With Rhee, Fenty and now Parker gone, it is a new day in DC.Daley going too in Chicago, as well as their schools CEO, Huberman.Klein leaving, but not Bloomberg unfortunately….NYC is the unluckiest of the three.
Another union victory for the anti-Weingarten forces in the AFT.There is a lot of back story here and Ed Notes has been on top of the DC story. Just look in the archives around April and May to see how Randi used a ruse to cancel the elections which were due to take place before the vote on the contract she negotiated with Rhee because she feared a Saunders win would jeopardize the vote.
NYC is unluckiest of the 3 because we still have Unity Caucus running the UFT.
See video I did of Nathan Saunders and Candi Peterson at the AFT convention in Seattle this summer.
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=EdNotesOnline#p/ u/5/v4wo0viVzT0
Both Nathan and Candi were out in LA in the summer of 2009 when a bunch of Real Reformers (union too) met with the LA teachers union and a group from CORE in Chicago when their hope of winning the union election was slim.
The UFT/AFT ineptness (or collaboration) is creating a more militant movement within the teachers union nationwide. Detroit may be next.
With his defeat by a margin of 556 to 480, Parker joins Rhee and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) as the third major figure to effectively be forced from office by political fallout from the 2007-2010 school-reform movement.
November 30, 2010 (GBN News): NY City Chancellor-designate Cathie Black experienced her first ever visit to a public school today. Breaking a weeks-long silence, she pronounced the visit to PS109 in the Bronx “exciting” as she entered the building. “I’ve passed by public schools so often,” she told reporters. “I can’t believe I’m actually going inside one.”New comment on your post "Do Not Apply"
Author : Bronx Teacher
I find it interesting that TAPCo was discussed on this forum. Somehow, the Theatre Arts Production Co. School was rated the number 1 school in the NYC-DOE report cards this past month. When the principal announced it, students fell over laughing. The reality is that Principal Passarella knows how to cook the books and play the system. I'm sure she's not the only one doing it, she's just the best at it. The report card grades various stages of academic progress ... such as the number of credits each grade student has obtained.
This is interesting because TAPCo has an almost 100% graduation rate ... funny, cause students who dropped out even graduated. Let's see how this works:
- teachers are not allowed to fail students. No F's or 55's on report cards. Any 55 is changed to an NC (No Credit). Teachers are to give students EVERY opportunity to remove the NC ... such as copying work from friends, cheating, lying, etc.
- teachers who do not comply and continue to fail students are terminated and removed from the school ... even if it's mid semester. Administration will just change the failing grades to passing ones.
- therefore, TAPCO does not have any failing students and thus, every student is on track for graduation.
- students are also given bogus credits for classes they never took ... such as Phys Ed and Foreign Language.
- most TAPCo students "earn" up to 14-16 credits a year, far above the 11 required for graduation. They are given full credit for taking an Arts class once a week, a Theatre class once a week, Phys Ed classes which don't exist, Foreign Language class once a week with a "phantom" teacher who is out on disability.
- Regents passing grades are a joke as well ... especially in ELA and US/World History. The rubrics are vague, and the grading teachers give out 4's and 5's like candy. A cursory review of the essays indicate that most of these students can barely string together a legitimate sentence. Meanwhile, teachers are giving them 5's.
- the latest insult to teachers is the development of the Inquiry Team ... or more-so, the Inquisition Team. This is a group of the principal's favorites who use their position on the team to intimidate other teachers. They are led by an angry, bitter little woman named Mrs. Acosta. Acosta does not teach any classes, but goes around criticizing people's classrooms. Her fake smile is very transparent. She has used her "power" against teachers who have spoken up against her or disagree with her. Her role is to report back to the principal any dissension among the teachers.
- it's interesting how the number 1 school in the City has a teacher turnover rate of about 45%. Don't be surprised if that number is exceeded next year. But it's ok ... Principal Passarella knows there are plenty of teachers out there who will do anything and everything for a job.
I just this evening picked up this story while browsing Norm Scott's Education Notes blog site (www.ednotesonline.blogspot.com); seems he picked it up from another blog called JD2718 (http://jd2718.wordpress.com ). It's not surprising, but it’s still truly a must read story for its explicit and detailed confirmation of what we all know is happening.
My challenge to Cathie Black: THIS above is, by the "management system" you are inheriting from Joel Klein, the number-one-scoring (by inference, the best-achieving) high school in NYC. Although no one at Tweed will ever admit it, we all know that this sort of "playing the system" is rampant across the entire city system, and the report card system is worse than a joke, since some parents may actually believe it is legitimate. Given your extensive management skills and experience and your superstar reputation, not to mention your newly acquired, in-depth knowledge of schools and public education, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT THIS SCHOOL AND HOW ARE YOU GOING TO FIX THE UNDERLYING PROBLEMS CREATED BY YOUR PREDECESSOR'S FATALLY FLAWED "MANAGEMENT SYSTEM"?
Faye with her CameraYesterday, Commissioner Steiner approved a waiver for Cathie Black, a magazine executive, to become our next Chancellor, despite a total lack of educational 
qualifications.
For more on the approval, including the fact that the mayor has consistently overstepped the law when it comes to our schools, see today’s Times. What can we do?
We’ve had eight long years with our schools run by a non-educator. Class sizes have risen sharply, our children have lost art, music and science, test prep has replaced learning, and the results? Black and Hispanic students have fallen even further behind their peers in other large cities, and we are the only city in the country where non-poor students actually score worse on the national tests than in 2003.
It’s time to start fighting back. Join on Thursday, and spread the word! Above is a flyer you can post and hand out at your schools.
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| "To create is to resist." |
As widely reported, yesterday Commissioner Steiner approved a waiver for Cathie Black, a magazine executive, to become our next Chancellor, despite a total lack of educational background or qualifications.For more on this appointment, see our blog at http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com. For more on the approval, including the fact that the mayor has consistently overstepped the law when it comes to our schools, see today’s Times. What can we do? 1- Join the new Deny Waiver Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Deny-Waiver-Coalition/ 117396824992566 to keep up with the latest news and updates. 2- Join with parents across the city in the Deny Waiver Coalition on the steps of Tweed this Thursday, December 2, at 4 PM, and wear red to show your outrage. Post this event on your Facebook page and invite your friends and colleagues.We’ve had eight long years with our schools run by a non-educator. Class sizes have risen sharply, our children have lost art, music and science, test prep has replaced learning, and the results?Black and Hispanic students have fallen even further behind their peers in other large cities, and we are the only city in the country where non-poor students actually score worse on the national tests than in 2003.It’s time to start fighting back. Join on Thursday, and spread the word!Thanks,Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
| Rise Up Red, New York! | |
Thurs, Dec 2 | |
ON THE STEPS OF TWEED COURTHOUSE, 4PMYou've signed the online petition, now make your voice heard as we gather to send a message to Mayor Bloomberg and NY State Education Commissioner David Steiner:"We want a qualified Chancellor! We don't want special deals and exemptions from the law for the Mayor's friends!" RSVP on Facebook (you don't need an account) ~> Facebook Event Page Come wearing red, and don't forget to join our Facebook and Twitter causes and share the event with fellow supporters! | |
Because of the dire fiscal situation, it seems some cut-backs to educational spending would be inevitable. The National Plan is pretty vague on education (amongst other things). Discussing the plan in the Irish Times Colm McCarthy remarked “The plan reflects successful lobbying to exempt the education budget from severe cuts. This is being justified in terms of the importance of holding with existing targets for pupil-teacher ratios, notwithstanding the dearth of evidence that reducing these ratios weakens educational outcomes in any measurable way.”
Is this really true? Well no. Few parameters in the economics of education have been so well studied as the effect of class size on educational outcomes. There are dozens and dozens of studies. So what’s the answer then? Well this is where it gets complicated. Firstly, we have no good evidence for Ireland that I am aware of. If this is what Colm McCarthy means then he is correct but then we don’t have any evidence on lots of things for Ireland and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. What does the international evidence say then? The first complication is that one should not expect one answer. Primary schools are different from secondary schools, a class of 40 is different from one of 20 and Korea is not Bangladesh so variation in measured effects is to be expected. A further problem, which non academics may not care about but is important, is that methods for estimating these effects vary widely and this partly explains some of the variation.
The most well studied country is the US. The STAR experiment in Tennessee is generally considered a well designed study and points to significant benefits from smaller classes but in that case the reductions were big (around 9 pupils on average). A “natural experiment” in Connecticut came up with a “precisely estimated zero” effect (Hoxby). The famous Maimonides Rule study for Israel (Angrist & Lavy) found positive effects of smaller classes but similar work for the Netherlands found the opposite (papers by Levin, Dobbelstein et al). A cross country study using TIMSS data (Woessman & West) found a mixed bag of results. Some reviews of the evidence point to negligible effects over all (see the work by Eric Hanushek) while other meta-analyses point to clear benefits from reducing classes. So rather than a dearth of evidence there is too much of it or at least there is not enough consensus and you can pick a study to suit your prejudice (or “prior” to give it its scientific name).
What’s striking about this literature is its near obsession with one variable, class size. Other measures of quality are almost entirely ignored. Ask yourself or someone else was their school good and they will quickly you reasons why it was or wasn’t. Class size tends not to be prominent a reason in my experience. This isn’t scientific but it does remind us that lots of things, some hard to measure, go into making a good school. One factor that everyone mentions is their teachers. Curiously, measuring the quality of teachers and the effect it has on outcomes does not feature much in the policy debates.
In the absence of clear evidence it probably makes sense that any damage from increased class effects is minimized by favouring more socially disadvantaged schools and those schools with the biggest class sizes.
