS 16 is doomed as a public school. There is a lot of history of contentious shared space there. The story decades ago about the attempt of Dist 14 to build a wall to separate the Hassidic kids from the public school kids and the community protests is legendary.

The heads of 2 charters are quoted but the Principal of PS 20 James Lee who made an excellent presentation at the meeting as to how his school is affected is not. Other principals spoke too about the impact of Girls Prep on their schools. Some talked about the bait and switch Girls Prep has been pulling. Medina was present for the entire CEC1 meeting a few weeks ago.

I posted an excellent video of a PS 15 teacher in Red Hook who presented the case for her school. It is worth checking out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlJNjRMFLls. If you haven't seen it take a look. The Jan. 26 PEP will address the PS 15/PAVE issue.

The stuff about Spencer Robertson's building falling through is priceless. When he announced at the CEC15 meeting that he had space and refused to divulge any info the PS 15 crowd hooted that this was just a lie and a smokescreen. And so it was.

Yes charter schools do lie.

Check ICE/GEM Lisa North in the pic on front page of Times - she is on the lower right hand corner.

I'll get back with more reactions later.

The article is also posted at the GEM blog.

Two Thousand Posts: Taking Stock

This turned out to be a busy weekend. I realized this is the 2000th post on the Ed Notes blog which began in August 2006, about 40 months ago. That averages to about 50 posts a month. Over twelve a week. I was going to do a "taking stock" piece for this special occasion, but I just had so much to say that I ended up saying nothing. Basically, I stayed away from the ed/pol stuff for the entire long weekend.

Maybe it was the aftermath of the 23 people we had for Thanksgiving, the group ranging in age from age 1 to 91 with just about every decade represented: teens, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty and sixty somethings. My dad, who will be 92 in January, held the upper limit. He had the company of my wife's aunt who is also 91. Our niece's 2 year old and our cousin's 3 year old were chasing each other around the house, with the 1 year old crawling along trying to keep up. The two 18 year old cats were OK with it for a while before deciding to take a powder – just a bit of hissing and hiding under the bed. (Some pics of the gang in action.)

Friday was cleanup and going to the gym day.

Saturday was an early morning Bikram yoga class. There's nothing like spending an hour and a half in a hundred and five degrees to get your brain to turn to mush. But I had wake up as I had a noon meeting at my house with a playwright (who is in my acting class) and his director friend to discuss making a film of one of his plays, with my video pal Mark and I doing the cinematography. We watched a tape of the play which was performed in Manhattan and it looks like an exciting project.

Saturday night Mark and I taped a performance of "The Odd Couple" at the Bayswater Jewish Center in Rockaway, with Mark's business partner Stuie playing Felix. I had been offered the opportunity to play one of the card players a few months ago but time constraints made it impossible to consider. Before the play we went to eat at "Lucky Boy" on Rockaway Turnpike. The place looks like a shabby diner from the outside, but what great food.

Sunday morning was my acting class and I spent some serious time trying to memorize my monologue from "Talk Radio" but my brain is not well equipped to hold onto so much information. This is one big rant and I really get worked up. So be careful if you run into me, as I may start practicing. Or I could just attend a charter school hearing and let it all fly.

After class, it was over to a friend's house for the weekly NY Jets game self-flagellation (soothed by piles of chips and dips). But lo and behold, the JETS WON! Then there were two more football games to watch, with the Baltimore/Pittsburgh game going to overtime, followed by Mike Francese's "Miked Up" which didn't end until past midnight.

Then I woke up to see the front page of the NY Times and Jenifer Median's story on charter schools sharing space with public schools and it was back to reality. Or maybe the weekend was reality. She has been working on the story for weeks and contacted me about getting people to talk to her. I know there was some reluctance. I already wrote up some comments for my 2001st post, which I will put up next.

Postscript:
I really do want to do a taking stock article, since the Ed Notes blog is an extension of the Ed Notes newsletter, which has been around since 1996. I believe that this body of work constitutes some kind of history of the UFT and education in NYC, plus the national trends over that time. It could be a book, but then one must pretty much drop everything to get such a project done and I have too much schpilkus, the original Jewish version of Attention Deficit Disorder, to sit down long enough to do it.