Poor misunderstood Joel Klein

In Joel Klein's exit interview in the NY Times he portrays himself as misunderstood. Or is it he himself who continually misses the point?

In response to a question about whether he regrets not paying attention to public school parents and teachers who grew angry at him for his neglect, Klein pulls out a card from a third grader at a Harlem charter school, thanking the Chancellor for being his "advocate." Not only was this clearly orchestrated by a charter school operator, but unmentioned is the apparent lack of appreciation from any of the one million plus parents or students at public schools in the system that he was responsible for running for the last eight years.

In response to a question as to whether he regrets the fact that there are still many schools with large numbers of failing students, Klein brags that he closed nearly a hundred schools.

When asked about whether he regrets that he didn't adequately listen to "outside voices"
he responds that he should "have spent more time really engaging people so they really understand the things that drive me."

Me, me, me. Again, others should have listened to him more; not that he could have listened to others.

He says "I think teachers would feel really respected if we created the kind of profession where teachers were the American heroes, where excellence was truly rewarded. "

Instead, he has scapegoated teachers at every turn, and "rewarded" them with larger classes, closing their schools, putting more pressure to increase test scores at any cost, and advocating for the elimination of their job security and seniority.

There is one honest nugget in the self-congratulatory, self-pitying piece. After a question about whether he would send his own daughter to a NYC public school, he states one of the central tenets of his administration:

"Schools have to turn around from within. There’s not somebody at a central office who waves a wand on this stuff."

In other words, don't blame him if schools didn't improve enough under his watch.

Too little and years late for the UFT on Testing

Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2010,

I commented earlier this morning - or late last night post Jets win - J-E-T-S, JETS, JETS, JETS -  on Monday's NY Times "too little, too late article" on the testing crisis in NY, reposting Leonie Haimson's marvelous take down - with samples of interchanges with the Times and examples of how other newspapers did more to expose the issue over the last 3 years, with a little clip from Casablanca on the Louis Renault Award. See

NY Times Shocked, Shocked Over BloomKlein Claims on Reading Scores

One issue I didn't deal with was the role of the UFT on testing.

If I had time I would go back into the Ed Notes archives and show you how from the very beginning of Ed Notes in 1996 I was putting the high stakes testing issue on the table at Delegate Assemblies. I had a high stakes testing principal from 1978 and saw all the evils - in fact, though I loved teaching elementary self-contained classes, her policies ultimately led me to leave the infantry of teaching and become a computer cluster after 18 years. She as happy to get me out because I wasn't doing enough test prep to her satisfaction. But the more TP I had to do the less satisfied as a teacher I was. So I was bringing my experience to the DA. At one point I made a reso and in my speech talked about how high stakes testing had wiped out social studies and science in the elementary schools - and I was surprised to see the place erupt in applause. This must have been around 1999.

The Times piece only had these comments about the role of the UFT:

Teachers pushed back, saying they could gauge their students’ performance better than any mass-produced tests could......Each new policy was met with denunciations from the teachers’ union or from education experts like Diane Ravitch. Ms. Ravitch, a supporter of standardized testing when she was an adviser to the Clinton and Bush administrations, became one of the biggest critics, arguing that schools were devoting too much time to the pursuit of high scores. “If they are not learning social studies but their reading scores are going up, they are not getting an education,” Ms. Ravitch said in 2005, as the mayor coasted to re-election.

 The union only pushed back for internal political reasons - to make the teachers - and the naive NY Times - think they were pushing back. Yes, classroom teachers and Diane pushed back. But the union only did so rhetorically. They supported mayoral control, refused to push back on the social promotion issue when it was clearly done for political reasons, did very little about the onslaught of micro management and the increasing focus on testing and test prep.

Randi took a full page ad in the NY Times to celebrate the great increases – that everyone knew were due to test score inflation – when they were released. Trying to eat from the gravy boat while trying to claim she hates the taste - even though it's dripping down her face.

I put this up on the nyceducation news listserve yesterday:

Also left out of the story is how Randi and the UFT jumped in to grab a share of the credit for the high scores, joining BloomKlein in front of the cameras here and in Washington when they won the Broad prize, grabbing bonus money for the scores and agreeing to have teachers rated on the basis of the tests scores.

The UFT tried to claim teachers deserved a raise due to the results.

I wrote at the time "Does that mean a pay cut if scores go down?" What a slippery slope.

Now some people think with MulGarten in charge there is a new deal at the UFT because he has made noises about the tests. Randi did too. So did Obama. Watch what they do not what they say.

The UFT/AFT was the only truly organized force that could have blown this scam out of the water from Day 1 but instead has chosen to play footsie with the ed deformers. It is now too little too late. History has passed them by.

But history has not passed Real Reformers by - though MulGarten is trying to steal this idea to claim the union are RR's when in fact they are closer to ed deformers in terms of their support for so much of ed deform.

NY Times Shocked, Shocked Over BloomKlein Claims on Reading Scores

Yes, let's give the NY Times the Captain Louis Award. You just had to hold your sides laughing at the front page story NY Times article on testing (Oct. 11). "Warning Signs Ignored" is the title and the NY Times was the leading ignorer. No one is really responsible you know. It sort of just happened. All on its own. Regent head Meryl Tisch? Former State Ed Comm Dickie Boy Allen? All innocent bystanders. The best quote: From Test Prep Queen Kathy (Who Me?) Cashin.

As a superintendent in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Kathleen Cashin had seen several schools improve throughout the early part of the decade. But when she saw the sudden jump, she said, she was shocked.
“I said to my intimate circle of staff, this cannot be possible,” Ms. Cashin recalled. “I knew how much effort and how much planning any little improvement would take, and not all of these schools had done any of it.”
But Ms. Cashin, who retired in February, held her tongue at the time. Asked why she did not take up her concerns with Mr. Klein or his deputies, she said, “I didn’t have their ear.” 

Excuse me while I take a minute............$##&*())()*))___
That felt better. I actually knew teachers at PS 193k when Cashin was principal (oh, boy) before heading Dist. 23 (in the status quo days), then Region 5, before Klein chose her as one of the 4 super superintendents, using her rising test scores at each post to rise further herself (there were even rumors she would replace Klein). And she didn't have anyone's ear. How sad. Actually, she is sort of a real educator (that's another story) who was shunted aside for the business model (Laura Rodriguez, one of  the other 4 Super Supes, won the brass ring and is now the DOE token educator in charge of something or other.)

Well, I'll go no further because Leonie Haimson savages the Times for years of non reporting on the testing fiasco. You can read it over at the NYC Parent blog too but I am printing it here too. I sent over a comment to the listserve that is was too little and much too late for the UFT, but I'll leave that for the next posting.

Too little and much too late, the Times finally reports on the state test score scandal

In yesterday’s front page story, entitled "On NY School Tests, Warning Signs Ignored," the NY Times recounted the history of the state test score inflation that left its own deficient reporting conveniently off the hook.

Anyone who was paying attention knew at least as far back as 2007 that there was rampant test score inflation, primarily through articles by Erin Einhorn and other reporters at the Daily News. These articles, which themselves relied on analysis from testing experts like Fred Smith, revealed that the test score inflation started as early as 2002, with questions and scoring becoming easier over time.

See this 2007 article on our blog by Steve Koss, relating the ingenious experiment done by Einhorn in which she gave the 2002 and 2005 math tests to the same bunch of children, with the results showing that the 2005 exam was much easier, a fact also reflected in the changing "P" values of the questions over time. Or this follow-up Einhorn article, where leading testing experts called for an independent audit, which of course did not occur until three years later.

Today’s NY Times article omits any mention of the Daily News’ earlier exposes – which brought attention to this issue to the wider public – and instead recounts as meaningful that a few individuals who supposedly had doubts about the apparent rise in test scores, like Pedro Noguera and Kathleen Cashin, didn’t directly mention them to Klein– as though he might otherwise not have noticed the evidence that was splashed all over the Daily News!

The article also lets Regent Merryl Tisch off the hook, claiming that “We came in here saying we have to stop lying to our kids,” without mentioning that throughout this period, she was Deputy Chancellor of the Regents, and yet did and said nothing.

(See my critique at the time of their August 2009 article, NY Times falls in line with the Bloomberg PR spin control; and the response from Times editor, Ian Trontz: The NY Times response, and my reply.)

Read Leonie's entire piece by clickingon this link (she has updated it.)

Too little and much too late, the Times finally reports on the state test score scandal

Too little and much too late, the Times finally reports on the state test score scandal

In yesterday’s front page story, entitled "On NY School Tests, Warning Signs Ignored," the NY Times' account of the state test score scandal left its own deficient reporting conveniently off the hook.

Anyone who was paying attention knew at least as far back as 2007 that there was rampant test score inflation, primarily through articles by Erin Einhorn and other reporters at the Daily News. These articles, which themselves relied on analyses from testing experts like Fred Smith, revealed that the test score inflation started as early as 2002, with questions and scoring on the state exams becoming easier over time.

See this 2007 article on our blog by Steve Koss, relating the ingenious experiment done by Einhorn in which she gave the 2002 and 2005 math tests to the same bunch of children, with the results showing that the 2005 exam was much simpler, a fact also reflected in the changing "P" values of the questions. Or this follow-up Einhorn article, where leading testing experts called for an independent audit, which of course did not occur until three years later.

Where was the NY Times amidst all these revelations? Absolutely nowhere. Even now, the Times article omits any mention of the Daily News’ earlier exposes – which brought attention to this issue to the wider public – and instead recounts as somehow meaningful that a few individuals who supposedly had doubts about the apparent rise in test scores, like Pedro Noguera and Kathleen Cashin, didn’t directly mention them to Klein– as though he might otherwise not have noticed the evidence that was splashed all over the Daily News!

The article also offers a rather irrelevant story, relating how Joel Klein earnestly tried to convince the state to change its scoring system to use a value-added method instead, as though that would have addressed any of the problems regarding the score inflation. In fact, that might have made things worse, as indicated by the way in which the inflation led to 84% of all NYC elementary and middle schools receiving "A" last year, based primarily on the value-added method, falling precipitously to only 25% this year, when the state decided to reset the cut scores.

The article also gives Regent Merryl Tisch a pass, letting her have the last word, saying “We came in here saying we have to stop lying to our kids,” without mentioning that throughout the test score inflation period, she was Deputy Chancellor of the Regents, and yet reliably supported Bloomberg and Klein's claims of great improvement.

The Times itself had plenty of reason to know about concerns about the state test score inflation throughout this period but not only failed to report on it, but generally toed the company line.

On August 4, 2009, at the very moment when Bloomberg was pressing for the extension of mayoral control of the schools, and two years following the Daily news exposes, the Times published a credulous story that recounted the steep increase in state test scores and the apparent narrowing of the achievement gap, including this quote from Joel Klein:

“Mr. Klein, for his part, said he was confident that rising scores reflected real improvements. “No matter how you look at them,” he said, “the picture is one that shows that the city is making dramatic progress.”

In the article , Klein put more emphasis on the apparent rise in proficiency levels rather than scores, “saying that the pass-rate was the more critical measure because it indicated proficiency, an important gateway to success…Our job is to get all kids to basic proficiency and then continue to move them forward, and I think we can do that.”

Now, of course, Klein emphasizes the higher scale scores on the state tests, since the reported proficiency levels have dropped so dramatically.

To the degree that the Aug. 2009 Times article expressed any doubts about NYC's dramatic rise in test scores, it was only the possibility that the drive towards high-stakes accountability had led to excessive test prep-- not any of the overwhelming evidence that the tests were simply and the scoring more lenient.

Indeed, yesterday's article focused on the same set of concerns -- excessive test prep, the public release of prior exams, and the limited number of questions on the exams -- rather than any of the more damning findings, showing how the state had rigged the results with easier questions as well as lower cut scores, both of which would directly implicate the state in the fraudulent outcome.

As I wrote in August 2009 to the Times editor, Ian Trontz:

“… there are many prominent administrators, researchers, teachers and principals who believe strongly that there has been rampant state test score inflation in recent years. Not only are huge jumps in the scores occurring in nearly all districts and in all grades– the middle grade increases last year were especially unprecedented -- but as has been widely reported in the Daily News and elsewhere, the cut scores have been lowered each year. To leave this out of your story seems negligent at best, especially given the room and the time your reporter had to expound on this issue.”

I also pointed out that the article had wrongly attributed gains to Bloomberg/Klein on the NAEPs by giving them credit for the increase in test scores since 2002, even though their reforms had not begun until 2003. Here is how Trontz responded to this point:

"We do not, however, think that your email points out any inaccuracies. It is not incorrect to say that fourth grade reading scores rose after the mayor took over. You are correct that some of the biggest gains occurred before his major reforms took effect, but we are not incorrect."

I concluded at the time:

“Given the evident bias of this article, it appears clear that the Times has been captured by the Bloomberg/Klein PR machine, and can no longer be trusted to provide objective analysis of their education record."

Shortly afterward, Wayne Barrett wrote about the controversy in the Village Voice,

"The Times front page piece last week -- headlined "Gains on Tests in New York Schools Don't Silence Critics" -- failed to quote any real critics, but gave Klein six self-promoting paragraphs. It did bury a single questioning quote from two academics not known as critics of the test scores in the thirty-fourth paragraph, but the top of the story trumpeted success scores that would have silenced any critic. If, that is, they were true."

Two days after the NY Times article ran, on August 6, the NY State Senate voted to renew mayoral control without any checks and balances, essentially allowing Bloomberg to retain his stranglehold over our schools. One of the few Senators who voted against the renewal, Sen. Carl Kruger, argued that the achievement gains claimed by Bloomberg and Klein would soon be found to be fraudulent.

In response, the Daily News editorial page, as Bloomberg-sycophantic as all the other NYC major dailies, argued vociferously against Kruger's claims. In the piece, the News editors referenced the recent NY Times article (since they could not cite the far more explosive reporting of its own staff ):

“Good luck with that. He'll sooner find Sasquatch under Chancellor Joel Klein's desk. The New York Times double-checked test results and concluded this week that they showed "a steady march upward."

Indeed, Sasquatch was hiding in plain sight under Klein’s desk all along.

Just a few days after the Senate vote, on August 11, 2009, Meredith Kolodner of the Daily News pointed out that the cut scores had been set so low on the 2009 exams that a sixth grade student could pass the ELA just by randomly guessing, while 7^th graders had to get just one extra question right to pass. At Gotham Schools, Diana Senechal tried taking the exams herself and confirmed that in the 5^th grade ELA, 6^th grade math, and 7^th grade ELA exams, a student could indeed achieve a level 2 through random guessing .

What’s most scary is that according to the latest Times article, the state is now apparently going to keep the questions on the exams secret forever, supposedly to ensure that they can keep their difficulty level stable -- to guard against excessive test prep using old tests.

So in future, it will be impossible for another reporter like the intrepid Einhorn to test the same bunch of kids with exams from two separate years, to prove how much easier they have become. Or for any parent to examine how flawed the questions may be. (Remember Brownie the Cow, the absurd questions on the 2006 4^th grade ELA exam?) As though keeping the questions secret is the only method that can be used to keep standardized exams stable over time!

Meanwhile, companies like the College Board manage to release the SATs each year, and still are able to equate them, by holding back the ungraded questions (what the Times article calls “field test questions”). Why that could not occur in the case of the NY State exams is never explained by the article.

Sorry, NY Times, this article is too little and too late. Years before, when Bloomberg was pushing to retain unilateral control over our schools based upon these inflated test scores, the paper of record owed it to its readers to inform them of these issues, and yet utterly failed.

(See my critique at the time of their August 2009 article, NY Times falls in line with the Bloomberg PR spin control; and the response from Times editor, Ian Trontz: The NY Times response, and my reply.)

Listen up, mayor and the NY Times

The Times ran an editorial last week, "Parents need to know", which claimed that NYC parents didn't understand how the weak state exams had been "shortchanging students" and that they did their "children no favor" when they disrupted a Panel for Education Policy meeting on Monday. This was after the PEP chair, David Chang, refused to let them speak in response to a long, deceptive power point that claimed, despite the collapse of the state test score bubble collapse, that the schools had made great progress.

The editorial also excused the state test score inflation by stating, "Weak state tests are a chronic problem throughout the country — one that education departments are only beginning to come to grips with." Oh please. The NY test score inflation has been obvious to nearly all objective observers since at least 2007, despite the fact that it conveniently allowed the mayor to claim great improvements during his campaigns for the renewal of mayoral control and re-election, illusions that were bought hook line and sinker by the mayor's allies on the Times and the other editorial boards.

The editorial ended by claiming that the schools have nevertheless been "narrowing the performance gap between white and minority students." Yet the gold standard, the national exams called the NAEPs, show no narrowing of the achievement gap in any grade or subject since the Klein regime began. Truly, the Times editors "need to know" and start living in the real world, for they, along with the chancellor and mayor, have lost all credibility, and should stop criticizing parents while displaying their ignorance of what's really going on in our schools.Our mayor, who famously said people could "boo him at parades" if people didn't like his educational policies, will likely see more booing of his Panel of Eight Puppets in the months to come, unless he wakes up and starts to listen.

Harsh lessons for the editors of the Daily News and NY Times

The Daily News editorial board finally gave up today, and admitted that the city’s big gains in state test scores over the Bloomberg era have been a vast mirage, in an editorial called Harsh lesson for N.Y.

They were apparently briefed by NY Commissioner Steiner on the findings of Harvard's Daniel Koretz, which, according to this editorial and numerous news reports, has found that almost half of NYC 8^th graders who score as proficient on the state exams will never graduate from high school; and three-quarters of those who do graduate need remedial courses before entering CUNY community colleges.

Yet the editors of the News have up to now been very willing victims of this deception – and a lapdog of every single false or exaggerated claim from the Bloomberg/Klein administration.

This, despite the warnings of many testing experts like Bob Tobias, Diane Ravitch, Jennifer Jennings, and Fred Smith that the standards had been lowered, and their own terrific reporting staff of Erin Einhorn, Meredith Kolodner, Rachel Monahan, and Juan Gonzalez, who, for at least three years, have revealed the numerous ways in which the state test scores have been systematically inflated over time.

Those of us at the NYC parent blog have also written about this extensively; see this entry from Steve Koss, analyzing an Erin Einhorn story from Sept. 4, 2007. Einhorn did an ingenious experiment with middle school students, showing how the math exams had gotten easier, and how SED and the DOE should have and probably were aware of this fact (I can’t find the original article online anymore.)

Let’s hope that the News editors will finally learn something from this “harsh lesson” and start showing some independence.

The NY Times also bears some of the blame. I have never seen an editorial in the Times that even mentioned the possibility of state test score inflation; and the paper hasn't yet reported on the Koretz' findings.

In August 2009, when Bloomberg was pressing for extension of mayoral control of the schools and his own re-election, the Times published a credulous story that recounted the steep increase in state test scores without directly quoting any of the skeptics; and also incorrectly used the DOE’s preferred date of 2002 instead of 2003 to claim improvements on the national exams called the NAEPs.

The article omitted any of the abundant evidence that the state exams and their scoring had become easier over time. (See my critique of their August 2009 article, NY Times falls in line with the Bloomberg PR spin control; and the response from Times editor, Ian Trontz: The NY Times response, and my reply. See also Wayne Barrett's take on our critique of the Times.)

What are the chances that now that Bloomberg has successfully won his battle to retain nearly unlimited control over our schools, and is in the midst of his third term, the editors of the News and the Times will apologize to their readers, and admit that the smell they’ve told us was roses was really an artificial chemical, successfully concocted to fool them? Don't hold your breath.

Did Alex Russo really say this?

In his discussion of the recent article in the NY Times about the reported increase in cheating in tests, the likely result of the intense pressure placed on teachers to improve scores, he wrote:

So: more coverage, but not necessarily more actual cheating. And no real case for causality, either, since so many of the tests kids take have little or no effect on their lives (or, I would argue, the lives and careers of most teachers and educators).

One really has to wonder what universe he's living in...

Tsunami of pro-charter opinion in the dailies

Before the state raised its cap on charter schools last month, New Yorkers were inundated with a flood of TV, radio and internet ads from the hedge-fund privateers: Democrats for Education Reform and Education Reform Now, both groups trying to disguise themselves as parents, educators and community members.

We were also overwhelmed by a tsunami of editorials and opeds from the newspapers, all in unison purveying the same flawed statistics and arguments, trying to bully the Legislature into submission.

I had my intern, Ann Fudjinski, count all the editorials and opeds in the NY Post, the Daily News, the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal between March 1 and May 29, when the final vote on the cap occurred.

The resulting tally (in excel) is quite astonishing.

In the NY Post, there were 21 separate editorials and 21 opeds for raising the cap in less than three months; sometimes several on one day. Nine were written by charter school authorizers, operators or paid lobbyists. (And this doesn't count the obviously slanted coverage of some of the reporters.)

In the Daily News, there were 25 editorials and opeds, for raising the cap; with only one leaning against (by Andrew Wolf). Eleven were opeds; three by a regular columnist (Errol Louis) and five by charter authorizers, operators, or paid representatives of the charter industry.

The volume was decidedly smaller in the NY Times and Wall St. Journal, but similarly one-sided. One pro-charter editorial and one pro-charter oped appeared in the Times; and one pro-charter editorial and two pro-charter opeds in the WSJ. In all, 99 percent of the editorials, opinion columns and opeds were in favor of charter schools.

Traditionally, opeds are supposed to provide balance to offset the views expressed by the editors and/or the regular columnists.

I emailed the oped editor of the NY Post, Adam Brodsky, to ask him why their coverage was so overwhelmingly lop-sided, but got no reply.

I did get a response from Josh Greenman, the oped editor of the Daily News, who wrote me that balance was less important than the "strength of argument, timeliness, vibrancy, newsworthiness and value added to an important debate."

Which begs the question why the only pieces he thought were sufficiently vibrant, newsworthy and valuable to the debate were those that agreed with the frequently reiterated positions of the Daily News editors.

The NY Times Has Provided Us With A Widget

The CityRoom article begins in the familiar Times style and heralds the arrival of something very important:

"The New York Times has assembled an extensive database of New York education statistics that will help readers put the vast sea of information about schools into better context."

But did they? The paper of record would have us believe that an "extensive database of education statistics" has nothing more than test scores. How about the age of the facility? class size? number of science labs? hours of gym? is art offered? music? an orchestra? credentials of staff? number of sports teams? number of after school clubs? funding per student? special education services? grievances filed? criminal incidents? AP courses? placement record? ....

Sorry, a school's test scores don't constitute a "vast sea" of anything. I suspect the publishers and editors of the Times would consider more than test scores before selecting a school for their children. But they have one idea of education for their children and an entirely different one for ours.

The Times' enduring obsession with Gifted and talented programs, and what is left out

This morning, the NY Times has yet another article about the city's Gifted and Talented programs, and the high-stakes exams that control admissions to these programs. See today's front page story, Tips for the Admissions Test ... to Kindergarten . It all seems so familiar....and indeed it is.

By my quick count, this is at least the ninth article about G and T that the Times has run in the last seven months.

To add insult to injury, this is the second Times article about the admissions process that omits any mention of its inherently discriminatory nature - which has significantly worsened under this administration. This is due to the Chancellor's insistence that all G and T admissions should be based solely on the results of high stakes exams, which Klein claims ato be more "equitable" but which are highly inequitable in terms of results.

His policies have also directly led to the proliferation of expensive prep programs that few typical NYC families can afford. If you are going to run articles about G and T admissions, failing to cite their contribution to worsening racial and economic segregation in our schools is regrettable. In fact, many people said that these policies would have a racially discriminatory impact, including Patrick Sullivan and Debbie Meier , who both predicted this on our blog when Klein first announced the new admissions policy in the fall of 2007.

For other recent Times articles about G and T, see this one, from October 19, about a new expensive private school in Manhattan: School for the Gifted, and Only the Gifted.

Here is another, a Susan Dominus column from August 17, Connecting Anxious Parents and Educators, at $450 an Hour , about a consultant who helps get kids into private schools: "It would be her mission to democratize information for New York’s most competitive elite."

"Democratize" at $450 an hour? This is like Michael Bloomberg claiming the recent election was fair, when he outspent his opponent sixteen to one.

This was followed by yet another Dominus column on August 25: Early Testing In City Schools Called Faulty. Although she discusses the unreliability of G and T exams, in that children tested at a young age often score quite differently in later years, she fails to mention how the results are also discriminatory, given the influence of socio-economic factors. And she uncritically repeats the administration's claims that their policies are somehow equitable:

" Chancellor Joel I. Klein has tried to rejigger the testing system to be more fair, with uniform cut-offs citywide and better outreach to less-advantaged areas. But what ''Nurture Shock'' suggests, and Ms. Commitante [head of DOE's gifted and talented progrm] somewhat acknowledges, is that just means the randomness of gifted and talented placement is now more equitable."

To the contrary, see this far more informative oped in the Daily News, by James Borland, a professor of education, who points out how inherently inequitable the admissions process has become:

A one-size-fits-all approach to identifying students for the city's gifted and talented programs - which is just what the Department of Education has implemented - is neither equitable nor educationally sound. In fact, testing very young children, before the educational system exerts its admittedly limited equalizing effect, only magnifies the effects of differences in socioeconomic status. It favors children who have had the advantages of expensive preschools; of parents with time, ability and inclination to read to them; and of exposure to cultural events.

On September 7, Dominus yet wrote yet another column, about a new G and T public school in Brooklyn, Going the Distance to Get a Child to a Magnet School , in which she omits any analysis of the economic or racial composition of the school, and instead, approvingly focuses on one "highly motivated" mom, who sends her son, Benjamin, to the school, although it is miles away:

...a bus hired by a dozen families, at about $400 a month each, will pick up Benjamin and another 5-year-old before stopping at homes in Crown Heights, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope and Prospect Heights. Finally, at least an hour and a half after Benjamin has left home, he and the others will arrive at Brooklyn School of Inquiry, a brand-new citywide school for gifted and talented children at the corner of Stillwell Avenue and Avenue P, in Gravesend. Such are the lengths to which some parents — highly motivated parents — will go to take advantage of the city’s coveted magnet programs for gifted children.

Is it really only a matter of motivation? Last spring, the Times ran numerous pieces dealing with G and T programs on the Upper West Side, the epicenter of the phenomenon, including this one on the City Room blog, Are Parents Thinking Differently About Education? (June 29):

The phone keeps ringing at the Upper West Side office of Robin Aronow, an educational consultant and schools guru: anxious families suddenly rethinking whether they can afford private school, distressed parents wondering what to do if their children don’t make it into vaunted gifted and talented programs.

See also these articles from the paper: Students Must Retake Lost Gifted Tests (May 15); Gifted Tests Missing on Upper West Side (May 13), and More Children Take the Tests for Gifted Programs, and More Qualify (May 5).

In this last article, the reporter discloses that the number of students who qualified for G and T seats rose by 45 percent over the year before, but not until the sixth paragraph does the reader discover that the racial disparity in admissions remained largely unchanged.

On the upper West side, the number of children taking the tests rose by 15 percent, while the number of students making the cut off score increased by 48 percent. Though the reporter does not speculate on the cause of this phenomenon, the DOE spokesperson attributed this increase to "families’ increasing familiarity with the new admissions process." Instead, these higher scores are most likely the results of the increased amount of test prep taking place.

By continually reporting on the expensive consultants that are profiting off parents' anxieties to get their children into G and T programs, the Times is encouraging their proliferation. Indeed, the paper deserves to get a cut from these consultants, by regurgitating these articles, over and over again.

If charter schools are the obsession of the editors of the NY Post, gifted and talented programs remain the singular obsession of the Times.

Both serve a tiny proportion of NYC public school students and are far less important than other issues that affect the huge majority of our kids: the systemic and worsening crisis in overcrowding and its impact on class sizes, the lack of transparency and flawed priorities of DOE spending, including the mushrooming school bonus program and the continued growth in Tweed's accountability office, the loss of arts and enrichment programs, the obsession with closing schools rather than improving them, the increased amount of test prep that dominates classroom time and the like -- all of which have contributed to the decline of educational quality in our schools, and all of which our paper of record fails to cover adequately, or not at all.

NY Times contradicts itself; but after all, why not when Bloomberg owns this town?

I hope everyone remembers that NY Times was a great cheerleader for continued mayoral control – including his authority to appoint a supermajority of members to the Board of Education (which Bloomberg likes to call the Panel for Educational Policy, to make clear it has no real power to overrule him.) The paper also supported his overturning of term limits, without a peep of dissent.

Well, yesterday the Times came out with an editorial lambasting Albany, with a bunch of proposals , including that no one man should decide over state pension investments, as the State Comptroller currently does. Along with the State Attorney General, the editors agreed that there should be a thirteen member oversight board, with appointments made by various different state leaders and state employees:

New York’s comptroller is the sole trustee watching over $116.5 billion in pension investments. This should not be happening anywhere, but especially not in Albany.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has proposed a 13-member commission to manage pensions. The idea is a good one, requiring appointments to the board by state leaders and employees with pensions. But this new board should not become another parking place for political hacks. While we need a better system than one person controlling so much money, it must be done right — with a board picked for its financial expertise with fiduciary duties to protect the pension.

What about accountability for the spending of billions of dollars in tax funds for our public schools, and the policies that will doom our children either to success or failure? Funny, instead in the mind of the NY Times, this meant that one man alone, namely Bloomberg, should have total control.

In their endorsement of the Silver bill that continued mayoral control, the editors wrote in praise: “It would preserve the mayor’s right to appoint a majority of the members of the board that advises him on school matters.”

In the editorial, they also implicitly supported the mayor’s right to fire any of his appointees at will, at any time, for any reason – which ensured that the board would continue to act as a rubberstamp , no matter how destructive and/or irrational the mayor's decisions might be.

Yet somehow, on something really important, like state pensions, the Times editors realize that for the sake of true accountability, we should have an independent oversight board with members appointed by a variety of different elected leaders and state employees.

Why the apparent contradiction? Could it have anything to do with the fact that, according to this week’s New York magazine, Bloomberg has used his political power and personal fortune to buy the support of opinionmakers, and effectively owns this town, lock, stock, and barrel, including the publishers of the three major dailies?

The article starts off with a description of a dinner party Bloomberg recently gave for the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson:

Johnson is in New York to promote U.K.-U.S. tourism. Bloomberg is a longtime Anglophile, and his company’s second-largest office is in London. The clearest sign that this Sunday evening holds special resonance for Bloomberg is the presence of Rupert Murdoch, Mort Zuckerman, and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publishers of New York’s three daily newspapers. They’re here because Bloomberg asked them to be. Those three are at anything that really matters to Mike, a dinner-party veteran says.

Indeed, in contrast with the past, when the business and media establishment were allowed to have different views from the mayor, this no longer occurs. Instead they all seem willing to serve as his lackeys.

The article describes how when Randi Weingarten tried to woo certain establishment figures to her side in her battle with Joel Klein, the mayor made it clear that “for business leaders, stepping forward and trying to become a civic leader would be at some risk to your relationship with the mayor, a corporate insider says. Only a crazy person would step out without Bloomberg’s say-so.”

So instead of a circle of wealthy and influential people who make policy in this town, there is one man alone, a billionaire who holds a monopoly on power. As the reporter writes:

…. there is a one-man Establishment: Michael Bloomberg. Certainly there are other figures with real power. But in a way that wasn’t true two decades ago, their influence is circumscribed, confined to their narrow categories: real estate, culture, health care, banking. And, in terms of civic life, little of their power exists independent of their relationships with Bloomberg. The mogul-class push for the mayor’s term-limits extension felt like the last gasp of what’s left of the city’s old-line ruling class….Bloomberg gets what he wants more than any mayor in modern memory. The foundation of Bloomberg’s imperial mayoralty is, obviously, money.

So much for checks and balances and the public having any say when it comes to our schools. Democracy in NYC: RIP.

The hiring crisis in our schools: what brought us to this point?

The Times performs a double whammy today by running an editorial in favor of the Race to the Top proposals; featuring a direct attack on the teachers unions for opposing tying the evaluation of teachers to standardized test scores: Editorial: Accountability in Public Schools.

The paper also features an article, Amid Hiring Freeze, Principals Leave Jobs Empty , about how principals are refusing to hire experienced teachers on ATR (absent teacher reserve) – of which there are nearly 2,000 -- despite 1800 teaching openings. Instead, principals are hiring new teachers as “permanent” substitutes, waiting out the hiring freeze that Klein announced a few months ago. What the article fails to discuss is how this is a crisis entirely of Joel Klein’s making, and represents one of the biggest management blunders of his career.

Klein has continued to pay for Teach for America and the Teaching Fellows program to recruit new candidates long after it was clear that a huge pool of experienced teachers was growing, who are being paid full salary and yet have no regular classroom assignments-- through no fault of their own. In the article, no mention is made of what led to this crisis: how Klein changed the school funding system, under the advice of Sir Michael Barber, a management consultant from McKinsey and Co., whose advice to the Blair administration to impose a similar scheme in the UK had earlier caused massive teacher layoffs and what was described as the most serious educational crisis in that nation’s post-war history.

NYC’s so-called “fair funding” system was specifically designed so that for the first time, principals would have to pay for their own staffing of teachers and for their full salaries, to give them an incentive to hire new, cheaper teachers rather than experienced ones. Many critics warned that given budget cuts to come, the refusal of DOE to fund teachers centrally -- as opposed to say, school achievement facilitators, data inquiry teams or parent coordinators, all of which is directly financed by the administration -- would lead to principals being forced to choose between larger classes and less experienced teachers, and this is exactly what has occurred.

See, for example, our exchange with Robert Gordon, who designed the funding system for Klein, in March 2007, and earlier comments from Noreen Connell and Gordon in a Times article from Jan. 27, 2007, Seeking Equity, School Chief Outlines a Financing Plan:

The expert, Noreen Connell, who leads the Educational Priorities Panel, a nonprofit group, said that the changes would initially make the budget system more complicated, and would be harmful long term by making it overly expensive for schools to retain veteran teachers.
While the new plan would provide money to schools and require principals to cover payroll and other expenses, Ms. Connell said in an interview that she preferred a system that seeks to calculate a school's staffing needs and then provides the dollars to meet them.

''The funding proposals,'' she wrote in commentary posted on the group's Web site, ''have the potential to do lasting damage for decades to come.'' In the interview, Ms. Connell also said the chancellor did not have time to carry out the plan before the end of Mr. Bloomberg's term in 2009. ''They won't be around to suffer the consequences,'' she said.

Robert Gordon, the Education Department's managing director for resource allocation, who is designing the new system, said it would maximize the amount of control that principals have over their budgets, allowing them ''to retain their most experienced teachers if that is what they want to do.''

Why should the school funding system be designed to force principals to choose between hiring or retaining experienced teachers and smaller classes – when these are among the few factors that have been proven to result in better schools ? Do public schools in the suburbs have to choose between these goals, or the private schools to which Klein and Bloomberg sent their kids?

The article also omits its own reporting of the fact that there has been a decrease of 1600 in the number of classroom teachers under this administration, with a concurrent rise in ten thousand out of classroom positions, including two thousand more school secretaries.

The only thing incorrect about Noreen Connell’s predictions in 2007 is that we may be saddled with Chancellor Klein for years to come, because of Bloomberg’s overturning of term limits. Robert Gordon has now moved onto the Obama administration, where he is probably designing similarly destructive funding schemes on a national scale. Sadly, the Educational Priorities Panel, one of the few objective monitors of DOE’s spending practices, is gone, apparently because the NYC foundation world didn’t see the point in supporting the sort of expert analysis that EPP was able to provide.

The NY Times response, and my reply

See the response from the NY Times editor below to my critique of their test score article yesterday – and my reply. Read from the bottom up. See also this front page story from the Times from November 16, 2007 – in which, in opposition to the paper’s current stance, it was clearly stated that there were no significant gains in any area but fourth grade math since the Bloomberg/Klein reforms took hold:

“The national scores also showed little narrowing of the achievement gap between white students and their black and Hispanic counterparts. The results for New York and 10 other large urban districts on the federal tests, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, paint a generally stagnant picture for the city, although there are gains in fourth-grade math.”

Why have they changed their story now? If you’d like to chime in, please do! You can ask for a correction at nytnews@nytimes.com; write a letter to the editor at letters@nytimes.com, or email the public editor at public@nytimes.com

Amazingly, the same testing consultant who was quoted in yesterday's NY Times as saying the state tests are “about as good as we can build them” is quoted in today's Gotham Schools that "“It’s hard to trust the data right now."

____ ____ _____ _____

Dear Ian:

Thanks for responding. The broad evidence that the state test scores are inflated is clearly relevant to the Times reporting here and was totally glossed over.

Not one independent expert was quoted as to this issue – only those who have a strong interest in claiming credit for improvements, including the head of SED’s test advisory committee, the head of the Regents and the Chancellor himself. This is not balanced reporting. In fact, the headline that refers to “critics” is rather strange, when not a single legitimate critic is cited.

As I’m sure Elissa is well aware, there are many prominent administrators, researchers, teachers and principals who believe strongly that there has been rampant state test score inflation in recent years. Not only are huge jumps in the scores occurring in nearly all districts and in all grades– the middle grade increases last year were especially unprecedented -- but as has been widely reported in the Daily News and elsewhere, the cut scores have been lowered each year. To leave this out of your story seems negligent at best, especially given the room and the time your reporter had to expound on this issue.

Moreover, the lack of progress on the NAEPs in NYC provides a natural audit of the reported rise in state test scores.

As to whether or not the 2003 increases could be attributed to the leadership of Bloomberg and/or Klein, you are surely right that “It is not incorrect to say that fourth grade reading scores rose after the mayor took over. You are correct that some of the biggest gains occurred before his major reforms took effect, but we are not incorrect.”

But perhaps you might have mentioned the latter statement in your story!

Or, if you are implying instead that the increases in 2003 could be legitimately due to the Bloomberg/Klein leadership, as the administration is desperate to claim, the NY Times seems to have flipped positions. As was widely recognized at the time, by your own reporting staff, the 2003 gains were quite uncomfortable for Klein et. al. when they first occurred.

Let’s take a little trip back in time.As Diane Ravitch has recounted:

“The Legislature approved mayoral control legislation in June 2002, and Chancellor Klein assumed office in August 2002. He spent the next six months conferring with consultants. He and the mayor announced their plans and their pedagogical choices in January 2003. At that very time, students in the city and state were taking the state tests. The chancellor had done nothing in the schools prior to January 2003 to raise student achievement. His reforms were introduced into the schools in September 2003. Thus, it is inappropriate for Dr. Bell-Ellwanger [or any DOE official, as they have recently claimed] to take credit for any gains registered on the state tests that were administered in January 2003.”

This reality was well recognized at the time, by both the Klein administration and the NY Times reporting staff.

As David Herszenhorn wrote in the Times when the state ELA scores were first reported on May 21, 2003:

“The city's positive results come at a time when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, are trying to overhaul the public school system and impose a uniform reading and math curriculum at all but the highest performing schools.

City officials, who might otherwise have been jubilant about yesterday's results, offered a muted reaction, saying that the gains were not broad enough and that the school system as a whole was still failing at least half the city's children.;;

''Although we are pointed in the right direction, there is still a lot of work that needs to get done,'' said a deputy schools chancellor, Diana Lam. ''Even with these gains, we have one out of two students that are not fluent readers at the fourth-grade level.''

Experts said the sharp increase in test scores could prove problematic for Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein, since it is too early for them to take credit and sets a benchmark for next year that may be hard to match….

The higher scores, particularly at schools that have showed sustained increases since 1999, also gave new ammunition to critics of Mr. Bloomberg's changes, who said that they might do more harm than good by disrupting existing programs….

And he quoted some of these dissenters, which at the time included Norm Fruchter and Randi Weingarten, as saying that the scores instead resulted from the reforms introduced by the previous Chancellor, Rudy Crew.

Of course, Klein and company are now quite eager to take credit for these 2003 gains – which as regards the 4^th grade ELA NAEPs, show the only significant improvements since Bloomberg took office. But this revisionist history is hard to square with your paper’s own past reporting.

Let's see how Elissa Gootman herself reported the state math gains when they were released on October 22, 2003:

“Fourth graders across the state made stunning gains in their math scores last spring, with even sharper increases in New York City…In the city, news of the gains, which were particularly pronounced in the Bronx and in some of the poorest-performing districts, elicited cheers among teachers and principals. But not everyone greeted the news so enthusiastically:

The suggestion that city schools were on the upswing put Chancellor Joel I. Klein, who is overhauling them, in a tricky position. While the chancellor’s critics pounced upon the higher scores as evidence that the school system did not need such an overhaul, some of his allies acknowledged that he would now be under even more pressure to show gains next spring.

''While I am gratified by the test results released today for fourth and eighth graders in New York City, I must emphasize that it is hard to tell the true significance of any one set of results in isolation,'' the chancellor said in a statement. ''We must always look at results in comparison over a number of years. Only through comparison can we truly measure the progress we're making.''

That’s true of course. And there has been no significant improvement in the NAEPs in the years since – except in 4^th grade math [in which there was a 25% exclusion rate].

Since the NAEPs are widely seen as the gold standard “audit” test, admitting that you didn’t see the need to report in any depth on NYC’s lack of progress on the NAEPs is like saying you can report a story on the DOE’s finances without seeing the need to mention any of the numerous audits from the State or City Comptroller’s office that reveal widespread waste on the part of DOE, including misappropriation of state class size funds, huge growth in private contracts with 20% going over budget, and repeated awarding of no-bid contracts, without registering or documenting their rationale.

But that’s another story…..perhaps you might look into the no-bid contracts for Agudath of Israel, with the amounts awarded the organization by DOE dwarfing what the Times’ political reporters wrote about today in relation to the Mayor’s use of his discretionary funds.

Thanks, Leonie Haimson

---

From: Ian Trontz [mailto:trontz@nytimes.com]
Sent: Monday, August 03, 2009 6:20 PM
To: leonie@worldnet.att.net
Subject: test score article

Ms. Haimson:

We appreciate the attention you've given to this story, as much as we've appreciated your being a source for us over a number of years.

We do not, however, think that your email points out any inaccuracies. It is not incorrect to say that fourth grade reading scores rose after the mayor took over. You are correct that some of the biggest gains occurred before his major reforms took effect, but we are not incorrect.

Indeed, there are many interesting and important ways to look at the NAEP results, but the NAEP comparison was one small part of this report; we could not devote unlimited space to it given the parameters of this article, which is about the city’s performance on state tests. We therefore included a very broad, basic summary of the NAEP results.

We also, unfortunately, do not have the most recent NAEP results, but you can be assured that we'll report them in full when we get them.

As for whether the tests themselves are deficient, I think the article discusses that, perhaps not with the depth you are seeking, but as with the NAEP, we cannot go down every road.

Ian Trontz, Assistant Metro Editor/Education