My debate on public sector unions on Fox News today

Check out my debate on Fox News today on a "power panel" with Steven Malanga of the right wing Manhattan Institute and Tracy Byrnes, Fox business correspondent. Megyn Kelly was pretty fair as the moderator, I thought.

My favorite moment was when Malanga said he didn't feel "oppressed" by not being a member of a union.

My least favorite? Having three irate voicemail messages on my machine when I returned to my office twenty minutes later. One woman screamed at me for having messy hair!

As the booking producer pointed out, this proves at least people were watching. He said this show has more than one million viewers. Scary! Please leave a comment.

Leonie on FOXNews - It's 3 against 1

video here

Of course -An anti-union City Journal guy

Megyn is a FOXer - and not neurtal.
What about union money to politicians.
Leonie - let's look at where the billionaire money is going.
Megyn interrupts - public sector earn more - also that teachers are off in summers.
Leonie compares to billionaires and Wall St.
Tracy Byrnes - nothing to do with WallSt
Megyn supports her. Doesn't interrupt.
Unless Leonie gets in their faces she will not get a word in.
City Journal slug - never belonged to union in his life. Are 93% of Americans repressed?
Leonie - polls show that vast majority of Americans support unions - FOX slug interrupts Leonie again as does City Journal slug. Now brings up pension issue.
Megyn - unions put Democratic politicians - talks about how much money unions are giving to politicians.
Leonie - who is pushing attack on unions - 1% control 25% of the wealth. We will not survive as middle class disappears.
FOX slug talks about jobs.
What a fix this is.
Leonie - very wealthy should pay fair share -

Megyn's got to go - of course - sounds disgusted that Leonie's words about equity would foul the FOX air.

CNN debate on class size on MLK's birthday

My debate with Matthew Chingos on CNN yesterday.



For Prof. Jeremy Finn's critique of Chingos' study of Florida's class size reduction program, Asking the Wrong Questions About the Impact of Class-Size Reduction, from the National Education Policy Center.

Isn't it time we had an educator, for a change?

Wow! It sure has been an interesting couple of days. Lots of news and commentary on Klein's resignation and the Mayor's appointment of Cathie Black to replace him. On the disappointing Klein legacy, I was quoted in the AP, the Times, NY1, am NY, Education Week, NBC News, and elsewhere.

I was personally attacked by the NY Post, and by Joel Klein on NY1 last night. When confronted with my quote from the Times, Klein called me a "propagandist" with an "agenda" (see video clip, starting at 2:30 minutes in.) Yes, I do have an agenda: for smaller classes and better schools for our kids.

There has also been much controversy and criticism of the mayor's appointment of Cathie Black, a publishing executive to succeed Klein. See the front page of the Daily News (below), this Times story and and these articles on our blog. Parents and elected officials alike have pointed out that Ms. Black sent her own children to private schools and has no education background, except for serving on the advisory board of a charter school.

Given her lack of education experience and qualifications, Ms. Black needs a waiver from the State Commissioner to be appointed chancellor.

Please sign the NYC Kids PAC petition, to urge the Commissioner to deny her a waiver. As soon as you sign it, the petition automatically sends an email in your name to the Commissioner Steiner, to the Board of Regents, and your state legislators,. Even if you have signed other petitions, please sign this one now, since it has an immediate impact.

The mayor would never dare appoint a magazine executive to head the police or fire departments. Leading the largest school system in the country needs just as much expertise, if not more. Only an educator is likely to recognize the necessary elements of a quality education, and how to work effectively with parents, teachers, and members of the community to create them. No matter what skills Ms. Black may have as a corporate manager, she simply has no idea what our children really need to succeed. We have had nine long years of a non-educator; it is time for a change.

Please also forward the petition link to your friends, and post it on your Facebook page. Here's hoping for better days!

Get Advocacy this Saturday!

This Saturday, November 6, I will be speaking at the UFT Manhattan parent conference, “Get Advocacy”, at 52 Broadway, in a session from 9 AM -10:30 AM.

I will be talking about how parents can network, organize and advocate for the issues that concern us. Lots of practical advice will be offered, and I promise to try to answer any questions you might have.

The entire conference is from 8:30-2:45 PM and there is a free breakfast and a free lunch as well, w/ Michael Mulgrew as speaker, as well as lots of interesting workshops. Please come! For more info, or to register, please email Teresa Concepcion at Tandersen@uft.org or call her at 212-510-6315

2010 forum: Public Education Under Attack!

Check out the flyer for Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats for Sunday, Oct. 17 event by clicking on the image to the right.

Feel feel free to download the flyer, post and distribute in your schools.

My unvideotaped debate with DOE's Suransky re NCLB, testing, and NYC's dismal results

On Wednesday, September 15, I was invited to New York Law School to debate Shael Suransky, NYC's Deputy Chancellor for Accountability, about NCLB and the negative effects of high stakes accountability systems.

I also took the opportunity to rebut the claims of impressive progress in student achievement in NYC that DOE continues to make, even after the state test score bubble has burst, and to point out the many errors in Chancellor Klein's written statements concerning this issue.

Unfortunately, NY Law School did not allow Lindsey Christ of NY1 or Norm Scott of Education Notes to videotape the event, reportedly because of pressure from DOE.

Lindsey was quite annoyed, and said she had never been barred from taping any such forum, either at NYU, Columbia, the New School, CUNY or SUNY.

For more on what transpired, you can see Norm Scott's accounts here and here, and the email exchange between Lindsey, the very testy VP for PR at NY Law School, and me.

As many people have asked for it, I am posting my powerpoint here, part 1 and part II. If you would like me to present it to your organization, please email me at classsizematters@gmail.com

-- Leonie Haimson, Executive Director, Class Size Matters

Follow Up on Leonie at NY Law and Exclusive Video Interview

UPDATED Sat, Sept. 18, 6am - info on Finland

There were some comments on the NYC Parent listserve about the actions of NY Law in relation to the Haimson/Suransky Smackdown. See my 2 previous posts if you missed them.

Leonie Smackdown Redux

Leonie Haimson KO's Tweed in a Knockdown

I'm printing the comments below along with a comment/correction Leonie left on my last post. And here's a link (NY Law School Ban on Taping) to the correspondence between NY1's Lindsay Christ and Nancy Guida (who I believe is the woman who gave me such a hard time) from the law school. Read in reverse order. Enlightening. [By the way, lots of people consider Christ one of the best ed reporters in town - did you know that she was a teacher for a few years before she got this gig? It shows.]

First, I have a bit of follow-up video I did with Leonie in her garden shortly after the NY Law appearance, which as you know they did not allow to be taped. We did it for the movie we are doing - The Absolute Truth About Waiting for Superman but this piece relates to some of the things she touched earlier that day - Finland, class size, teacher bashing - she calls teachers true heroes. Really eloquent stuff. It is a worthwhile 4 plus minute clip.

[Putting videos up seems to slow up this blog so I will leave it up here only for a day. Here is the you tube address if this gets slow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSg8myiMhR4]

{A Chapter leader sent this in after investigating ed in Finland. Info from Ministry of Ed}

1)  What is the average age of a Finnish teacher (elementary through secondary, not university professors)?

 female 44 and male 47

2)  What is the average number of years a Finnish teacher has been working?

see question 1 and 3: about 20 year

3)  What is the average age of a beginning Finnish teacher?

26

4)  Do the teachers in Finland belong to a union?

about 95 % teachers belong to  union OAJ  

5)  Do Finnish teachers receive a pension after retirement?

yes

6)  What is the average age of retirement for a Finnish teacher?

now its 60 but it will be 65-68.

7)  How many months throughout the year do Finnish teachers work?

teaching time is 38 week / year

8)  What other benefits do Finnish teachers receive? (like healthcare)

healthcare

Yours,

Vesa Ilves

Vesa Ilves
tutkija
OPETUSALAN AMMATTIJÄRJESTÖ OAJ

Comments:

Thanks for the kind words Norm; but one minor correction. I said there was no standardized testing in Finland; of course the schools there have regular classroom tests. Your point about the teacher's union in Finland is very interesting. Shael went on about how Finland was successful because it attracted the best students to teaching; I talked about how in Finland they give a lot of respect to teachers,and alot of autonomy. And I contrasted that w/ the total lack of respect that this administration gives teachers, and Klein's very low approval rankings in teacher surveys. I said if this administration and the Obama administration really respected teachers, they would listen to their prescriptions for education. Over and over in national surveys, teachers respond that reducing class size would be by far the best way to increase teacher quality and teacher effectiveness, over salary increases, teacher performance pay, more professional development, or anything else. And yet they don't listen, because they don't respect teachers or care what they think. Nor do they respect parents or care what we think either!

I don't see anything the least bit surprising in this, other than NY Law School's craven submission to the probable bullying from Bloomberg/Klein.

Leonie



For Klein & Company, It's all about controlling the message. THEY get to control the data, THEY get to decide how it will be spun, THEY get to control when, where, and how, and -- most important -- THEY get to limit or control, at least in their chosen forums, how much information is made available from "the other side." Knowing that they are probably well aware of Leonie's positions as well as her encyclopedic command of the facts and figures, they had every conceivable reason to suppress public distribution of this "debate." It would be OK for a few law school students to hear her side, but heaven forbid that it get out via NY1 or YouTube or EdNotes.

Just think about it for a minute. Had Shael been there by himself to make a presentation and do Q&A, does anyone honestly believe there would have been the least objection to it being taped by NY1 or anyone else? This was all about controlling the message and stifling the dissent -- nothing else. It's not rocket science, but it is smart, at least from their standpoint.

Steve Koss


New York Law School itself has a series of "Citylaw" breakfasts which are always taped for broadcast on cable TV--I forget at the moment whether it is on one of the City stations or CUNY TV (ch. 74 or 75 where I am in Manhattan). You can also access tapes of them at their website, www.citylaw.org. I just checked it and saw that, for example, the tape of Joel Klein's appearance there as featured speaker on 4/3/09 is still available, including the Q&A, where I successfully confronted him with several examples of how, given that he's essentially one of the Mayor's Commissioners, he does not have the ability or the inclination to stand up for the school system when other city agencies are pursuing policies that are harmful to the schools.

I bring this up to point out that it is curious that, in the case of yesterday, the School seemed so unwilling for a recording to be made.
richard


It was meant primarily for students, but the organizer (who was a student, but it was clearly taken out of his hands by the administration) had encouraged me to invite members of the public as well so I did. The moderator said they had never gotten so many RSVPs.

Check out Norm's column on how they were apparently pressured by DOE not to let the discussion be videotaped by either him or NY1.

I have never seen a PR person from an academic institution so nervous about getting publicity; usually they love the attention. First she said that taping was barred because they didn't get the permission from the participants; then she changed her story when I said that they had my permission, and that probably Shael would agree as well.

But in this case, Kathleen Grimm of DOE had apparently made their desires known strongly, behind the scenes to one of the deans. Whether another college or university would have reacted differently, and not given in so quickly, who knows.

The PR person came up to me afterwards, and demanded that I "remove" her email to Lindsey and me from the list serv about how they were barring any videotaping, as it was a private communication. I was astonished.

I said to her, not only do you want to keep the event private, but you also want to keep it secret that you want to keep it private?

If DOE didnt want Shael to be on a panel w/ me they should have asked him not to appear. But to prevent the wider public from being able to see the event is really shameful -- and I think it is esp. craven of a law school , that should be insisting on freedom of political speech to cave in this way..

Leonie Haimson

Leonie Smackdown Redux- Updated

UPDATED Sunday, Sept. 19, 11:30pm

See Leonie's account of the meeting at NYC Parent blog.

My debate with Shael Suransky of DOE

As many people have asked for it, she posted her powerpoint here, part 1 and part II. If you would like Leonie to present it to your organization, please email her at classsizematters@gmail.com.

The email exchange between Lindsey, the very testy VP for PR at NY Law School, and Leonie.

See my post game video interview with Leonie on you tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSg8myiMhR4]

 

Original posting, Thurs Sept. 16:
I wrote late last night about the New York Law School event featuring Class Size Matters' Leonie Haimson and the NYC Department of Education's Chief Accountability Officer Shael Suransky. But it was late and this piece, Leonie Haimson KO's Tweed in a Knockdown, didn't do justice to Leonie's spectacular work in  laying waste to the ed deform movement and BloomKlein as she took a wrecking ball and kept smashing it into their faces - boom, one blow after another until the virtual Tweed was not left standing.

Poor Suransky. He tried his best to defend Tweed but if this room semi-filled (more on this later) law students were a jury, BloomKlein would have been sent to the hangman's tree.

UFT/AFT Sidebar
How a one woman operation can accomplish such a feat while a hundred million dollar (or is it two hundred?) union operation flails helplessly does make people scratch their heads. But not me since I view the UFT/AFT as a virtual arm of the ed deform movement - whether they agree philosophically or not they take the position that it is here and they have to work within the framework. Thus my comparing them to the mentality of Vichy. (See UFT/AFT: Think Like Vichy)

 Ahhh, that felt good. Back to our program.
 As you all know, I am not a reporter and my scatterbrain mentality makes it hard for me to take notes, plus I can never read my own handwriting - think it's time for an Ipad? But here is what I have until I coral Leonie to do a voice over her presentation - and I should point out that she had to rush through it in her 15 minutes so a lot was skipped. One witness came over and suggested we do it as a series.

The symposium was titled "NCLB and the Effects of high stakes accountability systems (NYC and elsewhere)". I thought it interesting that Tweed was even willing to send one of their top people to get in the same arena with Leonie but maybe it is a sign of their desperate attempts to spin their side of the story after this summer's testing fiasco. It wasn't that Shael is not competent to defend them (I wish he were on our side) but that he has so little he can defend. However, he does seem to drink the Kool-aid.

His presentation went after Leonie and people were so wowed there was little he could do. He pointed to his experience at Morris HS where he claimed they graduated only 70 kids out of a cohort of 700 - when I challenged him later on this 10% grad rate he hedged, saying that some kids went to other schools and came up with a 25% figure. He claims that the 4 new schools, one of which he ran, had 75-80% grad rates with the same type of kids. Sorry, I don't believe it. That rivals Michelle Rhee's claims she performed miracles, raising her class' reading from 10% to 90% in a year. No don't get me wrong here. I do believe we can reverse the numbers. But Real Reformers (our new code name) know what it will take - smaller teaching groups to start - but I won't do the drill again.

Leonie talked about how the high stakes testing game has so totally distorted education. She laid waste the Tweed's report card system, how schools that got F's one year got A's the next, quoting Aaron Pallas, "A monkey could do a better job by randomly picking schools."

She devastated the value added approach, pointing to research that showed how the same teachers measured on student performance on different tests could turn up as the best on one and the worst on another. (See new Sean Corcoran study - link on my sidebar.) How high school grad rates were distorted by the pressure on teachers to mark up on Regents exams and credit recovery. And oh, those discharge rates. Campbell's Law in action.

Leonie went into the data that shows that lower class size is one of the 4 measures proven to have an effect on student performance - an obvious fact to anyone who spent time in the classroom. (Where does Suransky who says he was a teacher stand on this?)

She repeatedly returned to Campbell's Law: 

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."^[1]

Yes, give people incentives to cheat based on rewards (bonus pay) and punishment (closing schools, loss of jobs) and people will do what it takes to assure high scores.

When asked later what was her prescription for the ills of schools? Reduce class size and do what it would take to cut the attrition rate of teachers - these are related, of course.

One very interesting interchange took place between Leonie and Shael over a question about how the international standing of the US has fallen. Shael fell into this trap by talking about the higher standing of European schools - how teachers are so much more respected than here.

Duhhhh! European teachers have some of the strongest teachers unions in the world. Maybe that has something to do with how they are respected while also calling out our own AFT/UFT as bearing a major share of the blame for the lack of respect in the US.

In Finland he said, the top quarter of college grads went into teaching while in the US it is more like the bottom third.

Leonie pounced. Finland is the highest performing nation in the world. No high stakes testing at all, though there are some tests.

And how about those teacher unions there? Think that has an impact on luring the top college grads into the profession as opposed to the US where the lure is to go into finance so you too could take part in destroying the economy?


After burn: NY Law Mopes
I won't go into it in depth because we finally got in. But the PR person from the Law School and the NY Law School Assistant Dean were some of the nastiest people we have met.

When I arrived I was surprised to see Lisa Donlan there as I thought she was still in Paris. But she had flown in the night before – there is dedication to the cause. She told me we would not be allowed in without reservations, which we didn't know we needed. Worse of all Lisa said, when she asked if there was room could we come in, she received a firm "no." That this event was for students and they expected it to be filled. And besides,  they ordered pizza. "I won't eat," I chimed in (but I managed to sneak a slice later - na, na, na, na, na, na.)

[This section updated and clarified]
I tried to get in as press and was told I needed a reservation. Just them someone without a reservation came up and said he was with Tweed and was there at Suransky's request. He was Deputy Press Secretary Matt Mittenthal and he seemed like a nice guy but got caught in my tirade once it was clear he would be allowed in. I raised a ruckus: if Tweed can have someone come why can't Leonie have people even if they don't have reservations? I was at my most obnoxious and during our interchanges I was threatened numerous times - "leave this lobby immediately," the PR person screamed at me. More than once (I had tried to take a picture of the sign at the entrance that talked about justice). I told her to call security and I would go kicking and screaming, taping all the way. Matt told me that if other press was upstairs he would argue to get me in (yes, there are some likable people at Tweed even with my pal David Cantor gone.)

Anyway, as more and more of Leonie's people arrived, few with reservations, the Law School people got more and more nervous, finally relenting and saying they would count seats and let us in. So we got in. And the joke is the place was half empty. Lisa did a chair count and came up with these numbers give or take a few: 62 attendees, 46 empty seats at around 1:30 (the numbers varied as people came and went). 16 of these were FOL - Friends of Leonie. Poor Shael only had a few friends, including one of my faves - James Merriman, uber charter school pusher. I love to tweak Merriman. "How did that Perkins/Smikle thing work out?" "Incumbency" he harumphed. He later told Leonie that Sam Hoyt was winning big in Buffalo as a sign of the charter school lobby influence. See Leonie's comment on this in Postscript below.


Did Tweed make demands?
We have info that the Law school was contacted by the DOE to keep press out. NY 1's Lindsey Christ was told she could not tape and was apparently not happy and didn't show (Leonie posted emails between Lindsey and NY Law that upset these mopes no end - I'm getting a feeling she won't be asked back.)

I heard through someone connected to the Law School who was present and not happy with the way we were being treated by the Law School officials that Kathleen Grimm had told them that Leonie was advertising the event as a smackdown - not true as Gotham's Elizabeth Green had done that - and the press should be kept out. NY Law people seemed so nervous we wondered whether there is some funding coming from Bloomberg.


Postscript from Leonie 
Hoyt is a big favorite of the charter school lobby and beneficiary of the hedge hog dollars. He outspent his rival by 4-1 and only is ahead by 250 votes out of more than 10,000 cast.  His opponent wants a recount. Bloomberg gave Hoyt big $, and he was one of DFER’s Hot List. He also briefly subscribed to this list serv, for reasons I could never figure out.

Hoyt Wins, But Golombek Wants A Recount 

http://www.wgrz.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=86801&catid=13

Postscript 2: After the event I walked Leonie home and interviewed her in her garden for our film. I'm heading for the city now to cover the Diane Ravitch/Eva Moskowitz panel at The Economist event at Chelsea Piers. If I can get a few sound bites from Diane for the film that would be awesome.

Diane Ravitch and Leonie Haimson on Democracy Now

Interviewed by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on June 30, we discuss NY State's admission of test score inflation over the past five years, and how the lack of progress in NYC schools reveals the failure of test-based accountability policies to improve schools, even as these policies are being forced on the country as a whole by the Obama administration.

For the full segment on this issue, including clips of the Obama's speech before the Urban League, see the Democracy Now website.

Letters to the Times re high-stakes tests

Five letters were published in today's NY Times -- all pointing out flaws in their June 18 editorial about test-tampering, “That Cheats the Kids.” I wrote one of the letters about how the editorial completely missed the point about high-stakes testing -- that it makes the results unreliable. It is the system imposed by the city and increasingly the federal government that cheats our children; not the teachers.

Shutting out parents, and how it must stop!

Education Week just published an article I co-authored with Julie Woestehoff of Chicago’s PURE called Shutting Out Parents: Obama's Disappointing Blueprint for Reform, about how the US Department of Education has completely excluded parents and our ideas from their education agenda, including the need for smaller classes and more parental involvement.

The only instance in which parent involvement in decisionmaking is mentioned in Duncan’s entire blueprint for ESEA is to require that the parents of Native American children be included in the design of programs at the school level. (!!)

Though the U.S. Department of Education calls many of their proposals “innovation,” we see them as representing large-scale experiments on our children—experiments lacking a foundation in research and implemented without informed parental consent—something that would never be allowed in fields such as medicine.

It is a shortened version of a letter we sent last month to the President and Congress, signed by parent leaders across America.

Please send your own message to DC policymakers, by signing our NEW petition to Obama and Congress, Put the Parent Voice Back in Public Education, if you agree.

Interview about charter schools on Good Day NY

From Good Day NY this morning:

Check out the link for the interview with the Chancellor that preceded my interview.


Charter School Debate:Chancellor Klein and Parents Weigh In
By: KATHY CARVAJAL


A decision about sharing space among charter and public schools in New York City is expected on Wednesday night.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is facing backlash from parents who say their children are being shortchanged by adding charter schools.

Speaking with Good Day NY on Wednesday, Klein said he wished there was more space to avoid co-locations.

"I wish we had a lot more space in New York City. About 500-600 schools share space. But we need to share the space fairly among all 1.1 million students. We need to give parents hope and opportunity," Klein told Good Day NY Co-Host Rosanna Scotto.

Opponents like Leonie Haimson who represents the non-profit organization Class Size Matters says public school students are being shortchanged.

"Parents see it like charters schools have invaded their public school space. (Charter schools) have taken away libraries, classrooms and intervention spaces," said Haimson during Good Day NY on Wednesday.

Charter schools- or schools operated independently of the local school board- are often run by politically connected individuals and educate the most elite of children, said Haimson.
"Sometimes a school year in and year out doesn't do the work... the Obama administration has said we should be closing five percent of our schools," said Klein.

The bottom line, said Haimson, is to "let the parents decide.. it's our children... if you put this up to a vote among all the parents including charter school parents you'd realize the co-locations are extremely unpopular."

Haimson, Jackson Featured in NY1 Guest Editorials

NY1 asked a number of prominent New Yorkers to comment on mayoral control and Mike Bloomberg's management of the public schools. Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters is below.



Also check out NYC Council Education Chair Robert Jackson and parent leader Muba Yarofulani.