Joel Klein will reportedly make over $4 million a year at NewsCorp.
Let’s hope that Murdoch takes a total bath on this one, and he and Klein aren't able to make a penny off of poor kids – either here in NYC or in Africa – by selling bogus“educational” video games supposed to lead to real learning.
Kids, parents and teachers have suffered enough as a result of Klein's delusional and damaging fantasies about what constitutes a quality educator; see what principals said were their hopes for an entirely new direction for our schools now that he is gone.
Klein was reportedly a poor manager at his last private job –Bertelsmann — and was a terrible manager at DOE. The only reason he lasted as long as he did with all the expensive blunders, no-bid contracts, consultants , reorganizations, and wasted millions was because he had a boss, himself wrongly purported to be a good manager, who either wasn’t paying attention or didn’t give a damn.
"I represent the borough of Manhattan on what the mayor calls the Panel for Educational Policy but what is in the law the Board of Education of the City of New York. I see here today parents and their elected leaders and I see teachers from every borough. I see them from every race and I see them from every income level and from every political party. Why is that?
Because I've learned from talking to people is that every parent wants to the same thing for their kids: they want a rich curriculum, they want an experienced teacher, they want small classes, and they want room for their kids in their schools.
But what have I learned from sitting on the Board of Educaiton for three years? I've learned that instead of schools, we're going to build a billion dollar police academy. Instead of a rich curriculum, we get test prep and drilling in math and ELA. Instead of small classes, we get our kids packed 28, 30, 35, 40 in a class and that's wrong.
"But the worst of all this is the people who control our schools, the people who run our schools, the Mayor, the Chancellor, the Regents, they don't send their own kids to these schools. They have one idea of education for our kids and and an entirely different one for their own.
Beyond autonomy, beyond accountability, beyond privatization, the core principle of the Bloomberg administration when it comes to education is condescension: the idea that there's one idea of education for their children and a totally different idea of education for everybody else's, and that's what has to stop."
Yesterday, 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?
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. Here's a flyer. 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! Above is a flyer you can post and hand out at your schools.
New York State Comptroller Thomas Di Napoli has done several highly revealing audits of charter schools, showing their flagrant misuse of public funds. One of his audits revealed that KIPP Academy charter school in the Bronx had spent nearly $68,000 on "staff development" retreats in the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic. His office also released audits of the Western New York Maritime Charter School, showing that big-screen televisions, computer equipment and security devices purchased with public funds were delivered to the homes of school employees; and the Enterprise Charter School, which had a two-year, $60,000 consulting contract with its former CEO.
In 2007, DiNapoli released an audit showing the NYC Department of Education’s lax oversight of charter schools. According to the NY Post,
“The audit, which focused on the 2004-05 school year, found that the DOE doesn't ensure that charter schools provide it with required performance data, and that it lacks a formal process for reviewing the information. It also noted that the DOE doesn't generally require schools that aren't making adequate progress to take corrective measures, although meeting academic targets is essential to charter renewal.”
Di Napoli also did an absolutely scathing audit of the NYC DOE’s use of no-bid contracts, amounting to 291 no-bid contracts in three years. The audit revealed how “vendors often won the no-bid contracts without any proof that avoiding the regular process would save the city money. In some cases, school officials actually destroyed records about the contracting process…” (See this GothamSchools story.)
The charter lobby sued Di Napoli, to block all further audits in a lawsuit financed by the New York Charter Schools Association and the NYC Center for Charter School Excellence, on whose board Joel Klein sits. The Court of Appeals decided that he did not have the authority to audit charter schools. (The home page of DOE’s charter school office still features links to a press release by the charter school lobby, praising the court decision.)
In response, the recent state legislation that lifted the charter cap last spring specifically gave the State Comptroller authority to audit the use of public funds by charter schools – though the charter school lobby has said that will continue to try to block any more audits in court, despite the new law.
Yet this may not be necessary if the GOP candidate for Comptroller wins. His name is Harry Wilson, and he is a former hedge fund operator, who has accused di Napoli of launching “politically motivated” charter audits, and has pledged not to “harass” charter schools by auditing their use of public funds, no matter what the new law says.
Not surprisingly, Harry Wilson is the favored candidate of Mayor Bloomberg, as well as Bryan Lawrence, co-founder of Girls Prep charter, and Whitney Tilson of DFER fame, all of whom have contributed to his campaign. Here is Tilson’s endorsement of Wilson:
Harry is personally close to many in the charter school movement and was considering starting a charter school when he decided to serve in the Obama Administration instead….. DiNapoli engaged in a number of nuisance audits designed to harass charter schools in his early tenure as Comptroller. His attacks were so over the top, that the NY Charter Schools Assoc. sued him and the court agreed, finding that DiNapoli overstepped the bounds of his audit power …However, with the recent passage of legislation to race the charter school cap in the state, one of the provisions that was snuck in grants the Comptroller this same audit power over charter schools.
Want more? Harry Wilson is a close colleague of Steve Rattner, the Mayor’s personal financial adviser. Wilson served with Rattner on Obama’s auto task force, and is portrayed as the “hero” in Rattner’s new book about saving GM. In turn, Steve Rattner is the best friend of NY Times’ publisher, Arthur Sulzberger; and was one of the power brokers who convinced Bloomberg to run for a third term.
A couple of weeks ago, Bloomberg and Sulzberger were the two co-hosts of Rattner’s book party, which was attended by the financial and power elite of NYC, including the head of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Joel Klein etc. This very public celebration of Rattner and his accomplishments occurred just as Rattner was pleading guilty to a “pay to play” kick-back scheme of bribing the former State Comptroller to grant Quadrangle, Rattner’s investment company, millions in state pension funds to invest in 2004 when Hevesi was Comptroller.
Rattner paid $1.1 million in finder fees to Henry “Hank” Morris, Hevesi’s former chief political consultant, and he also agreed that Quadrangle would help finance a B-movie made by the brother of the pension fund manager. Rattner first claimed he had nothing to do with this B-movie deal, but emails apparently reveal that he helped put it together. As a result, he has agreed to pay a fine of $5 million and accept a ban from the securities industry for at least five years. He could also face perjury charges for lying about his involvement in the bribery scheme.
Yet despite this, the mayor not only hosted his book party, but has pledged to keep Rattner on as his top financial adviser, helping to run Willett Advisors, the group set up to invest the mayor’s personal fortune. (The company is named after Thomas Willett, NYC’s first mayor.) As Bloomberg told reporters, “Steve Rattner's my friend, of course I'd keep him on. Why would you not? If he can do anything to help, I value his advice and he's a close friend of mine and you stick by your friends.” (More on the Bloomberg/Rattner connection at Gotham Gazette.)
“It is rare for someone of Mr. Wilson’s talents and expertise to compete for one of the most important and least glamorous jobs in state politics. Mr. Wilson went to Harvard Business School and worked for Goldman Sachs, the Blackstone Group and Silver Point Capital. Mr. DiNapoli tries to make that résumé sound tainted, but the investment and management skills exhibited with General Motors are just what are needed for New York’s financial and ethical blight.”
Unmentioned in Times’ endorsement, of course, is the fact that Wilson’s friend and former colleague, Steve Rattner, had bribed the previous holder of the office that Wilson is now campaigning to fill, and who surely participated in that “financial and ethical blight” which the editorial claimed to decry.
Meanwhile, Di Napoli has banned all “pay to play schemes” by prohibiting the pension fund from doing business with any investment adviser who has made a political contribution to the State Comptroller, and has appointed an independent Inspector General to safeguard all the comptroller’s investment decisions. And he has never been accused of financial corruption, even by the same three editorial boards that endorsed his opponent.
Not coincidentally, all three papers are owned by men personally close to Bloomberg, and all three papers also supported the elimination of term limits as well as the renewal of mayoral control.
Check out this from "Aunty Broad", one of our friends in Seattle: the education oligarchy (Rhee, Broad, Bloomberg, KIPP and Kopp) "should be cloned because they are so smart." More brilliant exposes from Aunty Broad are here.
Check out this account, from the Queens Chronicle about a recent Town Hall meeting in Forest Hills:
The mayor said the school system in the city “is getting better,” but when Jenny Fisher, an Iraq War veteran who just earned a degree in elementary education asked Klein when the Department of Education would lift a hiring freeze on teachers, Bloomberg stepped in.
“We don’t have the money to hire new teachers,” he said. “I don’t want to lay off teachers and Joel just has to work with that restriction. Don’t blame him, blame me, I guess.”
Klein, speaking directly to Fisher, added, “I wish I could hire you. Our kids need it — lower class sizes and young, enthusiastic teachers.”
What utter hypocrisy! The city received $200 million in federal funds this summer specifically meant to hire more teachers for the 2010-2011 school year; (see the federal guidance here.) And yet the administration wants to hold onto these funds until the following year, despite the fact that they are anticipating a loss of 2,000 teaching positions and an increase in at least 18,000 students this fall.
There are currently 1700 teachers on Absent Teacher Reserve, getting paid full salaries, and yet the administration refuses to assign any of them to classes to lower class size; and would rather leave them in limbo, no matter what the damage to our children, to bolster their case for laying them off.
Bloomberg and Klein have done everything they can to resist providing our children with smaller classes that the New York's highest court said was their constitutional right. The result is that this fall we will likely see the sharpest increases in class size in twelve years, particularly in the early grades.
Kindergarten classes will probably be substantially larger than they were when Bloomberg first came into office, just as new research is revealing huge academic and economic benefits to keeping Kindergarten class sizes below twenty.
What a waste. We have new tests, new teacher evaluation systems based on unreliable test scores, a new organizational structure, and new experimental online learning systems, and yet our class sizes will be more overcrowded than ever.
Despite all their claims, this administration could care less about providing proven educational reforms such as smaller classes, in their zeal to waste money devising more damaging experiments on our children.
Today, in the Daily News, Adam Lisberg reports that Mayor Bloomberg gave $110,000 to Al Sharpton in 2008, apparently to gain his assent for overturning term limits, money that was laundered through the Education Equity Project, Joel Klein’s vanity non-profit that supposedly works for education reform.
This revelation comes on top of the earlier finding that Sharpton received a secret contribution of $500,000 from a hedge fund to join EEP in the first place, funds that were washed through Education Reform Now, a pro-charter lobbying group, to help him avoid federal indictment for tax fraud. Below is a timeline of events:
December 2007: As many as ten of Sharpton’s associates receive grand jury subpoenas as the IRS is probing whether Sharpton or his organization, National Action Network (NAN), committed tax crimes and/or violations related to his 2004 presidential campaign.
March 25, 2008: Eva Moskowitz writes an email to Klein:“As you know I met with Sharpton. Had a great meeting. Am sure you know Charlie King is working with who I have known for years. He was enthusiastic. Just was worried that Mayor and you were not on board. Was kind of surprised by this concern. Wonder if you can call him.”
Joel Klein responds, “I’m going to Memphis for him and have put together a panel for MLK day – I will speak to him. I think by on board he’s not talking policy….” [What then? finances?]
April 4, 2008: Klein appears at the Sharpton NAN event in Memphis. According to account written by Joe Williams on Democrats for Education Reform blog, entitled MLK, Ed Reform Sharpton, Shifting Winds?:“….It will be particularly interesting to see whether Rev. Sharpton can match his rhetoric with action… Sharpton...talked about how the education problem is so dire that we can no longer honor past alliances which existed to protect the status quo in education. (He didn't elaborate, but I assume he was talking about partnerships and $$$ between old civil rights groups and big labor, specifically teachers unions. Why did I assume that? He made the dots pretty easy to connect.)"
April 10, 2008: Joel Klein sends an email to Eva Moskowitz, asking, “Did I send you article re Memphis w Sharptons comment about new alliances.” She replies, “Yes thanks. Thought it was amazing.”
May 9, 2008: The AP reports that Sharpton is a subject of federal investigation and that his organization owes nearly $1.5 million in overdue taxes and penalties. It is also revealed that over the course of the past year, Sharpton's lawyers have been negotiating with the feds over the size of his debt, which include $365,558 in NYC income tax and $931,397 in unpaid federal income tax. His for-profit company, Rev. Al Communications, owes the state another $175,962 in delinquent taxes.
Sharpton says: "There have been a lot of old alliances being protected, and the children are not being protected," he said. "And if we're going to move forward, we're going to have to be able to have new alliances here — that might mean some old relationships with teachers unions, principals unions and all are going to be a little troubled.”
June 12, 2008: There is much speculation on our list serv and elsewhere about who is funding this effort.On our blog at “Unholy alliance: Al Sharpton and Joel Klein” we speculate that it is being supported by Gates and/or Broad Foundations. The next day, David Cantor, then-head of the DOE press office, emails our NYC education list serv that “No Gates or Broad money is going to this initiative. Zero.”
June 13, 2008:We speculate that perhaps Bloomberg money is backing EEP and add another posting, Who is funding the Education Equity project? Later that day, David Cantor emails me:“Leonie: The project is being funded anonymously. No public money will be spent. The mayor is not funding the project.”
June 15, 2008: I post Cantor’s email on our blog at The mystery continues: who is funding the Klein/Sharpton operation? and add: “One would think that given the kind of public campaign that these men say they are embarking upon, including staging "events at both political conventions” and attempting to influence the position of the next President, they should be obligated to reveal their source of financing" Silly me.
June 15, 2008: I finally pick up on the news about how Sharpton owes the IRS more than $1 million in taxes, and write on the blog: “Which further begs the question – is someone contributing to Sharpton's operations to persuade him to ally himself with Joel Klein, and if so, who is it? Apparently, the US Attorney's Office in Brooklyn is conducting a grand-jury investigation of his organization's finances, as is Attorney General Cuomo. Hopefully we'll find out someday. More good timing on the part of Joel Klein, who certainly knows how to pick his friends. But I guess beggars can't be choosers.”
June 19, 2008: According to the Post, the feds broaden their investigation, and issue "a flurry of subpoenas" to Sharpton’s corporate donors.
June 20, 2008: Sharpton hires former Brooklyn US Attorney Zachary Carter to represent him.
June 2008: Sometime this month, Sharpton's organization receives a $500,000 donation from former Chancellor Harold Levy’s hedge fund, Plainfield Asset Management, passed through Joe Williams’ pro-charter group Education Reform Now. None of this is revealed, however, until almost a year later, in Juan Gonzalez’ column.
July 20, 2008: Al Sharpton pays a down payment of more than $1 million in tax debt to the IRS.
July 22, 2008: The Feds agree to drop criminal charges against Sharpton, as he has agreed to pay millions of dollars in back taxes and penalties. About a dozen of his aides who had been served with federal subpoenas will no longer be required to testify. The unpaid taxes which he has agreed to repay are believed to total anywhere between $2 million and $9 million.
August 2008: Bloomberg considers running for a third term, which will necessitate overturning term limits.
Sometime during Sept. 2008 (?): Bloomberg gives $250,000 grant to EEP. According to the News, this is one of only two contributions that EEP received in 2008, totaling $500,000.
Sept. 30, 2008:It is reported that Bloomberg has definitely decided to overturn term limits, ignoring the results of two referenda, so he can run for a third time. The NY Times runs an editorial supporting his decision, saying “If the voters don’t like the result, they can register their views at the polls,” meaning they can choose not to vote for Bloomberg.
October 2, 2008: Bloomberg formally announces he will run for third term.The same day, National Action Network gets $50,000 from EEP.
October 8, 2008: Sharpton tells the New York Times, "I'm leaning toward those who advocate in favor of making changes in the law through a referendum. But I haven’t come to any final determination yet."
October 12, 2008: Charlie King, Sharpton’s chief of staff tells the New York Post re term limits "There are meritorious arguments on both sides of this issue, and we are taking great pains to weigh each argument."
October 17, 2008:The National Action Network receives another $60,000 payment from EEP. The same day, the NY Times reveals that the mayor and his top aides have asked leaders of community and arts organizations which have received contributions from Bloomberg and/or city funding to testify on behalf of overturning term limits during the City Council hearings.
At least 11 Doe Fund employees, testified in favor of the mayor’s plan, without identifying their employer, describing themselves only as neighborhood residents.The DOE Fund also shipped homeless men to the hearings in support. It is later revealed that just weeks after the hearings, Bloomberg gave at least $5 million to the DOE Fund, and a year later, less than 48 hours before he was sworn in for a third term, another $5 million.
October 22, 2008: the NY Times runs an editorial supporting the city Council overturning term limits, despite the fact that voters voted twice to uphold the limits: “... We agree with the mayor that the Council is best positioned to quickly settle the matter. It would be technically difficult and perhaps legally problematic to organize a meaningful citywide referendum before the 2009 elections." (Just a few months later, the Times excoriates Hugo Chavez of Venezuela for proposing that voters be allowed to decide term limits through a referendum, an opportunity that NYC voters never received.)
December 8, 2008: Bloomberg hires Bradley Tusk, formerly top operative and Deputy Gov. to Rod. Blagojevich, as his campaign manager. Over the course of the year Bloomberg gives $1.3 million to the Independence Party. Of that, $750,000 was allegedly pocketed by Queens GOP operative John Haggerty.
March 31, 2009: Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News breaks the story of the $500,000 contribution to Sharpton from Harold Levy's hedge fund, which was first laundered through Joe Williams’ pro-charter organization Education Reform Now. David Cantor tells Juan that up to that point, Klein has raised more than $1.6 million for EEP. [more than $1 million in Jan-March? From whom?]
April 1, 2009: Bloomberg appears at Sharpton’s annual NAN conference, saying he is a “Sharpton fan.”Gov. Paterson, Sec. Duncan and Joel Klein also participate in the event.
May 7, 2009: Bloomberg, Sharpton and Gingrich meet with Duncan and Obama and announce that education reforms are the “civil rights issue of the 21st century.” The same day, the White Housepress secretary Robert Gibbs says the president “does not intend to make any political endorsement in the New York City mayor’s race.” (Obama does later make very low-key endorsement of Bill Thompson, but never campaigns on his behalf.)
November 4, 2009:Bloomberg wins a third term by an unexpectedly narrow margin of 5 percent; after spending a record $110 million of his personal fortune on his campaign, more than all other donations for all NY state elected officials combined.
And that's only the campaign spending that is officially reported!
For parents who are understandably agonized about the steep drop in state test scores at their children’s schools, as reported by the NY State Ed Dept. and variousnewsoutlets today, this is what they should keep in mind:
Since the city experienced a 34-39% decline in the percent of students scoring at proficiency; any school that saw a drop smaller than that is doing okay.
However bad a school’s test scores, it is not the fault of teachers, principals, parents or the kids themselves; it is the fault of the people running the system. Their names are Bloomberg and Klein, and they should hang their heads in shame. For years, they have insisted that the state exams were more reliable than the NAEPs, and refused to make the real reforms that would improve our children’s opportunity to learn, like reducing class size. And since their value-added achievements which they insist should determine teacher pay and tenure are next to nil; they should be forced to resign.
The state is also at fault by colluding in the fiction of improving test results for the past five years, all to make it seem as though their high-stakes accountability policies were producing results.
More than anything else, as Steve Koss writes below, today's revelations (which are not revelations to people who have been reading this blog) should teach us all that TEST SCORES ARE NOT EVERYTHING.
Our kids – and our schools –should excel in all areas, not just on standardized tests, and the more policymakers focus on test scores to the exclusion of all else, as has happened in recent years, the less real learning will occur in our schools and the more our children will suffer.
It's as though a doctor only weighed his patients, and decided on that basis alone whether they were healthy. Not only could the scale be defective, as occurred in this case; but even if not, the patient could be slowly dying, and he would never know.
According to the NY Times, "Next year, the city will spend an estimated $296 million on school safety, a $5.4 million increase. In 2008, the budget was roughly $204 million."
Meanwhile, the Chancellor blames the increased spending on the police; and the Police Department (more believably) says the decision about how much to spend was made by DOE.
“This court is confronted with the odious specter of a city government taking every possible step to perpetuate a fundamental, decades-old injustice against its own citizens ...The city’s obstinacy, its unflagging defense of an overrun position reflects a misguided set of priorities and loyalties. New York City is not a fiefdom. It is a representative democracy.”
Though the Judge wrote this about the mayor's refusal to implement non-discriminatory policies in the hiring of firefighters, it could be said about Bloomberg's refusal to reduce class size, even though the law requires it, or about many of his other policies which so flagrantly deny parents a real voice and our children their right to a quality education.
Enough is enough! How can we bear three more years of this imperial rule?
At the City Council hearings yesterday, Ernie Logan, head of the principal’s union, said that according to principals, the first time their superintendent had ever visited their schools this year was to tell them that their schools were being closed.
This is despite two lawsuits, two consent decrees, and strengthened language in the new governance law, all supposed to make superintendents the manager and the head support officer for districts once again.
See these observations from Matt Bromme, former superintendent of District 27 in Queens:
In a system of over 1 million children, there will always be dysfunction.
What is the tragedy is that instead of looking into improving school boards the Mayor chose to look at every school board member as a potential criminal and someone whose mental capabilities were below his and the Chancellor's. In their desire to improve education, they took the stand that "we rich and influential people," will take care of education because you the parent are not able to help your school improve.
There were a number of school boards and members who were dedicated to making their district a better school community. There were another group of school board members were interested in only themselves and most of them became members of the City Council or the legislature in Albany.
Superintendents, who had districts that were manageable were removed and replaced by Regional Superintendents who did not have manageable regions. Therefore the Chancellor created a second reorganization, and then a third and now a fourth. Bill Thompson stated that as a City Comptroller, he would never invest city funds in an organization that went through so many reorganizations in such a short period of time.
So now, we have superintendents without staff or power. We have principals who do not look at education as a lifetime position but a stepping stone to another career. We have the Tweedites who stay a year or maybe two and then disappear, none of whom even know the outer boroughs.
We have schools who have abandoned the arts, history and science in order to test drill students until they are bored and turned off to learning. We do not allow trips to museums or the theater until after testing is completed.
We can sell Doritos, but we will not allow parents to sell brownies.
DianeRavitchis right. We need to educate the "whole" child and not just focus on two subject areas via test prep. Children no longer read for enjoyment. Children no longer study math for long term use. They read and answer math problems solely to pass two exams that make or break their school's future.
On Friday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Federal District Court upheld the right of parents, students, teachers and other concerned citizens to exercise their first amendment rights and peacefully protest against the school closures and charter school invasions in front of the Mayor's house on E. 79 St. on January 21.
Up to now, the city has been blocking protesters from this public space.
Please come! Bring signs and bring your children so they can be part of this historic event.
Remember, even if your school is not directly affected, the proposed closings and charter school sitings will lead to more overcrowding and larger classes citywide, and will come at a tremendous human and fiscal cost to the system.
Thousands of students will likely be discharged, most of them ELL and special ed, without a chance to graduate with a high school diploma. Hundreds of teachers will be put on absent teacher reserve.
When: Thursday, Jan. 21 from 4 -6:30 PM
Where: Meet on the SW corner of 79 St. and 5th Avenue, near Central Park.
A flyer you can post or distribute in your school is here.
Here is the Times on this victory; an excerpt from the court transcript follows:
Judge Hellerstein: Now, a curtailment of basic First Amendment rights is an irreparable damage. If I curtail the right peacefully to picket and peacefully to express views, I'm curtailing, theoretically, First Amendment rights. And so the denial of those rights constitutes irreparable damage.
....we live in a democracy. And to the greatest extent possible, we need to find ways to both engage in all the protective devices that are necessary to protect our governance in our society while not compromising, wherever we can avoid compromising, the constitutional rights of citizens to demonstrate, to express their views, and protest, and picket.
…The picketing is against the increase of charter schools that I'm told the mayor is planning. Since the mayor is the political leader and elected leader of the city and in charge of the educational system of the city, the point is to picket effectively where residence of the mayor is. As regulated by the provisions I read out, I grant the motion.
The NY Times has an editorial on what they hope and expect from Bloomberg’s third term, which begins today. The section on education reveals how little the editors really understand about what has happened in the last eight years in our schools:
”After the State Legislature finally scrapped the board and gave the mayor control of the schools, he brought much-needed stability.”
Actually, there has been continual confusion and chaos under this administration, with repeated re-organizations, school closings, worsening overcrowding, Kindergarten students placed on wait-lists, changes in management structure, delayed and error-prone admissions processes, mid-year funding cuts, and all the rest.
"He has also swept away the bureaucratic underbrush..."
Here,the Times' credulousness comes into relief. This is one of the administration's most repeated claims, without any evidence to support it. Instead, new levels of bureaucracy have proliferated, with the establishment of the School Support Organizations, Senior Achievement Facilitators, Portfolio officers, Integrated Service Centers, Network leaders, data coaches, and a huge growth in the press office and accountability division at Tweed, not to mention all the other corporate-type positions that are continually created, even as schools are forced to make huge budget cuts to the classroom and the teaching force shrinks. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent annually on consultants and no-bid contracts.
“He also wants bad teachers out of the classroom and off the payroll.”
Of course, everyone wants bad teachers out of the classroom -- parents most of all. Yet by making principals pay for the salaries of their staff out of their own budgets, what the administration really appears intent on doing is getting experienced teachers out of the classroom, no matter what their quality. Why? Perhaps because they are paid more and because they tend to remember the way things used to be before Bloomberg and Klein, which causes them to resist the manipulation of test scores, the granting of credit recovery, and the myriad other ways in which pressure has been exerted on educators to lower standards -- all in the supposed name of improving results.
“In all, the mayor’s education policies have been a good thing for students...."
To the contrary, Bloomberg's top-down policies have not been helpful to students, with class sizes rising, discharge numbers rising, test prep taking over our schools, art, music and science devalued and diminished, and parental involvement suppressed and repudiated at every turn.
“…but he and his school officials still have to spend more time listening to concerned parents.”
At least this one statement is correct, even as it understates the contempt that Bloomberg and Klein have shown for our views.
Yet if this editorial reveals anything, it is the need for the editors of the Times to spend more time listening to public school parents. It’s not clear from the above remarks that they have any idea of what we've been saying for the last eight years, or how the mayor’s priorities conflict with our desire for our children to attend safe, uncrowded schools with small classes, experienced teachers, along with art, physical education and all the other activities necessary for a well-rounded education. Or perhaps, they simply refuse to take our views seriously.
Let’s hope in 2010, they as well as Bloomberg begin to pay attention. It would be long overdue.
It appears from an article in the Brooklyn Paper that the PAVE charter school board has been put on the defensive by DOE's proposal to give them a five year extension on staying at PS 15 -- and allowing them to take more space from the school each year as they expand, instead of the two year extension they originally requested.
A member of the board revealed that they have already been provided $26 million of city taxpayer funds from the NYC Department of Education for their own facility, and have raised $6.2 million more. Apparently they lack only $6 million to make this new building a reality.
Unmentioned in the article is that Spencer Robertson, the founder of PAVE, is the scion of Julian Robertson -- former hedge fund manager and according to Forbes, the #147 wealthiest person in the US, with an estimated fortune of $2.2 billion.
Julian Robertson is one of many hedge fund operators who have taken up charter schools as their new hobby, according to an article in the Style section of the NY Times. Robertson owns vineyards and golf courses in New Zealand, as well as homes in Locust Valley, the Hamptons and Sun Valley, as well in New York City.
He and other financiers are especially enthusiastic about the cause, because they their contributions are more than matched by hefty subsidies from state and city taxpayers. According to Whitney Tilson, another hedge fund operator and charter school supporter:
“It’s the most important cause in the nation, obviously, and with the state providing so much of the money, outside contributions are insanely well leveraged."
And yet Julian Robertson himself is careful not to pay NYC taxes , by making certain to spend under 183 days in the city. The state recently brought a lawsuit against Mr. Robertson senior for failure to pay taxes, but Robertson won this case, by proving that he had carefully worked out the minimum number of days he would reside in the city and having his scheduler keep records of this:
"...Mr. Robertson designated an assistant, his scheduler Julie Depperschmidt, to keep a careful count of where the Robertsons were from day to day in 2000 and to make sure they did not spend 183 days or more in New York City."
Spencer Robertson's wife Sarah is Director of Talent Recruitment at PAVE , and head of the board of Girls Prep Charter School, which has caused considerable controversy of its own by seeking to expand within a District 1 public school building. See the photo below, courtesy of the NY Times, of a recent District 1 meeting about the expansion of this school.
Another member of the Girls Prep board is Eric Grannis, husband of Eva Moskowitz, who makes more than $300,000 a year, operating another string of charter schools and who herself has been eager to expand her schools even further into the buildings of existing public schools in Harlem.
See this article about a "secret" meeting that took place last May, between Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Julian Robertson and other members of the Billionaire Boy's club, about how to coordinate their charity "efforts".
I suppose that didn't include a measly $6 million for a building for PACE, since DOE has now given them carte blanche to keep squatting in PS 15 for at least five more years-- which presumably would also allow the school to keep collecting interest from the $26 million of taxpayer funds they already had been given for school facilities.
(I wonder what the reaction of these hedge funds operators might be if a charter school was allowed to take up space and expand within the private schools where their own children attend school. )
Finally, everyone must read this brilliant Diane Ravitch piece about how the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" program, with its emphasis on charter school expansion is antithetical to the whole concept of equal opportunity and public responsibility for education. She puts it within a historical context, as only Diane can do:
Having written the history of the New York City public schools, I was reminded of the origins of free schooling in certain northeastern cities in the early 19th Century, when wealthy men decided that it was their civic duty to help civilize the children of the poor. In their view and in their day, they were doing good deeds, but their schools were stigmatized as charity schools for children of paupers and were avoided by children of the middle class. Outside of big cities, public education emerged as a community response to a community's need to school its children, not as a charitable venture.
Today, with the proliferation of charter schools, we may be seeing a resurgence of the historic pattern as public schools are privatized and taken over by very rich men (and women) who see themselves as saviors of the children of the poor. Naturally, you find this a repellent portrait because it undermines the democratic foundations of public education. It means that our society will increasingly rely on the good will of wealthy patrons to educate children of color. It means that education is seen as a private charity rather than as a public responsibility. Let's hope that the new owners who have taken over these schools are able to sustain their interest. After all, having 500 children in your care is not the same as having a stable of polo ponies or a vineyard in Napa Valley. If the children don't produce results that make the sponsors proud, they may pick a different hobby.
In the same vein, Aaron Pallas has a column in Gotham schools, Teacher Education in New York State: A skoolboy’s-Eye View, in which he lucidly explains how the evaluation of teachers based on value-added student test scores is not ready for prime time. Pallas recently appeared on a panel at Teachers College with David Steiner, new NY Commissioner of State Education, (photo to the right), and Merryl Tisch, head of the Board of Regents. (You can see a webcast of this event here.)
In his column, Pallas urges Steiner and Tisch to start working on improving the state exams, which have gotten radically easier over time, before beginning to consider a system that would base decision-making on their results. He also points out how the long-standing practice of having high schools score their own Regents exams is a system ripe for abuse.
As part of the state's "Race to the Top" proposal, Commissioner Steiner recently also proposed that they expand the awarding of teaching degrees -- allowing providers other than institutions of higher learning to offer teacher preparation programs, with the Board of Regents granting Master’s degrees to candidates who "graduate" from these programs.
There is so much lacking in terms of the state's current oversight -- of district spending practices, of cheating, of "credit recovery", of the proper reporting of graduation rates, of whether schools are even providing the minimal services to kids that they are entitled to by law.
Given the awful mess at State Ed which Steiner has not yet begun to clean up, I would hate to see him allow further abuses to occur by deregulating the awarding of teaching degrees -- which could easily make a teaching certificate as meaningless as passing the Regents exam is now.
The NY Times has some interesting exit poll results. About 25% of voters told the Times they had children in public school. These parents went for Thompson 55% to 43% for Bloomberg.
Joel Klein will reportedly make over $4 million a year at NewsCorp.
