Mayor Bloomberg was roundly booed at the annual Queens St. Patrick’s Day parade on Saturday, for threatening to lay off of over 4,000 teachers and his attack on their seniority rights. Check out the video below and excerpts from the Daily News, NY Post and NY1:
Chants of "Save our Teachers" rang out from pockets of the green-clad crowd that lined Newport Ave. and Rockaway Beach Blvd. in Belle Harbor….
Anthony Hannon, 80:….“What he’s doing to our teachers and our Fire Department – it’s shameful. Who cares about bike lanes? He’s an idiot,” sputtered Hannon. ….
"The classrooms are already overcrowded and now he wants to lay off thousands of teachers?"asked Jeanne O'Leary, who has been teaching at nearby Public School 104 for 10 years.
… Sondra Smith, 38, a special education teacher at Public School 114… has been teaching in the city school system for 15 years. Despite the mayor’s prediction that thousands of teachers could be laid off next academic year, she said she did not fear for her job. Heckling the mayor as he turned the corner onto Rockaway Beach Boulevard, Ms. Smith yelled, “You’re against the teachers, and you’re against the kids.”
She was appalled that she has had to buy school supplies for her 30 students, complained that the classes were overcrowded, and thought that the mayor should embrace a city tax at sporting events to make up for any shortfalls in the school budget.“There are so many things the mayor could be creatively thinking of to save teacher jobs and serve the kids, and he doesn’t because he doesn’t care,”she added.”
See also this AP article, in which the destructive effects of the layoffs are explored:
"The proposed New York City cuts, combined with attrition over the last two years, would take roughly one in eight teachers out of the city's public schools and could swell classes to an average of 24 to 29 kids, depending on grade level -far outstripping the national public school average. .....Parent advocates say the city is ignoring an already-broken agreement made in 2007 that was supposed to reduce class sizes across the board."
In the article, Professor Alan Krueger of Princeton, (former chief economist of both the US Labor Dept. and the Treasury Department) points out that for every dollar spent on keeping class sizes low, the economic benefits would be expected to yield two dollars in terms of increased salaries for these student later in life.
The research organization AIR was funded by the Gates Foundation to commission a series of papers on the Bloomberg/Klein education reforms, and to “convene a working conference….to inform future educational improvement efforts in the city.”
Reportedly, the papers will be published in a collection by Harvard University Press.
On November 10, they are holding an “invitation-only” forum at the downtown Hyatt hotel to discuss the results of their findings in what has been described as “an opportunity for dialogue and conversation among NYC stakeholders, DOE staff, and researchers…” (see invitation below.)
Yet the only NYC public school parents who have been invited to participate in this “dialogue and conversation” of stakeholders are the five borough-appointed members of the Panel for Educational Policy.
This exclusion of parents is reminiscent of the definition of stakeholders put forward by Secretary Arne Duncan and Joanne Weiss, when she ran the federal “Race to the Top” program (both of them former Gates grantees as well).
In their list of “key stakeholders”, they included education administrators, the teachers union, the business community and charter school operators, but not public school parents, as those groups that states were supposed to elicit support for their proposals. (They put in parents in afterwards, and only pro forma, after receiving negative feedback.)
Here is what Patrick Sullivan wrote in his comments to the US Education Department at the time:
One factor considered in awarding the grants to each state is the extent to which support and commitment of key stakeholders is enlisted (Overall Selection Criteria E3). While the administration has a long list of stakeholders, parents are not on it. Charter schools, teachers unions and foundations are deemed to be important stakeholders but not parents.
For this conference, once again, the concept of stakeholders appears to exclude public school parents and their children, who have been most affected and disenfranchised by the policies of this administration.
Parents aren’t even at the bottom of the list. In fact, they don’t exist at all.
I just wanted to remind you of the conference invitation attached. The meeting will take place in two weeks (November 10th) and will be an opportunity for dialogue and conversation among NYC stakeholders, DOE staff, and researchers from inside and outside NYC about the findings of the NYC Education Reform Retrospective project. This is an invitation only conference and has been designed to offer an intimate venue for sharing ideas and considering implications for reform efforts in NYC and elsewhere. You have been invited based on your involvement in the NYC education reforms or your relevant research or practical experience. We hope that you will be able to join us and contribute to this discussion.
We have extended the RSVP and registration date to November 1st.
If you plan to attend, please fill out the attached registration form and e-mail it back to nycretrospective@air.org by November 1st.
If you are unable to join us, please reply to nycretrospective@air.org by November 1st to say you will not be attending.
We look forward to seeing you in NYC on the 10th!
Jennifer O'Day, Project Director for the New York City Education Reform Retrospective
Check out the just-published piece in NY Magazine calledWishful Testing, featuring thecomments of Steve Koss, blogger here, and which analyzes the state test score bubble, Campbell’s law, the over-hyped HarlemVillageAcademy, and connects the dots.
Between this, the recent Robert Kolker piece on the national craze ofscapegoating teachers, and features by Jeff Coplon on Eva Moskowitz’ chain of charters and school overcrowding, the magazine has shown itself to be most valuable in dissecting the Bloomberg/Klein mirage.
Especially as compared to the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, whose reporting on the subject has been execrable.
On the front page of today's Times is one of those iconic stories that epitomizes the system under Bloomberg and Klein: Francisco Hernandez Jr., a 13-year-old Brooklyn boy with Asperger’s wandered alone in the New York subway system for days, after he had been scolded at school for not concentrating.
Despite desperate searches by his parents , it took eleven days before the police tracked him down, dirty and exhausted, on the D train at Coney Island. What does this sad story have to do with the policies of this administration?
“Though doctors had recommended that Francisco be placed in a small school for children with learning disorders, she said, officials at his school told [his mother] he was testing fine and did not need to be transferred."
Like Kelly Sinisgalli, the 4th grade girl who was barred this fall by her principal from taking dance class and consigned to more test prep because she had only scored a “low 3” on her state exams– meaning at grade level –this sort of lunacy is the consequence of the rigid accountability system that Bloomberg and Klein have imposed, and that the Billionaire's boys club of Gates and Broad, and the Obama administration is trying to impose on the nation.
Following massive publicity, and after she had aced some practice tests, Kelly’s principal finally relented and allowed her to return to dance class, yet the essential situation remains the same.
Whether it’s a 4th grade public school student from Queens who is thought to be scoring poorly, or a thirteen year old boy with Asperger’s from Brooklyn who is thought to be scoring well, their fate is increasingly determined by their test scores, because test scores are all that matters to those running the system.
Today, the mayor announced he would extend his grade retention policies to 4th and 6th grades -- meaning that all NYC students through 8th grade would now face being held back on the basis of a single test score. According to Gotham Schools,
Asked about researchers’ claims that retention policies can raise the dropout rate, Bloomberg said he was “speechless,” adding, “It’s pretty hard to argue that it does not work.” Klein said that since 2004, when the DOE ended social promotion for third graders, support for its end has been “unanimous.”
In fact, the consensus among experts is overwhelmingly negative -- that grade retention hurts rather than helps students and leads to higher dropout rates. When the City Council held hearings the first time the Mayor proposed this policy, they could not find a single education researcher who supported it.
Yet the mayor and Klein manage to inhabit their own universe of spin; reminiscent to the manner in which Karl Rove described the Bush administration:
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
See the 2004 letter, signed by over 100 academics, heads of organizations, and experts on testing from throughout the nation, in opposition to the mayor's policy, when he first proposed 3rd grade retention, explaining:
"All of the major educational research and testing organizations oppose using test results as the sole criterion for advancement or retention, since judging a particular student on the basis of a single exam is an inherently unreliable and an unfair measure of his or her actual level of achievement. ...Harcourt and CTB McGraw Hill, the two largest companies that produce standardized tests...are on record opposing the use of their tests as the exclusive criterion for decisions about retention, because they can never be a reliable and/or complete measure of what students may or may not know."
Among the letter’s signers were Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, renowned pediatrician and author of numerous works on child care and development, Robert Tobias, former head of Division of Assessment and Accountability for the Board of Education and now Director of the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning at NYU, and Dr. Ernest House, who did the independent evaluation of New York City’s failed “Gates” retention program in the 1980’s.
Other signers included four past presidents of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s premier organization of educational researchers, as well as three members and the study director of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Appropriate Use of Educational Testing, and two members of the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council.
According to Dr. Shane Jimerson, professor of Child and Adolescent Development at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of over twenty publications on the subject of retention,
“The continued use of grade retention constitutes educational malpractice. It is the responsibility of educators to provide interventions that are effective in promoting academic success, yet research examining the effectiveness of retention reveals lower achievement, more behavior problems, and higher dropout rates among retained students. It is particularly disconcerting that a disproportionate number of students of ethnic minority and low income backgrounds are retained. Moreover, children’s experience of being held back is highly stressful; surveys indicate that by sixth grade, students report that only the loss of a parent and going blind is more stressful. “
The second time the DOE pushed through this policy, for 5th grade retention, Klein agreed to commission an independent research study of the results. RAND has been analyzing the data since 2005 and has produced several interim reports which the public has not been allowed to see, as reported in a chapter in our book, NYC Schools Under Bloomberg and Klein: What Parents, Teachers and Policymakers Need to Know, by Patrick Sullivan, member of the Panel for Educational Policy:
"....the reports contained the results of extensive surveys with elementary school principals, summer school administrators, and Academic Intervention Services (AIS) specialists. Summer school leaders were coping with the latest DOE reorganization and complained they could not get any specific information on the students assigned to their programs. AIS leaders found that small class sizes were the most effective tool to help struggling students but less than a third of at-risk children had access to smaller classes. Principals felt the retention policy relied too much on standardized tests and was damaging to student self-esteem. Most troubling of all: none of these findings had been made public."
"When we voted on the 8th grade retention policy last year they said the release date for the RAND study was August 2009. Now it is “sometime this fall”. Would that happen to be “sometime after the election this fall?” What are they hiding?"
According to the DOE spokesperson, " Preliminary results of the RAND study, which looks at the performance of third and fifth graders affected by the Mayor’s promotion policy over time and will include data from the 2008-2009 school year, were delivered to the Department of Education last year...."
If Bloomberg and Klein were really so convinced that their retention policies have been successful, they should be obligated to release the RAND findings before the vote of the Panel to approve their extension to even more children.
At the rally at City Hall today on school governance, Assemblymember Inez Barron, a former principal, denounces the Senate deal on governance and offers a blistering critique of the Bloomberg/Klein education record. (For more on the outlines of the deal, see GothamSchools, Daily News, Times, Post.)
From class size and "creative confusion" to the NAEPs, Barron tells the real story behind the Bloomberg myth. She even quotes John Dewey and Martin Luther King Jr. on the meaning and purpose of education. Inez Barron for Schools Chancellor!
Question: ”Obviously the school system is one of the most controversial issues in the campaign. Some people would say that the Chancellor has become a lightning rod – instead of bringing in constituencies, and working with them together to transform the school system, he has had a tendency to alienate them.…is there something that can be done to reduce these frictions – I not going ask you if you’re going to replace him..."
Bloomberg: "I am not.”...“Number one , I don’t think this is going to be controversial in the campaign – my understanding is that Bill Thompson said he is in favor of mayoral control of the schools….if you brought to a vote in Albany would overwhelmingly pass in Senate as it did in Assembly; no rational person would want to roll back the progress we’ve made in improving graduation rates"... etc. .
“Joel Klein comes from a city family… he grew up in public housing, he was the first one in his family to go to college…he understands. Is he tough and hard in making decisions; yes. And that’s why the school system has worked.
Could he have better social skills? We all could I suppose. His job is not to be a nice guy, his job is to deliver results.
If you ask Randi Weingarten or Ernie Logan, they would tell you that while they battle with Joel all the way, this school system has worked because of him, Dennis Walcott, everybody else….We got the right guy.”
