Join us on Thursday to protest the waiver!

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 the new Deny Waiver Facebook page, and keep up with the latest news and developments.
  

• 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.

Absurdities and Kneecapping

 Dear Absurdists and Kneecappers,

 Did you see this headline: NY Post Comes Out Against School Grades: These grades flunk

It is becoming increasingly clear that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is doing no one any favors -- not the public, and certainly not himself -- by assigning letter-grade report cards to city schools. The jerry-rigged system for determining the grades obscures more than it reveals. Thus, the information the cards impart is worse than misleading -- it's virtually useless. And the charter-school movement -- an unambiguously bright light in the city school system -- is particularly ill-served by the letter grades. 

Unambigously bright light? They must suffer from severe pupil dilation.

Poor babies. They're favorite pet charters didn't do so well on the grading system. It must be flawed. But then again we knew that all along. Of course Michael MulGarten stepped into it with this one:

The teachers union -- which detests both the competition from charters and the use of tests to hold teachers accountable -- hopped on the new grades with both feet.
Traditional schools' edge in grades means "either the strategy Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have touted for so long -- the creation of more charter schools -- isn't working, or that the entire progress-report methodology, which relies almost completely on standardized test scores, is flawed," crowed union boss Michael Mulgrew.

Tweed was quick to point out that the UFT's own charter got a "D" with the comment, "those in glass houses shouldn't cast stones." The UFT charters have suffered one disaster after another with numerous changes in leadership. I actually agree with the Tweedies here. We told the UFT not to get into the charter school game because they would never be able to take a position opposed to charter schools or be able to lead a real fight back for public education if they did. And so they did (get into the game). And so they don't (lead a fight back).

 

Leonie Haimson commented:

Even the NY Post, owned by Murdoch and close buddy of Bloomberg and Klein admits that the school grades are so absurdly unreliable they should be eliminated.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for them this year appears to be the way charter schools got lower scores on average this year.

The jerry-rigged system for determining the grades obscures more than it reveals. Thus, the information the cards impart is worse than misleading -- it's virtually useless.

 Followed by Steve Koss

It's difficult not to guffaw over the absurdist inconsistency in the Post's "new position" on school report cards, what with their having gone from its greatest shills to sudden detractors simply because they disagree with its outcome in respect to the system's assessment of charter schools.

What's even more astonishing is that they either don't see or don't care to see the other astonishing inconsistency in their revised position on the school report cards. If after having spent countless millions of dollars and doubtless reflecting the professional genius of innumerable experts on education, the end result is so inconsistent and unreliable that even the Post's troglodytic conservatives want to throw out this type of reporting at the aggregated school level, what could possibly make any sentient homo sapiens think that INCREASING the granularity of these measurements to the teacher/classroom level will be any better?

Likely without the faintest sense of what they've done, the editors at the Post have kneecapped their own already-indefensible position with regard to value-added analysis and evaluation of teacher performance. After all, if the geniuses at DOE and their wasted millions couldn't do it right for entire schools (where aggregation enables at least some degree of the margin for error to wash itself out), how on earth can it be done for a third-grade teacher with just 25 or 30 children in a classroom?

What could be more better than seeing the Post's editorial troglodytes unknowingly clubbing themselves in the knees without even realizing they're doing it?

Steve Koss

Michael Duffy and Tweed: we don't listen and we don't care

Michael Duffy, head of the charter school office at DOE, in an interview said that he learned nothing from speakers at the hearings about the controversial expansion of Girls Prep Charter school:

"… I think, for my part, in a couple of hours of comments, I didn’t hear anything new from the public that wasn’t already known prior to the start of the hearing. I know it’s important that people have a chance to speak their mind, but I don’t think there’s anything that wasn’t known to the Department prior to the proposal for the expansion of Girls Prep."

Obviously he wasn't listening and doesn't care what parents or members of the community think. He is not alone.

Here is an excerpt from DOE's "amended" Educational Impact Statement for the proposed closing of Alfred E. Smith HS, summarizing the public comment so far:

Thirty-eight oral comments and 315 written comments regarding this proposal were received between December 3, 2009, and January 25, 2010. The comments came from current students at Alfred E. Smith, alumni from the school, teachers, community members, and companies that employ Alfred E. Smith alumni. All comments opposed the closure of Alfred E. Smith. At the January 11, 2010, joint public hearing on the original proposal, 100 members of the public noted their opposition.....One oral comment and sixty-one written comments were received between January 26 and February 23; all of these comments also opposed the DOE’s revised proposal.

More than four hundred people sent in comments opposed to the closing and not one in favor.

So did the DOE change its proposal in any way to close Alfred E. Smith?

No. So much for public process.

The Onion Just Flat-Out Nails It!

The latest print issue of The Onion, New York's (and America's) best print/online satire magazine, includes a "Sports Section" article that absolutely nails the state of NYC and NYS education as well as that of the entire U.S. under NCLB.

Titled "Pittsburgh School District Leads Nation in Ability to Spell 'Roethlisberger,'" the article is fall-on-the-floor, laugh-out-loud hilarious, at least until you realize just had sadly true is the underlying reality that it satirizes. Replace the word "Roethlisberger" with NYS Math and ELA exams, Grades 3-8, and you've got the exact voice of the Tweed/DOE P.R. machine. If I hadn't seen it in The Onion newspaper myself, I'd have thought it came from Gary Babad. Enjoy.