Florida Districts Having Trouble Paying Teachers And Bills

Well, it didn't take long for the financial problems involving a state-run investment pool in Florida that I posted about yesterday and today to hit teachers and other public employees right in the pocketbook.

Bloomberg News reports that school districts, counties and cities across Florida are struggling to raise cash in order to make routine expenditures like paying employees now that they have been denied access to the $15 billion dollars remaining in the state-run investment pool.

There had been a rash of redemptions from the fund by local governments, cities and school districts after it was reported that the fund contained at least $1.5 billion dollars of downgraded and defaulted debt.

Florida officials froze the fund yesterday after redemptions reduced the assets in the fund by 44%.

Here's how it affected some of the districts:

The Jefferson County school district was forced to take out a short-term loan to cover payroll for the 220 teachers and other employees in the system after $2.7 million it held in the pool was frozen yesterday. At least five other districts also obtained last-minute loans, said Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association.

``The unthinkable and the unimaginable have just happened here in Florida,'' said Hal Wilson, chief financial officer of the Jefferson County school district, located 30 miles (48 kilometers) east of the state capital Tallahassee. ``What we just experienced here is a classic run-on-the bank meltdown.''

Thousands of school districts, municipalities, towns and municipal organizations keep their money in state- and county-run pools. These state- and county-run pools, similar to money market accounts, are supposed to invest in safe liquid short-term financial products like Treasuries and certificates of deposit from highly-rated banks.

But many of these funds have invested in high-risk products like structured investment vehicles (SIVs) backed by sub-prime mortgage debt or CDs from banks with a decent probability of failure (like Countrywide Financial.)

Hal Wilson says he should have seen the writing on the wall when other counties and school districts started withdrawing money from the fund earlier in the month.

But Wilson listened to state officials who told him the money would be safe.

He screwed up - he believed them.

Now he and his school district will have to scramble to raise cash to meet expenses until Florida state officials can find some way to fix this mess.

You can bet that if state officials don't fix the problems soon, teachers and other public employees will start to work without pay and local governments will start to default on debt service payments.

As for Jefferson County, Wilson says as soon as the fund is unfrozen, the county plans on pulling all of its cash out:

"They won't have to worry about little Jefferson County any more,'' he said.

That's why Florida probably won't unfreeze the fund any time soon.

The Bloomberg News article notes that there have also been problems with a state-run investment pool in Montana where school districts, cities and counties withdrew $247 million from the state's $2.4 billion investment pool in the past three days.

The Montana investment pool held $90 million in a SIV downgraded to a default rating by Standard & Poor.

With news breaking tonight that Moody's says $64.5 billion dollars of debt sold by Citigroup has either been cut to default status or placed on review for downgrade, you can bet that there will be more old-fashioned bank runs on state- and county-run investment pools in the very near future.

This stuff is getting scary.

UPDATE: The NY Times reported today that one scheme Florida officials are considering to shore up the state-run investment fund and help local school districts meet payrolls and other routine expenditures is raiding the state's $137 billion dollar public employee pension fund for cash.

The Florida public workers' union is understandably concerned about this proposal since it transfers risk to the pension fund.

I can understand why.

There's nothing like having to worry about the solvency of the investment funds that pay for both your salary and your pension.

Poor Leo

Leo Casey, Randi Weingarten's internet mouthpiece, is having a bad day. It appears that nasty old Mickey Mouse may have removed his name as teacher of the year (from back in one of those years when Mr. Casey was a teacher). Mr. Casey feels this is because he signed a letter protesting one of John Stossel's idiotic anti-teacher hatchet jobs (sponsored by ABC, which is sponsored by Disney).

I think Mr. Stossel ought to write the mouse personally and urge Mr. Casey's reinstatement. While Mr. Stossel can wave his mustache up and down and condemn teachers, it takes a guy like Leo Casey to really worsen their working conditions. And since Mr. Casey has been a UFT official, things have gotten way worse. So take this, John Stossel:

1. City teachers now report in August, and listen to several days of useless indoctrination that benefits no one.

2. Teachers now work an extra 30 minutes per day. High school teachers spend this time teaching a sixth class (that Mr. Casey maintains is not a class. After all, he doesn't have to teach it).

3. Teachers once had to do hall duty once every three semesters. Then, they were relieved from it permanently. In Mr. Casey's tenure, however, teachers have been assigned to do hall duty, lunch duty, potty patrol, and other equally important duties forever.

4. Mr. Casey's party cleverly negotiated a 2% raise this year, then just as cleverly found a way to give most of it right back to the city.

5. Mr. Casey's party put an end to the practice of teacher transfers without a principal's OK. Now scores of them wander about as permanent subs because principals would rather hire newbies for half the price.

6. Teachers can't appeal letters in their files, no matter how preposterously inaccurate they may be.

7. Though Rod Paige abhors teacher unions, he openly admires Mr. Casey's UFT.

8. I'm a working teacher. Yet Leo Casey had no qualms whatsoever about libeling me on Edwize, the UFT blog I'm compelled to support with my dues. Though he was factually inaccurate, Mr. Casey neither withdrew his statement nor apologized, preferring to side with a charter school leader who proudly opposes both tenure and seniority rights.

For these, and many other reasons, I think John Stossel should examine the situation in detail. Leo Casey is most definitely his friend. Without the cooperation of Leo Casey and his party, none of these things could ever have been achieved.

Related: EIA Intercepts thinks there's something fishy about Mr. Casey's claims. Could Casey be overreacting, like the time he accused a UFT opposition party of Nazism?

Thanks to Schoolgal

No Redemptions For You

Florida officials have suspended redemptions from that state-run investment fund I told you about yesterday.

Local governments and public school funds were pulling their money out after news broke earlier in the month that the fund is backed by at least $700 million dollars of defaulted debt and other high-risk structured investment vehicles (SIVs.)

After redemptions by local governments and public school funds reduced assets in the fund portfiolio by 44%, Florida officials put a stop to future redemptions.

Before the run of redemptions, the fund had $27 billion in assets. Now it has $15 billion remaining.

Calculated Risk posts that there are serious questions about the investment decisions made by the people running the pool. While only $700 million has gone bad so far, the fund has also invested $650 million dollars in CD's in Countrywide Bank, an institution that could very easily go belly-up at any time due to mortgage problems and credit crunch issues.

But if you haven't already gotten your dough out of that state-run pool before today, you have to sit tight and hope/pray the rest of it doesn't go bad.

The lesson learned?

With Wall Street awash in non-transparent complex structured investment vehicles that you have to be a lawyer, an attorney and a nuclear scientist to figure out and with the government and the Federal Reserve having encouraged the expansion of such speculative products over the past few years, many people, many pension funds, many local governments and even foreign towns are at risk of losing it all.

And unless you're one of the Wall Street shills or crooked fund managers who were hawking this fraudulent garbage (they called it "financial innovation" at the time), you probably have little idea how bad it can get.

I believe it was Bob Dylan who said "If you steal a little, they throw you in jail... if you steal a lot, they make you Fund Manager of the Year."

Our Hero

The NY Post reports today that Saint Rudy Giuliani billed various city agencies $500,000 to repeatedly visit his girlfriend in the Hamptons, while his wife and children sat in Graycie Mansion.

No wonder he couldn't afford to give contracts to cops, firefighters, or teachers.

More detail here.

Three-Card Monte

Bloomberg News reports that local governments and school districts have pulled $8 billion dollars out of a state-run investment pool after learning that the money market fund was backed by $700 million dollars in defaulted debt.

The withdrawals have been made since November 14 when the head of the agency that manages the state's short-term investments revealed the defaulted debt in a report delivered to the governor. About $19 billion dollars remains in the state-run investment pool.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. sold Florida most of the now-defaulted asset-backed commercial paper. The defaults are related to sub-prime, near-prime and prime mortgage problems that have roiled the credit market in recent months.

When asked why Orange County in Florida withdrew its money from the state-run investment pool, Martha Haynie, the county's comptroller, said

"I want Orange County to be first in a lot of things, but I don't want Orange County to be the first to lose money in the state's Local Government Investment Pool.''

What Ms. Haynie is talking about is what happened to four little Norwegian towns near the Article Circle:

Officials in four northern Norwegian townships (Narvik, Rana, Hemnes and Hattfjelldal) went along with an alleged recommendation by Terra Securities to invest a total of NOK 451 million in what they're now calling "high-risk structured products" offered by Citibank and sold for Citibank by Terra.

The American commercial paper was also tied to bonds issued by local governments in the US, and Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) reported that hedge funds were involved. To boost returns, the Norwegian townships also borrowed NOK 3.5 billion to invest in Citibank's products, which later lost as much as 50 percent of their value because of the US credit crunch.

News started leaking out about the troubled investments when the townships were ordered to pay in millions more, to satisfy guarantee requirements. Mayor Asgeir Almås in Hattfjelldal feels cheated.

"I wonder whether Terra had such a lucrative deal with Citibank that they found some fools to earn quick money," Almås told newspaper Aftenposten. His little township with a population of just 1,500 but solid revenues from power plants, invested NOK 100 million and since has paid in another NOK 20 million in guarantees.

Both Terra Securities, which said it would file for bankruptcy protection, and Citigroup, which itself has written down billions of dollars related to mortgage problems, absolved themselves of complicity in the matter.

Terra officials said they're sorry about the losses but the townships must be considered "professional players" who must take responsibility "for the investments they choose to make."

The Wall Street Journal reports that Citigroup said it "believed that the risks of investing in the notes were described in the materials provided to Terra."

The officials in the Norwegian towns say they "asked all the questions we could" about risk levels, including currency valuations.

Nonetheless, the towns have taken big losses on the investments and must "throw good money after bad" to cover guarantee requirements.

The problem, of course, is that the Norwegian towns didn't get out of the garbage investment funds in time like the Florida townships and school districts have.

With banks announcing new write downs related to credit crunch and mortgage problems nearly every day (Wells Fargo and IKB are the latest to do so) and with the housing market continuing to tank nation-wide, you can bet that more homeowners will be defaulting on mortgages, more banks will be writing down losses and more townships, more school districts, more pension funds and more retail investors will risk losing their shirts in this financial mess.

It's all a big three-card monte game and investors need to remember that the game is rigged in favor of the Wall Street guys, the hedge fund managers and the multi-national banks that Helicopter Ben Bernanke continues to keep rescuing while little guys who were stupid enough to buy into what Wall Street was selling lose nearly everything.

Now you'll have to excuse me, I have to go and take a look at what toxic crap my own pension fund has been invested in.

The Carnival of Education...

...is up this week at Matt-a-mattical Thinking. Check it out.

Condos First

The housing situation in Manhattan has been tight for as long as anyone can remember. So the best thing, of course, is to build in areas with good public schools. Everyone knows there's nothing like a good public school to prop up real estate prices and help sell whatever's on the market. But Manhattan's expensive, and paying a $20,000 tuition or three, in addition to mortgage and maintenance fees, could be a deal breaker for some.

But schools like PS 199 are at the breaking point, with no place to put the additional students that new constructions will inevitably bring. And apparently, there aren't any toxic waste sites in the area for Mayor Bloomberg to build on. Still, neighborhood school PS 199 has to continue to accept kids who move into the area, no matter what.

This is nothing new to me. I've been teaching in a building that's exceeded 250% capacity for years, and God help us, really, if there's a fire. A fire, though, would be about the only thing that would garner enough outrage to halt the mayor's pattern of indifference toward learning conditions.

When a parent complained at a recent meeting, Chancellor Klein replied, “Send your kids to private school.” The DoE denies this is true, but they also deny that classes are overcrowded and that teachers are quitting in record numbers. On TV I see commercials that declare class sizes have been reduced, though sizes of 38 and 40 barely raise eyebrows in my school anymore.

Elsewhere in the country—in Florida and Georgia, for instance—developers have to pay impact fees when they build houses so new infrastructure can be created to serve the growing public. But no such policy exists here.

That would be anti-business, I suppose. But it hardly supports the administration's contentions of putting "Children First."

What's going to happen to PS 199? The same thing that happened to my school years ago, of course. In Mr. Bloomberg's New York, it's developers first, then condos first, then sports stadiums first, then billionaires first. And then, of course, it's children first.

Arts and Crafts with Mr. Bloomberg

A few weeks ago, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein graded every school in the city from A to F. 85% of these grades were based on standardized tests in English and math. While some assume that the mayor and chancellor collectively know everything there is to know about education, there are those who maintain that other factors determine how good (or bad) a school is.

For example, is it important for kids to learn music or art? Not really, according to these school grades. But there is another school of thought. Ask Richard Kessler, executive director of the Center for Arts Education:

Multiple studies show that learning in the arts enhances learning in other subject areas and contributes to a student's overall development. In addition to the skills taught in the individual arts disciplines -- visual art, dance, music and drama -- the arts provide students with unique opportunities to work collaboratively, to develop creative and critical thinking skills, to solve problems and develop innovative solutions -- all 21st century skills that employers in New York City and around the world want.

It doesn't take a genius to see, for instance, that regularly practicing a musical instrument develops personal discipline. Parents don't run to school concerts because they think their kids are wasting their time in all those school choruses and orchestras. Is it that hard to imagine that life requires skills that may not be reflected in multiple choice tests? How many kids actually receive instruction in art or music?

According to the Department of Education's parent survey for the 2006-2007 school year, 41 percent of parents surveyed say their children receive zero arts education. A 2006 department study found that hundreds of schools did not have a single certified arts teacher. Other studies have indicated that, even in schools where arts are offered, only a fraction of the students receive the instruction.

And why should principals offer instruction in the arts? How is that going to help them acquire those 20 or 30 thousand dollar merit-pay bonuses? How is that going to help them raise that D to a C and save their jobs? There's really little motivation for them to offer kids music, art, or theater.

Save that for the kids in private schools, I guess.

Candles In The Wind

Tonight the United Federation of Teachers will hold a candlelight vigil outside of the Department of Education headquarters at Tweed Courthouse.

The vigil, which will be led by UFT president Randi Weingarten, is the first public protest by the teachers' union against the NYCDOE and Mayor Bloomberg's reforms in months.

Ms Weingarten explains in today's NY Sun just why she is holding the candlelight protest downtown:

Today, teachers rightly feel that the school system still has little respect and appreciation for all their hard work making a difference in the lives of children. They will express their dissatisfaction this evening at a candlelight vigil at Department of Education headquarters in lower Manhattan.

What's behind their frustration? A growing sense that, after getting the school year off to a promising start, the department is relying on an unnecessarily punitive and counterproductive management style that is intended to create a climate of fear, rather than collaboration, in our city schools.

Weingarten goes on to explain that the city's announcement of a "teacher performance unit" - what she calls a "gotcha squad" - headed by a prosecutor and staffed by lawyers that will assist principals in ridding schools of "bad teachers," was the last straw that caused her to return to an aggressive stance with the city.

Weingarten claims that just a few weeks ago a different tone was coming out of Tweed and City Hall. She says that when she and the mayor agreed to bring merit pay to New York City schools back in October, she says she "touted this as a model of what can be achieved when unions and school management work together as equal partners toward common ground."

But now she says that Bloomberg and Klein are back to being hard-asses and she can no longer sit on the sidelines and let them run with the "'blame the teacher' routine."

What a joke Ms Weingarten is.

Does she really expect thinking members of her union to believe this candlelight vigil and her opinion piece in the Sun means she's looking out for us against the city?

After Ms. Weingarten helped Mayor Bloomberg gain total control of the schools in 2002 without having to be accountable to any other entity, after Ms. Weingarten conceded days in the '02 contract, after she conceded days, time, a sixth class, grievance rights, and seniority rights in the '05 contract, after she conceded health care "cost containment initiatives" (future health care payments by UFT members) in the '07 contract, after she signed off on the change in school financing that helps principals get rid of costly veteran teachers for less costly and more pliable Teach For America missionaries who will be around for a few just a few years, after she helped exile hundreds of good teachers into the abominable ATR system, after she ignored the hundreds of teachers in the DOE rubber rooms who have been taken out of their classrooms without knowing what charges have been levied against them, after she helped Mayor Bloomberg bring merit pay to the New York City school system, thus ensuring that the very issue which the NEA and the AFT opposes has received a stamp of approval from the nation's largest urban teachers' union, after she helped bring in the odious Green Dot education management organization to run charter schools in the city...after all this, she wants UFT members to believe that tonight's candlelight vigil and today's protest in the Sun signals a new era of UFT/Tweed confrontation.

Oh, pleeeeeaaaseeeee.

This is just another Weingarten dog and pony show to make it look like she's doing something aggressive against the mayor and the DOE while behind the scenes she continues to work with Uncle Mike and Uncle Joel to dismantle decades of benefits and job protections the UFT has won from the city.

As Whitney Tilson, education reformer/hedge fund manager, tells the NY Sun, this vigil is an attempt by Ms. Weingarten to pacify her members - it's not meant to be a serious challenge to the mayor or to Tweed:

"Let them have their vigil, and then sanity will return," he said.

"Sanity" for Tilson and many of the other so-called education "reformers" means collaboration between the UFT and the city in dismantling the decades of hard-won UFT job protections and rights as Bloomberg continues his ideology-based movement to privatize the city school system and turn it into a quasi-corporation with principals/CEO's, quarterly standardized test balance sheets, annual performance bonuses, and a gutted, toothless union.

Never mind that as I posted here yesterday, students and teachers cannot be treated like industrial output if you want to have an effective education system.

Education is not just about test scores and data charts, no matter what Bloomberg, Klein and their corporate backers think.

Children are human beings and good educators know that we teach to the whole person - intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually - not just to a blot on a standardized test sheet that can be collected, collated and analyzed.

It's a shame that Ms. Weingarten has not done more to fight the damage Bloomberg, Klein and their ilk have done to the system.

This is not to say that there were not problems with the school system before Bloomberg gained total control.

There were.

But to totally blow up the system three times over, to continually reorganize and continuously add and subtract curricula, to increase the number of standardized tests per year by ten so that education becomes perpetual test prep, to create two different accountability methods - the school report cards and the school quality reviews - that are so antithetical that a school can do exceptionally well on one while receiving a failing grade on the other is not helping to create a better New York City public school system.

Instead, it's throwing ideas and plans at the wall and seeing what will stick.

As I said before, it's a shame that Ms. Weingarten and the UFT leadership have collaborated with Bloomberg and Klein in creating this mess.

But they have.

And holding a candlelight vigil tonight outside Tweed will do nothing to change that collaboration.

What A Bargain!

According to Sol Stern, the New York City public school system budget has increased by $7.2 billion dollars since Mayor Bloomberg announced his Children First reforms in January 2003.

Back in 2003, the school financing budget was $12.5 billion dollars, including pension costs and debt service. In the current fiscal year 2008, the budget is $19.7 billion dollars, including pension and debt costs.

The additional $7.2 billion dollars is a 50% funding increase in the last five years.

When Bloomberg first gained total control of the New York City public school system in 2002, he said that he was going to “make sure we get the most value for the school system’s dollar.”

Stern decides to take Bloomberg up on his challenge and see.

Stern examines the release of the 2007 Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) of the federal government’s National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which compares the fourth and eighth grade math and reading scores on the NAEP exam of 11 of the nation's largest urban school districts, to see just what the extra $7.2 billion dollars has bought.

Stern finds not much.

As has been noted here and elsewhere, New York City students showed little-to-no improvement on the tests.

New York City was the only 1 of the 11 urban districts to show no improvement on eighth grade math scores from 2003 to 2007. In fact, scores remained flat for every ethnic and racial subgroup in the city.

Fourth and eighth grade reading tests were even worse. There was no significant change in proficiency on the fourth grade reading tests between 2003 and 2007 while the reading scores for eighth graders actually fell from 2003 to 2007.

Only fourth grade math scores increased from 2003 to 2007.

Stern concludes:

These results may surprise people who have heard so much over the past five years from the Bloomberg administration and some of the media about New York City’s “historic” gains on the state’s math and reading tests. But the NAEP doesn’t lie; it measures achievement far more accurately than state tests do. No doubt the administration will put the best face on the latest test data. But the reality is that $7 billion in extra education spending has so far produced only pennies’ worth of academic improvement in most grades. The sooner the city faces up to the bottom line, the sooner we can start speaking honestly about how to remedy the situation.

So the additional $7.2 billion has bought a slight increase in fourth grade math scores, a slight decrease in eighth grade reading scores and no significant change in fourth grade reading or eighth grade math scores.

What a bargain!

So, what did Bloomberg spend all the extra money on?

Well, clearly some of it went to teacher compensation. By May 2008, the United Federation of Teachers says teacher salaries in New York City will have increased 40% between 2002 and 2008.

While the editorial writers at the Times, News, Post et al. like to call that increased compensation "raises," the truth is that teachers have given up days, time, a sixth class, grievance rights, seniority rights and other job protections to win the extra compensation.

Nonetheless, it is true that some of the $7.2 billion has gone to salaries for personnel.

Where did the rest of the money go?

Decreased class sizes?

Nope. In fact, Bloomberg and Klein fought the state to use additional state education money on anything but reduced class size:

City educrats have agreed to reduce class sizes in 75 failing, overcrowded middle and high schools in order to collect $258 million from Albany.

The state money was the subject of a dispute between the city and state until a final deal was announced Monday.

Gov. Spitzer had insisted the "Contracts for Excellence" money could be used only to reduce class sizes or support four other state educational priorities, but city officials wanted to support Mayor Bloomberg's agenda, including a program that gives kids standardized practice tests 10 times a year.

Now of course reducing class sizes in 75 schools is, as Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters told the Daily News, "totally inadequate compared to the critical need," but the fact that the state had to take on Bloomberg and Klein to force them to use the money on reduced class sizes in critically overcrowded failing schools goes to show just how little they care about the issue.

So if Bloomberg hasn't used the additional education funding for reducing class size or reducing populations at severely overcrowded schools, what has he used it on?

Well, there is the $80 million dollar ARIS computer system and the additional 8-10 standardized tests New York City public school children will be required to take every year starting in February 2008.

And of course you can't have 8-10 additional standardized tests a year without a testing contract handed out to McGraw-Hill to create those 8-10 additional standardized tests a year.

So far, nobody at the school level actually knows what these 8-10 additional standardized tests a year will look like or what they will test, but I'm sure they'll be great.

What else did the mayor and the chancellor spend the additional education funds on?

Well, there was the constant reorganization of the school system (we're now on our third reorganization in the past five years), the closing of the school districts and the opening of the school regions and then the closing of the school regions and the reopening of the school districts.

Then there was the city-wide reading and math curricula that were added after the mayor took total control of the schools in 2002. The rationale here was that every child in every classroom in every school across the city should be learning the same problem at the same time on the same day as every other child in the same grade.

The key to these curricula changes was "sameness."

So we had the city hire people to measure bulletin boards to make sure the margins were "regulation" and investigate classrooms to make sure they had reading rugs (teachers with irregular bulletin board margins or without the proper reading rugs were written up.)

The reading and math curricula have since gone away and were replaced with a mania about data.

DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA!!!!

The mayor and the chancellor brought in an outside entity to conduct "school quality reviews" that were heavy on the "what are you doing with your data" variety.

The mayor and the chancellor also took the $80 million dollar ARIS computer system and ran the testing and graduation rate data along with student, parent and teacher surveys through it and kicked out school report cards that managed to give D's and F's to many schools that did very well earlier in the year on the "school quality reviews." Many of these schools also have very good test scores, but the report cards measure "progress," not "performance," so schools with excellent test scores in math and reading still managed to receive very low or failing report card grades.

The 8-10 additional standardized tests to be added next year will be added to the ARIS stew and used for the school report cards in the future.

At least until the next mayor comes in and cleans up the mess this one has created.

But to get back to the matter at hand, the mayor has also spent budget money on merit pay for teachers and merit pay for students, closing large overcrowded schools and creating lots of small overcrowded schools in their place, turning toxic waste dumps into school buildings, doling out no-bid contracts to cronies like the Snapple company, holding teacher fairs to alleviate the high teacher turnover problem and let's not forget adding lots and lots of public relations to win over the public and the media to their reforms.

That's a ton of stuff that Bloomberg has spent education money on in the last five years and he sure has little to show for it.

The ironic thing is, if he had taken the $7.2 billion dollars and spent it on lowering class size, reducing overcrowded schools, fixing the existing school infrastructure and providing new and safe school infrastructure for the future, retaining quality veteran teachers and attracting new teachers who learn their profession and stay in the system beyond 3-5 years rather than hiring a bunch of Teach For America/Teaching Fellows missionaries who are trained for 3 months before they're tossed into the classroom to sink, Bloomberg could have done a whole lot more to improve the school system and the NAEP test scores.

But of course Bloomberg and Klein didn't really come in to improve education in New York City.

They came in with an ideology that what the public sector - especially public education - needs to improve is market-based, privatization solutions that will convert the public sector into a quasi-private sector run with a corporate mindset that privileges quarterly results, constant "progress", and ruthless efficiency over long-term results and realistic progress.

Let's call it the "Walmartization" of public education

Never mind that children shouldn't be treated like widgets and quarterly test scores cannot be used to measure school effectiveness the way quarterly profit margins can be used to measure a corporation's performance.

Never mind that constant reorganization of the school system and constant changes to the curricula hurt children who need stability and constancy the most.

Never mind that the Jack Welch/Mike Bloomberg way of treating employees (make them fear for their jobs) has created an environment of hostility and anger in the system rather than forged a partnership between school administration officials and teachers to try and move schools forward together.

You see, when you have billionaire businessmen, failed anti-trust lawyers and their wealthy private sector cronies making 100% of the calls on education policy with no say from anybody outside of their narrow circle, you get a school system that is heavy on the spending, heavy on the p.r., and heavy on constant change, but pretty light on actual results.

Oh well.

The mayor knows that nothing improves a school system better than additional money spent on public relations efforts to fool the public and the media into thinking the smoke and mirror reforms are working.

With Bloomberg set to run for president in '08 as an independent, you can bet we'll see a lot more TV commercials and print advertisements lauding Mayor Bloomberg's education reform record.

But it's all phony.

As Sol Stern and other education experts like Diane Ravitch have noted - the NAEP results don't lie.

There has been little-to-no progress since Bloomberg and Klein started their dog and pony education reform show back in 2002.

The Big Picture

While Mayor Bloomberg's "reforms" do not appear to have improved test scores (the only factor of education he seems to consider important), they seem to have contributed in other ways. It appears teachers are resigning in record numbers. Doubtless the mayor attributes this to the work being too easy and the pay being too high.

However, there's little reason to think this upsets Tweed. Firstly, Deputy Chancellor Chris Cerf disputes the numbers. Typical of Tweed's M.O. , Mr. Cerf sees no need to provide alternate numbers or explain in any way whatsoever why the UFT's numbers are flawed.

Don't expect too much in the way of follow-up from City Hall. Transitory teachers are a bargain. They get the lowest pay, are replaced by others who get the lowest pay, and they never take sabbaticals or receive pensions. That they may never learn to teach is totally irrelevant.
Experience is reviled in this city, and it's all about filling wooden chairs for as little as possible. While this policy may preserve valuable funds for seats in sports stadiums, it reflects nothing less than contempt for this city's schoolchildren.

Thanks to Schoolgal

Thanksgiving for Everyone

Gobble Gobble

Welcome to the 146th edition of the Carnival of Education. Let's talk turkey:

Holiday Dinner

We'll begin with Elementary History Teacher, who's got a pretty good handle on what Thanksgiving is all about.

Math or multicultural mush? Joanne Jacobs knows what she wants on her plate.

How's about a nice side dish of hot potato parent?

Health Food

At Successful Teaching, they claim showing gratitude can make you live longer. Well, all I can say is thank you. Thank you very much.

Ryan from I Thought a Think asks what role schools should play in public health.

How do you motivate kids to be serious students of English? Over at Throughlines, they have a few suggestions.

Homeschool 2.0 offers some must-read books for teachers.

I'll Take This With a Grain of Salt, Please

Mister Teacher doesn't go for that whole turkey thing. He's partial to monkey, apparently.

Here's an alternative to the traditional turkey dinner--it's something called Daft Doggy.

Woodlass from Under Assault questions her union's leadership.

Ever-vigilant Eduwonkette examines how NYC's Education Department spins the test scores.

Home Cooking

Why are they opting for homeschooling over at Learning at Home? Well, since public schools have already pretty much banned everything, what choice did they have?

What's it like for a homeschooling mom to talk to professional teachers? Dawn will tell you right here.

Sure you can teach. But what about your own kids? Here's a parents' guide to improving your children's education and grades.

Lighter Fare

Don't know a 401K from a 57 Chevy? Miss Cellania tells all you need to know about money.

Miss Brave envisions a teacher reality show. Will it be better than Top Chef?

Stressed out from living on a teacher's salary? Get 2 for the price of one--Have a Gneiss Day offers The Confessions of a Playstation Widow, and throws in a Stress Buster free of charge.

Pissed Off Teacher shares the dubious joys of teaching in a trailer, and has some cute cat photos for no extra charge.

Canned Is Fair (but Fresh Is Better)

Mamacita of Scheiss Weekly says there are no excuses in basketball, but perhaps too many in education.

Here are some SAT test-taking tips you might want to share with your students.

Darren from Right on the Left Coast has a tale of two teachers: one's turkey with dressing and the other's Beefaroni.

Do Giblets Have Heartstrings?

So You Want to Teach offers a touching tale about overcoming adversity.

"I am always amazed—and humbled—when I am privileged to witness parents receive devastating news with grace and dignity," says California Teacher Guy. It's well worth reading the whole story, and you'll find it right here.

Warm and fuzzy though he may be, Right Wing Prof labors under the odd notion that if students wish to pass his class, they actually need to do assignments when they are assigned.

Don't Burn the Questions, Please

Why isn't education "reform" catching on with Democrats? Go right to the top and ask the PREA Prez.

According to Instructivist, When Bill Gates says jump, Chicago's Mayor Daley asks only: How high?

University Diaries tackles that ever-troubling mystery--Where do professors come from?

Uh-oh. When schools ban sugary snacks, are they encouraging students to become illicit candy pushers?

Study here? Or study abroad?

Big Apple Pie

Syntactic Gymnastics takes a decidedly jaded view of NYC Chancellor Klein's system of grading schools.

Chaz gives us the skinny on just what qualities Mayor Bloomberg seeks in teachers.

Reality-based educator says if we judged Chancellor Klein by the same criteria we used to grade city high schools, he'd receive an "F."

And Diane Ravitch assesses Mayor Bloomberg's progress on the NYC Public School Parents Blog.

Danger, Will Robinson (Blowfish Sashimi)

Uh Oh. EdNotes Online says watch out--they're conducting witch hunts for teachers.

Jon Swift warns not to vote for Hillary--it could kill David Broder.

Can designing the yearbook place your waistline in peril?

Pasteurized Cheese Food Product

At Smartless, they're discussing the myths our teachers taught us.

There's a lobbyist very publicly bashing Texas schools. But Education in Texas says the public is not getting the whole story.

The Education Wonks examine a professional testing company, and give it an F.

Dave Saba gives a well-deserved F to these teachers as well.

Don't Burn the Questions, Part 2

Is it really possible to live without television?

Sharp Brains asks. "Is intelligence innate and fixed?" Hmm...maybe some of those goshdarn administrators will get smart after all.

Should I write that nasty old test, or should I just swipe a bunch of questions from that Barron's review book? Ask Matthew K. Tabor (but don't ask what the "K" stands for).

Going to the Mat asks---what's the gold standard for charter schools?

What if you. Felix, have to pick up Oscar's tuna fish sandwiches just before parent-teacher conferences?

Miracle Whip

The Tempered Radical describes a professional development seminar that was clearly second to none.

D0 you believe in magic? No? Well read this.

Maybe there's an alternative to that ubiquitous Scholastic Book Fair after all.

Hats in the Ring-Ding

Nancy Flanagan from Teacher in a Strange Land asks whether teachers should get involved in politics. Then, she invites you to a Technology Smackdown. You feel lucky, punk?

Maestra T. wonders why presidential hopeful John Edwards couldn't visit her high school instead of this one.

Menus from the Good Old Days

What's it like to be on strike? The Columbus Education Association remembers it well.

Future Daughters share their favorite things about history.

Times are tough. But Jose Vilson remembers when you could buy things for pennies.

Mrs. T. (no relation to Mr. T.) waxes nostalgic about Thanksgivings past.

Exotic Offerings

How do they handle problem kids in England? Find out here.

Batya at Shiloh Musings feels she's teaching less English and more test-taking skills. All the way in Israel they have the same problems we have here.

Now here's something you don't see every day. In NYC there's an awful lot of talk about grading schools. But over at Principled Discovery, they're discussing a proposal to grade parents.

The Baglady discusses how Asian parents influence their children's success.

Dessert Menu

Even with the finest ingredients, the proof's in the pudding.

The Science Goddess weighs mastery and performance.

Eduwonk asks whether educators should be reviewed by their peers.

Hmm...maybe teaching English to newcomers is not so easy after all.

Next weeks carnival will be at Mattamatical Thinking. Submissions are due on 11/27 by 11:59 pm Eastern. Emails to mbardoe (AT) att (dot) net or use this handy form.

Thanks to all who participated in this carnival!

And special thanks to David Bellel for creating the one and only teaching turkey.

Houston Miracle: Bloomberg/Klein Edition

It is becoming pretty clear that the progress Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have claimed as a result of their education reforms in the New York City public school system is phony.

Last week the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores were released for 11 cities including New York City.

The NAEP scores showed eighth graders have made no significant progress in math or reading since Mayor Bloomberg started his reform campaign in 2002 while progress for fourth graders has stagnated in the past few years.

The poor NAEP score results stand in marked contrast to the "steady" gains fourth and eighth graders have made on state exams since Bloomberg took office, leading B. Jason Brooks, director of research at the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability, to say that the state tests have clearly been "dumbed down" and "simplified."

Today the NY Daily News reports that Chancellor Klein has sent out a mass e-mail to 100,000 principals, administrators and teachers touting the NAEP results as a success. Klein claims new immigrants have been unfairly tested in reading, but if you strip those students out from the test scores, you will see upward trends for the system that show a "story of good progress."

But on the very same day that Klein is trying to defend himself and his mayor from charges that their education reforms have resulted in little-to-no gains in national test scores while other cities around the country like Atlanta have passed New York City by, the NY Sun reports that Klein and Bloomberg essentially cheated on the 2007 NAEP tests by adding tons of testing modifications:

So many New York City students received extra time and other accommodations on a respected national test this year that several testing experts are saying the results should be considered invalid.

On the test known as the nation's report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, New York state gave accommodations to more fourth-graders than any other state in the nation, and New York City gave more help than any of the ten other major cities that participate in a separate city-by-city comparison. On three of four tests the accommodation rate hovered around 20%. On the last — a fourth-grade math exam city officials are trumpeting as evidence the Bloomberg administration's schools program is working — the rate was 25%.

The math test this year showed the city's fourth-graders making record gains, with 79% of students reaching the basic level, up from 73% in 2005 and 67% in 2003. At the same time, the number of students receiving legally allowed accommodations, such as extra time to take the test, having the test read out loud, and receiving a translation into the student's native language, more than doubled, to 25% this year from 12% in 2003.

Shown the numbers, several testing experts said they were shocked.

"That's a percentage which is large enough basically to invalidate the test," a professor at New York University who has advised the city and federal government on standardized testing, Alan Siegel, said. "When you change the statistics for 25% of the people who are guaranteed to be at the lower end, that's going to have a tremendous impact."

An educational statistician who has written multiple studies of NAEP results, Donald McLaughlin, told the Sun he could not recall seeing testing accommodation figures as high as New York City's were this year ever.

That's right - ever.

McLaughlin went on to say that with testing modifications trending so high, there was good reason to "be very suspicious" about claims academic achievement is increasing under Bloomberg and Klein.

The NYCDOE defended the huge increase in testing accommodations by saying that state policies had increased the number of English Language Learners who had to take the standardized tests. In New York, NYCDOE officials told the Sun, all ELL students are eligible for accommodations on both math and reading tests.

But another education analyst, Richard Innes, told the Sun that the rise in testing accommodations in New York City is part of a national trend in response to pressure to show improvements on tests:

"The schools are figuring out: Gee, I've got a weak-performing student. If I consider him learning disabled, he's going to get a higher score on the test," Mr. Innes said.

Increasing accommodations on tests may be a national trend, but as we can see from the stats, New York City is far in the lead of this trend.

Which brings me back to what I wrote in the beginning: the "progress" Bloomberg and Klein tout for their education reforms is phony.

The "progress" on the "dumbed down" and "simplified" state tests comes from manipulating the methodology and rubric of the tests while the federal tests which cannot be dumbed down or simplified show students have made little-to-no progress even after Bloomberg and Klein have doubled the number of students receiving modifications.

When Bloomberg and Klein finally ride off into the sunset and some independent education experts and testing analysts get the opportunity to really look under the hood of the New York City Department of Education, its reform movement, its graduation rates and its test scores, I know that they will find that Bloomberg's "Education Miracle" here in New York is as phony and trumped up as the "Houston Education Miracle" that Rod Paige and George W. Bush cooked up in Texas some years ago.

In fact, the evidence is already in the public domain now:

Bloomberg and Klein have been manipulating state and city test scores to show student progress that federal tests show has not really happened.

They have closed tons of large schools and stopped testing Support Services and ELL students from those schools in order to further manipulate test scores.

They have played with the graduation rates (as I noted in this post yesterday.)

They have continually reorganized the system in order to postpone real accountability for their reforms.

And finally, they have spent millions on public relations to win over the public, the media and the newspaper editorial boards with their smoke and mirror reforms.

For a long time, it worked for them. But the curtain is starting to be drawn back on the "Bloomberg Education Miracle" and as I said earlier, it is becoming pretty clear that the progress Bloomberg and Klein have claimed for their time in power is phony.

New Visions /Garbage Diplomas

The New York Post reports that D.C.-based Policy Studies Associates compared 10 traditional public schools with 10 New Century high schools that are operated by the education reform group New Visions for Public Schools.

The comparison found that while the New Century high schools had a higher graduation rate than the traditional public schools (78.2% to 60.6%), more than half of the students who graduated from New Century schools received "local diplomas," which require a score of 55 on state Regents exams rather than 65.

In contrast, only about 30% of the students who graduated from the traditional public schools received local diplomas.

New York State is scrapping local diplomas next year. At the school where I teach, nearly every student we graduate receives a Regents diploma, even if that means we have to test students 2, 3 or 4 times on a Regents exam after extensive tutoring to help them get a score of 65 or higher.

I know this because I often teach the remedial ELA Regents class for students who have sat for the Regents and received a score between 55 and 64.

You see, the administration where I teach believes the "local diploma" (which most 4 year colleges outside of the proprietary variety will not accept) is essentially worthless.

Apparently the education reformers at New Century schools and New Visions for Public Schools don't quite see it that way, however.

The Post reports that New Century supporters acknowledge that their schools need to prepare more students to graduate with Regents diplomas but they say they are helping more kids to graduate than traditional public schools.

And that is true - the Policy Studies Associates' report found that 17% of students left the traditional public schools without graduating in 2006 while only 3% left New Century schools without a diploma.

But what good is graduating students with a worthless diploma that the state is scrapping next year and reputable colleges won't accept for admission?

I don't think it's any good at all, but what do I know?

Unlike the people in the education reform business at New Visions for Public Schools, I actually spend my day in the classroom trying to help students who haven't been able to score a 65 on a Regents exam achieve that benchmark.

Later today, I will be tutoring a student who has sat for the ELA Regents twice and failed to reach 65. I also will be teaching at least four Support Services students who could easily graduate with IEP diplomas, but my administration believes they can and should try for Regents diplomas.

It's not easy trying to help some students pass all 5 Regents exams with scores of 65, but if a school administration and staff really tries, it can be done.

Apparently, the education reform people at New Visions for Public Schools (who have opened 83 schools in New York City since 2002) don't think it can.

Otherwise, they'd be doing it instead of touting the percentage of students they graduate with garbage diplomas.

H/T: DR

Who Needs Tenure?

Well, it appears Andrew Trees does. By all accounts a fine teacher, Mr. Trees has just been fired from the prestigious Horace Mann Academy after having released a satirical novel about "Academy X." It appears Mr. Trees is adored by his students, and he's received positive performance reviews. Still, the administration didn't like his book and Mr. Trees, though he is filing a lawsuit, appears to have little recourse:

David Reis, who specializes in employment law for Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, a San Francisco-based firm, said the language quoted from the faculty handbook about job protection might be sufficiently vague to allow the school to defend Mr. Trees’s dismissal. “The easiest argument for the school is to say the book and the firing are completely unrelated, that the guy just wasn’t a good teacher and we have evidence of that,” Mr. Reis said. “Or they can say there’s nothing to prohibit us from firing someone who writes things about us that we don’t like.”

Of course, tenure would have precluded Mr. Trees' problem entirely. But there are other implications here. Would Mr. Trees have received positive evaluations if the administration had known he was working on this novel? Wouldn't the people who fired him for it have found fault with him whether or not there was any?

When Klein and Bloomberg start rattling swords about getting rid of bad teachers, I have similar apprehensions. Frankly, I have no sympathy for incompetent teachers. On the other hand, I think the administration adores bad teachers. They provide a handy scapegoat, and according to the Times, this administration sorely needs one.

Is it beneath the integrity of this administration to fire those who criticize them? When Bloomberg faced opposition on one of his school boards a few years back, he simply fired two dissenting members. That's one of the perks of mayoral control, apparently.

Would they fire you because you complain there are 4600 kids in a building designed for 1800? Would they fire you for speaking to the press? Would they fire you for complaining about the ice on the floor that your students keep slipping on? Would they fire you for raising a fuss when they assigned your class to an auditorium with 15 other classes? For raising a fuss when they assigned you to teach in a bathroom?

You betcha they would, if you gave 'em half a chance,

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Bringing In The EMO's

Washington D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee is thinking about bringing in Education Management Organizations (EMO's) to run 27 failing schools in the District.

Under the No Child Left Behind law, schools that fail to meet academic targets for five consecutive years have to be restructured or lose federal funds.

Rhee, a former deputy chancellor in New York City's public school system under School Chancellor Joel Klein, has to decide how she will restructure these 27 failing schools in D.C.

Under the NCLB law, Rhee can bring in private firms to manage the schools, turn them into charters, keep them under the system's control but replace the principals and teachers, allow the state - or in Washington, the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education - to seize the schools, or devise a unique solution.

The Washington Post reports that most districts with schools that need restructuring usually replace staff and create their own unique solutions, such as developing teacher training programs, lengthening the school day and school year, and introducing new curricula to the schools.

But Rhee is leaning toward bringing in Sacramento-based St. HOPE Public Schools, where Rhee previously served as a board member, Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia, or Green Dot Public Schools, based in Los Angeles.

Charter school advocates and EMO operators are applauding Rhee's moves in DC so far:

"The chancellor has identified some of the best organizations nationally doing this kind of work," said William H. Guenther, president and founder of Mass Insight Education and Research Institute in Boston, which studies school reform. "The challenge is how fast and how far you can go."

But the Post notes that Philadelphia turned over 38 academically challenged schools to six different EMO's including Mastery Charter Schools and gave these schools more money to operate than regular public schools, yet test data showed that the EMO-operated schools "didn't fare any better than the rest of the district," according to school system spokeswoman Felecia D. Ward.

As a result of the dismal results at the EMO-operated schools, Philadelphia is going to take a closer look at the schools and the school operators before deciding what course of action to take next to improve them

Henry M. Levin, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University's Teachers College, agrees that turning public schools over to EMO's like Green Dot or Mastery Charter Schools is not a magic bullet solution:

"There's nothing in the literature [to suggest] that privatization will get you revolutionary results," he said.

Indeed, if the city of Philadelphia is used as a test subject, that surely seems to be the case.

Yet Chancellor Rhee, a former member of Teach For America and the darling of charter school advocates and education reformers everywhere, is looking to bring in one of the Education Management Organizations that has failed so miserably in Philadelphia to run failing schools in D.C.

That seems counterproductive to me.

I can understand the need to drastically change the way the 27 chronically failing D.C. schools operate, but why bring in a company that has a track record of failure in another urban city running failing schools to run yours?

You have to wonder if this push towards school privatization is less about actually improving schools and more about simple privatization.

Many of the "reformers" behind the education reform movement - Mayor Moneybags Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Eli Broad, Whitney Tilson, for example - are wealthy businessmen with vested interests in privatizing government to lower their own tax bills and increase profits for themselves and their business cronies.

Think about the hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have handed out to business cronies in New York City for things like test prep, test development, tutoring services, food services, curricula, and computer systems.

Do you think there aren't huge profits to be made by demonizing public schools and privatizing as many as you can while you and a bunch of your business cronies lap at the public tax money trough all the while proclaiming that you're "doing it for the kids"?

The ironic thing is that the education privatization movement is still gaining steam while the privatization movements of health care, military services, and Social Security are under attack.

Most Americans now see that HMO's, Blackwater/KBR/Halliburton, and a Wall Street-run Social Security program are neither more effective nor more efficient in providing the services they purport to provide.

They are, however, very efficient and very effective at providing profits for their investors, their boards, and their CEO's.

Which is perhaps why so many of the so-called education reformers are very efficient, very effective and very wealthy men who stand to make lots of money from education reform and privatization.

From Ms. Weingarten's Secret Diary

Woke up. Watched a little tube. Ate light breakfast, whistled for chauffeur.

Met Joel at usual place. Waiter hosed him down, threw him a steak. Once again, forgot raincoat, rainhat, got wet. Must visit hairstylist in PM. Note to self---leave rain gear in SUV. Knew I'd get no chance to eat, was good idea to have breakfast at home.

Second steak, less tearing and groaning, less flying saliva, but threw bone at chandelier. Strong throwing arm. Expensive repair for taxpayers. No one turned head, everyone pretended not to notice, then Joel finally spoke.

"Teacher BAD! FIRE teacher!"

Putrid breath, as per usual. I hate when he gets like that. How many teachers should we fire? How to make deal w/o pertinent info?

Yuk. Drool everywhere. Will probably come off pantsuit with Woolite. Better idea--Note to self: call Mike Shulman--get New Action boys to dry clean pantsuit.

Made big mistake, replied too loudly, "FIRE?"

Waiter, misunderstanding, brought butane torch. Joel even more upset. Screaming wildly. Flailing limbs in every direction.

"Fire BAD! Joel NO LIKE! Fire BAD!! AYEEEEE!"

Jumped from chair. Bared teeth, growled, viciously attacked waiter. Ran away screaming. Jumped out front picture window with loud crash. Was awful. Expensive repair for taxpayers. Blood all over new pantsuit, total loss, put on expense account. Hope fire didn't spread too far when torch hit floor. Snuck quietly out back door and whistled for chauffeur.

Will have to meet again , try to pin down number of teachers to fire. Note to self--mount token opposition? March? Can always make deal to cancel at last minute. Note to self: wear sunglasses when meeting Joel--best not to be noticed around rampant destruction of property.

Can't wait to get out of here and go to DC.

Edwize Gets Wise...

...but despite the best efforts of the Unity/New Action aristocracy, it seems a case of too little too late. It appears that, despite our repeated concessions to City Hall, despite the fact that we've moved 40 years backwards in terms of teachers' rights, the mayor still wants to target us, spending a million dollars to get rid of more tenured teachers. Does anyone trust this administration to make fair judgments? Is anyone besides the Unity patronage mill surprised?

Well I'm not. Are you? Here's what I posted on Edwize:

It's unfortunate that you came to this realization so late.This was entirely predictable, as were most of the actions of this administration.

Perhaps giving up seniority transfers, days in August, and the right to grieve letters in file did not satisfy them after all.Perhaps allowing teachers to be suspended without pay based on unsubstantiated allegations did not quench their desire to scapegoat working teachers.

Maybe it was not such a good idea after all to give in to reorganization number three, the one that made it even more difficult for ATR teachers to find employment, when the mayor's PR, for once, was on a downward scale after the bus fiasco.

Perhaps, in retrospect, enabling mayoral control with no checks or balances was not in our best interests after all.Maybe it was not, after all, the best idea to allow time for money swaps in lieu of real raises.After all, when people work extra hours in Burger King, they get more pay, and few interpret that as a raise.

Perhaps it was not such a good idea to wave our arms in victory when a toothless class size agreement (with no consequences for the mayor violating it) was enacted.In fact, Tweed is not even bothering to release class size statistics, despite a legal obligation to do so.

In my school, where I teach in a trailer behind a building that regularly exceeds 250% capacity, no one is surprised anymore when class sizes hit 38 or 40.No one is surprised when 48 new kids arrive in one week.

Maybe, considering this mayor's approach, it was not such a good idea to enable and support him every step of the way leading up to this.

Though the UFT's actions have earned us the admiration of Rod Paige, and the editorial pages of virulently anti-union anti-teacher tabloids, perhaps they were not in the best interests of working people after all.

Klein Offers Excuses For The "F" He Received On The NAEP Exams

The NY Times picks up the story of the National Assessment of Education Progress test scores which show NYC public school students have made little-to-no progress between 2005 and 2007 on the tests.

The Times notes that the "stagnant" NAEP results are at odds with the improved state test scores over that time period and show that the city's education gains are "limited."

The Times also notes that Mayor Bloomberg has "trumpeted" the improved state test scores as "evidence that the city is setting the pace for urban school reform" but that other cities around the country - like Washington and Atlanta, for instance - have outpaced New York City on the NAEP tests, suggesting that the reforms Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have put into operation with great publicity have had little effect.

In fact, fourth-graders showed much greater improvement on the reading tests in the years before Bloomberg and Klein took control of the public school system and started experimenting with various reforms and reorganizations.

Now of course Chancellor Klein had to try and spin the NAEP numbers yesterday as a positive for the city and for the various reforms he has helped put into place.

For instance, he said that 79 percent of students in the city are performing at or above basic levels of competence, rapidly approaching the national average of 81 percent.

But the Times reports that federal officials said the slight uptick in the percentage of students reaching proficient or above in math was "statistically insignificant."

In reading, the percentage of fourth graders reaching proficient or above did not change between 2005 and 2007.

In the eighth grade, the percentage of students reaching proficient or above actually decreased by two percentage points between 2005 and 2007.

Yet Klein says these results are proof positive that progress is being made, even though urban school systems that are supposedly in shambles - like Washington, where Klein just sent one of his former deputies to clean up the mess - showed huge gains on both math and reading tests for both fourth graders and eighth graders.

So where's the accountability, Chancellor Klein?

If you and your reforms were judged by the same criteria you used to judge schools for the report cards issued last week (i.e., year-to-year progress, comparisons to similar schools and/or school systems), you would have received an F.

That's right - an F.

Not only did your test scores show little-to-no improvement from 2005 to 2007, but your performance lagged far behind similar urban school systems on both the math and reading tests for both the fourth and the eighth grades.

And yet, instead of holding yourself accountable like you are holding teachers, administrators and schools accountable, you offer lame excuses about how the system is making progress toward "basic" competence and how the dumbed-down, in-house graded state exams are better measurements of mastery anyway.

Again I say, what crap.

Michael J. Petrilli, a researcher at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, noted that the city test scores did not seem to be improving any more than the rest of the state and said “That to me seems quite damning to the Bloomberg administration.”

He means that it's damning that after all the publicity about the reforms and after all the reorganizations and the additional standardized testing and the concessions from the pliant UFT on mayoral control, seniority rights, and grievance rights and the additional school days and the additional seat time for students and the after-school tutoring sessions for failing students and the changes to school financing that allow principals to rid themselves of veteran teachers and bring in cheaper newbies and the stepped-up efforts to fire "unsatisfactory teachers" (as reported in yesterday's Times), Bloomberg and Klein STILL can't improve the scores on the one test where the scores cannot be manipulated and the testing methodology dumbed down.

I'd have to agree.

It's too bad that all the Bloomberg/Klein shills who were waving their pom-poms last week over the release of school report cards by the NYCDOE - like the Daily News, Post and Sun editorial boards and NY Daily News columnist Errol Louis - won't be crying for accountability from Klein and Bloomberg the way they were crying for accountability from teachers, administrators and schools.

We Interrupt This Program to Bring You an Important Message...

The Carnival of Education is coming to New York, specifically right here, next week. Send links to the email address on the upper right or use this handy submission form.

Submissions are due by 6 PM EST next Tuesday, November 20th. Be there or be square.

What Test Score Gains?

The NY Sun reports that New York City students showed few improvements on the the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam (NAEP), a respected national "yardstick" test used to compare student progress across the nation.

The Sun says that NAEP results are usually released on a state-by-state basis, but several large cities agreed to have their own results reported for comparison purposes back in 2002.

Here's how New York City students fared:

Compared to the rest of the country, New York City fourth-graders edge out large central cities slightly on average but fall behind the national numbers. Eighth-graders scored no better on a math test than students in large central cities. That pattern has been essentially unchanged since 2003, the year the Bloomberg administration began to initiate changes in the city's public schools.

...

This year, 34% of fourth-graders scored proficient on the math test, up from 21% in 2003. That is below the national average, 39%, but above the average for large central cities, 28%. When it comes to reading, 43% of fourth-graders in the city this year did not reach the basic level — one step below proficient — down from 47% in 2003. Eighth-grade results were more dismal. In the city, 41% of eighth-graders cannot perform basic reading, up from 38% in 2003, the first year scores were reported, and above the percentages in Houston and Chicago, 37% and 39% respectively. On the math test, 43% of eighth-graders scored below basic, compared with 46% in 2003.

There you have it - after three New York City public school system reorganizations in the last 6 years, countless school closures, curriculum changes, math and reading coaches, additional standardized testing, additional professional development for teachers, additional school days and seat time for students, merit pay for teachers and testing "bonuses" in the form of cash and prizes for kids who improve on tests, there has been little-to-no improvement in the national test scores of New York City students.

Let me repeat, after all the vaunted changes the "Education Mayor" and his chancellor have brought to the New York City school system and after all the glorious press the mayor and the chancellor have gotten for "breaking the status quo" and "bringing accountability to the schools," the national test scores are flat.

Flat.

Sure the dumbed down city and state tests show lots of improvement, but the national tests, which neither the mayor nor the governor can have manipulated or dumbed down to make the scores seem better than they are, are flat.

What do you think about that education reformers?

You have gotten most of what you wanted out of both the UFT and the NYCDOE.

You got a partly privatized public school system with a gutted central bureaucracy and a union that has conceded autocratic mayoral control, merit pay, seniority and grievance rights, and additional days and time.

You got standardized testing added to the curriculum which is used to track school, teacher and student performance on an $80 million dollar computer system.

You got a host of large schools closed down and plenty of your darling small schools and charter schools opened in the past six years.

You got Jack Welch/CEO-style principals in charge of their own budgets and accountable for their own results.

You got school financing reform which allows these CEO principals the freedom to can costly senior teachers and hire cheaper and more pliable Teach for America-type missionaries who will hang around for a few years before moving on to their "real jobs."

You got what you wanted and the result has been flat test scores on the one test that can't be played with by the people in charge of the school system.

Heckuva job, education reformers.

I wonder what happens after you get vouchers, the end to teacher tenure, year-round school and nine hour school days and the national test scores STILL don't show improvement.

Will you then come to acknowledge that there are factors beyond schools that contribute to student performance?

You know, like whether students take some responsibility for their own education and parents take some responsibility for their own children.

Yes, schools have to improve and teachers and administrators need to be accountable for their results.

But parents and students need to be held accountable too.

Whenever I hear education reformers talking about problems in education and their proposed solutions, I never hear them ask for more accountability from parents and students for how students perform in school.

All I ever hear is how teachers suck and the schools are abysmal and something has to change or the United States of America will wither and die.

But until students and parents are asked to take some responsibility for themselves, little is going to really change.

Tony-O, Tony-O, Wherefore Art Thou, Tony-O?

I've often thought having a mobbed-up union boss would be beneficial to teachers, but the other day Mike Antonucci came out squarely against it. I pointed out that after the graft and extortion at least there'd be some benefit to rank and file. Mike suggested Miami where Pat Tornillo ran the union:

He led the nation's first statewide teachers' strike, a bitter walkout that kept 1-million Florida children out of school but gave public employees the right to bargain collectively.

He built the largest labor union in the South, securing higher pay for teachers who paid him millions of dollars in dues - money he used to help elect dozens of Democrats to public office.

Wow. He got higher pay for teachers and the right to bargain collectively. That's nothing to sneer at. And he used the money to elect Democrats in Florida. I'm for that. Maybe if he'd elected a few more we could have avoided the endless reign of George W. Bush.

The UFT, on the other hand, used dues money to elect Republican George Pataki so he could veto 25/55 and improvements to the Taylor Law. They used dues money to support Republican Serphin Maltese, who was instrumental in breaking two parochial school unions. And, truth be told, they've helped elect dozens of Democrats too. All in all, what's the problem here?

Former employees say he charged the Miami-Dade teachers union for $2,000-a-night hotel suites and trips to Europe and the Far East. According to published reports, he used his union credit card to buy tailored suits in Hong Kong, jewelry in California and python-print pajamas from Neiman-Marcus. He is even accused of using union dues to pay his maid.

Hmm...the UFT supports multitudes of trips to conventions for loyal Unity/New Action hacks. It pays 40 million dollars a year to support patronage employees. It pays the salary of a full-time limo driver to whisk UFT President Randi Weingarten wherever it is she goes. Now I won't speculate about python-print pajamas, but who would begrudge a couple grand to a union boss who actually improved conditions for working people? Not me. On the other hand, Ms. Weingarten, who I'm told makes in excess of 300 grand, has brought us the following:

1. Punishment days in August
2. Unpaid suspension based on unsubstantiated allegations
3. A sixth class for most high school teachers
4. Perpetual hall patrol
5. Halved prep time
6. Talk about class size, but no substantive action whatsoever
7. Enabling mayoral control, with no checks or balances
8. Severely abridged seniority rights
9. Compensation increases that failed even to meet cost of living...

....among other things. It's true Ms. Weingarten's innovative "more work for less pay" approach endears her to the likes of Rod Paige. But I wonder if we'd be better off under someone who actually worked to better our lot.

During a recent 30-month period, Tornillo and his wife charged an estimated $350,000 to the United Teachers of Dade, reported the Herald, which said it inspected Tornillo's credit card statements, union checks and financial records.

The spree came on top of the $243,000 salary Tornillo received annually as union president. He is now on unpaid suspension.

Why not get a union leader who works for us, and double, triple, quadruple the salary so he (or she) can do this stuff legally? It's a drop in the bucket, compared to the patronage mill the UFT runs. Did you notice the glitzy television campaign that preceded the UFT election? Ms. Weingarten spent millions of our dues dollars to plaster her name and expensive new logo all over Law and Order. Did anyone raise a fuss? Of course not. It happens before every UFT election so it must be legal.

But it does no good at all for those of us who actually have to work.

Let's get a mobbed-up boss and pay a million a year. Two million a year. What's the big deal if we're already paying 40 million a year in patronage? For that, we still have no one to stand up for us. And the fact is we need someone who will stand for us, rather than simply doing whatever advances her personal ambitions.

Despite popular sentiment otherwise, NYC's 30-year teacher shortage did not occur because the pay was too high and the work too easy. And its legacy benefits neither teachers nor the kids we serve.

Update: Mike Antonucci responds here, asking, "What do you call it when you pay an individual additional money to get the result you want?" I'd call it extortion (but I'm fairly certain Mike has something else in mind.)

You Have the Right...

...to stay in school till you're 21.



I found this over at the Inside Schools blog. While I'm very liberal, never having voted for a Republican in my life (full disclosure: I did once vote for Randi Weingarten), there are some serious issues with this.

One is that it's often mathematically impossible for such kids to have any chance of graduating. When you have kids with 6 high school credits, 21 years old, there ought to be something more realistic offered to them. Simply having them pass time sitting in classrooms does no service to anyone, particularly when schools like mine are over 250% capacity with class size rules routinely violated.

Now some of these kids are new entries to the United States. Maybe they need extra time to learn English. Maybe some kids were sick and had to miss school for a year. But some of these kids are perpetual screw-ups. And with Mayor Bloomberg's typically enlightened policy of 6-12 schools, that could be particularly problematic. I have a sixth-grade daughter, and I'm not all that keen on having her share the halls with 21-year-old losers who have no interest whatsoever in passing classes.

Should kids have the absolute right to stay till 21?

How's That Raise Looking Now?

Randi Weingarten likes to brag that she has won substantial raises for New York City public school teachers over the last few years that have raised teacher salaries by 40% between 2002 and 2008.

To my mind, it's NOT a raise when you have to work extra time and extra days while giving up work protections like grievance and seniority transfer rights to get more money.

To my mind, that's increased compensation for an increased workload with a decrease in work protections.

In any case, it is true that Weingarten has gotten pretty big increases salaries for UFT members in the last few years compared to pre-2002. But even as my salary has increased (along with my workload), I've noticed that my standard of living hasn't.

Reading today's NY Daily News, I think I've figured out why - my increased compensation from Mayor Moneybags for teaching in the New York City public school system has barely kept pace with price increases since 2002.

An MTA Metrocard is 41% higher now than in 2002.

The average homeowners' heating bill is 90% higher now than in 2002.

A gallon of milk cost less than $3 in 2002. Now it costs $4 - a 33% increase.

The cost of bread, soybean products and corn have also risen dramatically in the last five years.

Health care costs? My allergy medicine has increased 200% a month, visits to the allergist have gone up 50%.

Housing costs? Well, you know how high the price of real estate has gone in the last five years. While home prices have fallen 5.3% nation-wide in the last half year or so, they are still on the rise here in New York City. With a low dollar helping foreigners buy real estate in New York at steep discounts, that trend doesn't seem like it will end in the near-term.

The cost of rent? Also on the rise and with apartment availability near all-time lows, not expected to decrease any time soon. My own rent has gone from $1850 to $2400 a month between 2004 and 2007.

How about college costs? CUNY tuition has risen from $3200 a year to $4000 a year.

According to the Daily News, the consumer price index (CPI) for the New York City area has risen 18.5% between 2002 and 2007, and that's not including health care costs. With oil near $95 a barrel and gas well over $3 a gallon, price inflation will only be accelerating in coming months. Bloomberg News reports that the U.S. government bond market is showing increasing anxiety that the plummeting value of the dollar will result in runaway inflation:

The combination of the currency's 31 percent decline during George W. Bush's presidency, oil prices near a record high and interest rates at a four-year low have convinced investors that consumer prices are poised to accelerate. While all Treasuries have gained during the worst U.S. housing market since 1991, none have done better than Treasury Inflation Protected Securities.

When investors start putting their money into inflation-protected bonds, you can be sure they don't believe the Federal Reserve chairman when he says inflation pressures are in check.

With the increase in food, energy, housing, education and health care costs that I have "enjoyed" over the past few years, neither do I.

Which brings me back to Weingarten and those "raises" she has won for me over the last few years.

When I think about the generous 2% "raise" Randi Weingarten won for me this year and the 5% "raise" she won for me next year (along with the change in language in the contract that allows Randi and the mayor to negotiate health care "cost containment initiatives") and I think about all the extra work I have to do as a result of previous contracts, I get pretty irritated.

Add that irritation to the fact that all the extra work I have to do and all the extra money I get for that extra work really amounts to nothing after inflation and I get mad as hell.

Basically, I am working longer and harder to make less money. Plus Randi and Company have set the pattern that anytime New York City teachers want a COLA, they have to concede something like days, time, or work protections.

How about the rest of you? Are you mad as hell too?

Thanks, But No Thanks

New York City stagehands went on strike over the weekend, joining TV screenwriters in work stoppages that have brought Hollywood and the New York TV and theater worlds to a screeching halt.

The NY Times reports that Mayor Bloomberg - himself a hard-nosed contract negotiator and a noted union-buster - offered to help "moderate" the stagehand strike:

At the Veterans Day parade yesterday, Mr. Bloomberg told reporters he had offered to provide a moderator as well as a neutral venue to continue the talks, as he did during the musicians’ strike in 2003.

“It is a private dispute,” the mayor said, “and they have to, in the end, work it out. We can’t tell them what to do, but we can make sure that we give them every opportunity.”

The president of Local 1, the stagehands' union, James J. Claffey, told the Times he continues to decline the mayor's generous offer to moderate the dispute and provide a setting for negotiations.

Might that be because the mayor has taken every city union to the cleaners over the past six years in contract negotiations, forcing work rule changes and additional concessions from union members for "raises" that often have amounted to less than a cost of living adjustment?

I dunno what Claffey's thinking is on this point, but as a fellow union-member who has watched my work day, work year and work load increase while my standard of living has fallen, I say it's best not to take any chances.

Tell Mayor Moneybags to go scratch and bang out a deal without his help.

The Calling

Batya at Shiloh Musings writes about whether teaching is "a calling" and she's published a more extensive analysis as an op-ed right here. She claims it isn't actually a calling, but a profession.

While I agree with her overall sentiments, I think it's a little more complicated than that. Teachers in Israel, where Batya works, are embroiled in a strike movement. Batya (in striking contrast to UFT leadership) doesn't see giving management the moon and the stars as a viable option.

The problem, I think, is some who label teaching a "calling" feel that it therefore precludes consideration of salary and working conditions. Teachers who want more money are routinely reviled in the tabloids here, and perhaps Israeli papers are not much different. Still, we have to buy food for our kids and mend their tattered little clothes somehow. We're not ascetics, and we haven't taken vows of poverty.

Our jobs are important, and we touch a lot of young lives. We don't want to strike. But we're taken for granted in the city, and all our union knows how to do is give back and give back more (without even demanding cost of living in return).

Maybe teaching is a calling. Maybe it isn't. But our kids will be stuck with the world we leave them, and raising the standard for working people is the very least we can do, calling or no. Should we leave them a world in which oppressive employers like Green Dot can pretend their sham labor organizations are unions, or should we demand better?

Teaching may be a calling, and it may be a job. It's probably a combination of both. But it's a short-sighted teacher who doesn't understand that better working conditions and fair salaries benefit both us and our kids.

Sucking In The Seventies Redux

Awhile back I posted on my blog that it was starting to feel like the 70's all over again.

With oil near a $100 a barrel, with gold near $850 an ounce, with the dollar at all-time lows, with inflation increasing and economic growth slowing, with the U.S. fighting two foreign wars on credit and with America's reputation abroad falling dramatically, it really does feel like the Ford/Carter/Beame/Koch era all over again.

It's the little stories that add to my feeling that the 70's have come back.

Remember the Rolling Stones song "Shattered" from the 1978 Miss You album?

That song seemed to crystallize the feeling that American society was completely unraveling and nobody could do anything about it:

All this chitter-chatter, chitter-chatter, chitter-chatter bout
Shmatta, shmatta, shmatta -- I can't give it away on 7th avenue
This towns been wearing tatters (shattered, shattered)
Work and work for love and sex
Ain't you hungry for success, success, success, success
Does it matter? (shattered) does it matter?
I'm shattered.
Shattered

Ahhh, look at me, I'm a shattered
I'm a shattered
Look at me- I'm a shattered, yeah

Pride and joy and greed and sex
Thats what makes our town the best
Pride and joy and dirty dreams and still surviving on the street
And look at me, I'm in tatters, yeah
Ive been battered, what does it matter
Does it matter, uh-huh
Does it matter, uh-huh, I'm a shattered

Don't you know the crime rate is going up, up, up, up, up
To live in this town you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough!
You got rats on the west side
Bed bugs uptown
What a mess this towns in tatters Ive been shattered
My brains been battered, splattered all over Manhattan

Uh-huh, this towns full of money grabbers
Go ahead, bite the big apple, don't mind the maggots, huh
Shadoobie, my brains been battered
My friends they come around they
Flatter, flatter, flatter, flatter, flatter, flatter, flatter
Pile it up, pile it high on the platter.

So here we are in 2007 and the crime rate is going up across the country because the Bush administration has taken resources away from crime fighting and put them into anti-terrorism efforts.

A bridge fell in Minneapolis because the government failed to take proper care of it. Infrastructure across the country is falling apart, but many politicians talk tax cuts and privatized roads and bridges rather than developing real plans to fix infrastructure problems.

Here in New York, the MTA has decided to spend billions to expand the 7 train eight blocks and three avenues to help out Mayor Bloomberg's billionaire real estate buddies build up the Far West Side. Meanwhile, the subway system shuts down every time we get a heavy rain and the MTA says they have to raise a round-trip fare to $5.

Steam pipes explode in New York City, burning pedestrians and showering Midtown Manhattan with asbestos. The Con Edison CEO shrugs his shoulders and says it's the city's fault that his company's pipes explode.

Large swaths of California burned last month and some areas of the state couldn't effectively fight the fires because they had cut funds from emergency services like fire fighting.

On the economic front, food, health care, education and energy prices are through the roof while wages aren't keeping up with headline inflation.

Wall Street has been plagued by wild bouts of turbulence - the Dow goes up 200 points one day, then falls 350 the next. One day earlier this year, the Dow fell 500+ points in a couple of minutes.

Banks are writing down billions of dollars from their balance sheets as a result of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. More write-downs are expected to come.

Real estate values, wildly inflated over the last few years, are falling across most areas of the country. So far, real estate values have fallen 5.3% from the high reached in June of 2006. Values are expected to fall another 5%-15% in the next couple of years. Meanwhile home foreclosures are increasing as billions of dollars in sub-prime and Alt-A adjustable rate mortgages reset to higher rates.

Facing lower tax revenues, Mayor Bloomberg has announced 1.5% cuts at city agencies this year, 5% cuts for next. Can lay-offs be far behind if the economy falls into recession next year?

Strikes abound these days. GM workers were on strike for awhile, taxi cab drivers keep walking out every month. Striking screenwriters have shut down series and live TV shows. Striking stagehands have shut down most of Broadway.

Instead of bedbugs, we have staph infections killing kids in NYC public schools.

While the prime rate isn't going up, up, up, many financial analysts expect the Federal Reserve will have to reverse course and raise interest rates by the middle of next year.

Even Alan Greenspan, that most bubblicious of bubble-makers, has warned that inflation is going to be a huge problem in the next thirty years and said he expects the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates to double digits to deal with the problem.

You heard that right - Greenspan thinks double digit interest rates will be needed very soon to deal with inflation problems.

With even Greenspan calling for sane fiscal policy to burst his self-created bubbles, doesn't it feel like the 70's all over again?

I think it does.

Shadoobie doobie doo.

Accountability Is for the Little People

The NY Times editorial board today took a stand directly opposing the simplistic A-F grading system embraced by Bloomberg and Klein:

...Bloomberg should ditch the simplistic and counterproductive A through F rating system. It boils down the entire shooting match to a single letter grade that does not convey the full weight of this approach and lends itself to tabloid headlines instead of a real look at a school’s problems.

I couldn't agree more. I'd say, though, the "tabloid headline approach" is precisely what's worked for this mayor in the past. Few, if any, of his "reforms" would pass muster if they were examined closely (as they often are by that pesky Diane Ravitch).

In fact, few observers look very deeply, which is why NY "reforms" are emulated all over the country. I just got an email from Pittsburgh, where they're adopting the NY model of 6-12 schools. I don't know about you, but I have a kid in 6th grade, and I would not be altogether keen on having her share a building with some 21-year-old loser working on his sixth high school credit.

A commenter from LA recently wrote that he follows this blog with interest, as idiotic NY "reforms" (like mayoral control) have a way of showing up on the left coast within 6 months of inception here. I speculated they may have sent us Green Dot solely for revenge, but the fact is people all over the country look to Mayor Bloomberg for examples. Ms. Weingarten can claim the new merit pay program is not a merit pay program (and what on earth is the difference between merit pay and performance pay?), but merit pay proponents all over the country can use the UFT's concession as an excuse to use merit pay in their communities.

Typically, there are huge flaws in the mayor's plan:

...people all over the city were understandably skeptical when a high-performing school was given an F and several low-performing schools — those actually on the state’s failing list — were given A’s and B’s.

Beyond that, people who know the growth models well were displeased to learn that New York’s first crack at the system for elementary and middle schools was based on a single year’s test data, instead of the accepted standard of three years.

Yet you won't be hearing those details on the 6 o'clock news, and that's not what people will remember. Mayor Bloomberg no longer needs results to support his programs. He can simply blame all problems on working people, close the schools in which they work and fill them with non-union or union-lite charters, saving a great deal of money for sports stadiums and luxury boxes.

If this mayor truly gave a damn about schools, he'd insist on good teachers, reasonable class sizes, and decent facilities for all the schools. Instead he focuses on cost-cutting nonsense that utterly fails to address the dysfunction in our system and continues to shove public school kids into obscenely overcrowded buildings, often on toxic waste sites. The mayor's priorities are crystal clear.

For the most part, recent critical press notwithstanding, you'd have no clue from the sleepy media.

So Much For That Bull Market

On October 27, I took a look at the state of the American economy in a post called Bull@#$% Market.

At that time, both the Dow (13,806) and the S&P (1535) were near all-time highs. The Nasdaq (2804), while not near an all-time high, was at its highest level since the dot.com bust in 2000-2001.

The Federal Reserve was meeting in three days and was expected to cut the benchmark interest rate another 25 basis points to 4.5%, further stoking already hot equity and commodity markets.

On the same day that the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee cut interest rates, third quarter Gross Domestic Product numbers were released showing the American economy grew at an annual rate of 3.9% - far higher than what analysts were expecting.

Two days after that, the October job numbers were released showing the economy added 160,000 jobs. This number was also much higher than analysts expected and seemed to indicate that the American economy was not in danger of falling into recession.

All seemed right with the world that week, or as right as things can be while the U.S. is fighting two foreign wars with borrowed money, the domestic real estate market continues to tank, banks are writing down losses from the sub-prime mortgage fall-out, and oil is over $90 a barrel.

Optimism abounded on Wall Street and many people assumed the Fed's interest rate cuts (with at least one more expected in December) would help the Dow and the S&P hit all-time highs before the end of the year.

Since November 2, however, the Dow has fallen to 13,042 and is in danger of dropping below the 13,000 level. The S&P plummeted past the 1490 support level and now stands at 1453. The Nasdaq dropped to 2627.

We're now not that far from having an official "correction" in the market (a drop of 10%-19%).

In addition, plenty of financial companies have announced more write-downs related to sub-prime mortgage exposure (Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Wamu, Wachovia, E-Trade, Merrill Lynch) with both UBS and Bank of America warning of additional write-downs expected in future months.

S&P downgraded its outlook for Washington Mutual Inc. and IndyMac Bancorp Inc. to "Negative" from "Stable," and for Capital One Financial Corp. to "Stable" from "Positive" as a result of continued credit problems.

Compounding problems for Washington Mutual, NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced an investigation into whether WaMu improperly pressured home appraisers to provide inflated home values (and inflated profits for the bank) in order to justify making home loans to consumers.

WaMu stock has fallen precipitously as a result, following Citigroup into the toilet.

Cuomo also warned that other banks that colluded with appraisers to inflate home values are in his sights and will receive subpoenas in the near future:

``I don't believe it's just about Washington Mutual,'' Cuomo said at a press conference in Manhattan today. ``I believe it's widespread. I believe it's the rule not the exception. And we're investigating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other investment banks as to the underlying practices that have allowed this to go on for so long.''

Cuomo is also suing First American for conspiring with WaMu to inflate home values.

Further problems for mortgage lenders could hurt an already horrible real estate market.

According to the latest Case-Schiller Home Price Index,U.S. home prices fell 4.5% over the last 12 months and at an annual rate of 8.5% in August.

Home prices are now 5.3% below their peak in June of 2006.

20 out of the top 28 markets in the U.S. are seeing serious declines in prices while inventories are an all-time high.

In a series of articles published today (see here, here, here, and here), Newsday reports that the housing slump is already hurting the Long Island economy as consumers can no longer tap their homes for equity loans and go shopping at the mall or the local car dealership.

Long Island's economy is heavily dependent on consumer spending and with consumers pulling back on purchases and foreclosures increasing in many areas, Long Island is looking at a serious recession in the near-term.

Marketwatch wonders if California, a state responsible for 20% of the nation's GDP, is already in a recession as a result of falling home prices, rising foreclosure activity, slowing consumer spending and rising unemployment:

"California seems to be sliding into recession," wrote Jan Hatzius, chief economist for Goldman Sachs, in a research note earlier this week. Hatzius based his appraisal on the sharp increase in the unemployment rate in the state from 4.7% in November 2006 to 5.6% in September 2007.

While a 5.6% jobless rate may seem low, the important thing is how much it's risen. Hatzius said any increase of more than 0.6 percentage points in California's unemployment rate has always been associated with a national recession.

The consumer is slowing nation-wide, a concern because 70% of the nation's economic activity comes from consumers.

October's retail sales were particularly bad.

2/3rds of retailers missed analysts' expectations.

Same-store sales rose just 1.6 percent last month, the slowest growth since October 1995.

Even when retailers did show growth, much of it came from higher food prices, an inflationary indicator rather than an indication of true growth.

Speaking of inflation, while the Federal Reserve continues to insist that inflation is in check, U.S. consumers aren't buying it.

Consumer confidence is at its lowest level since the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

With gas over $3 a gallon nation-wide and oil near $100 a barrel, consumers say they expect inflationary pressures to increase in coming months and think they will have to spend less on other goods to meet increasing food and energy costs.

That doesn't bode well for the Christmas sales season.

Indeed, some retailers are already cutting prices very early in the season to stoke purchases.

Nonetheless, most analysts estimate that this year's Christmas retail sales will be dismal and worry that a poor X-mas season will further pressure an already weakening economy.

Back on the real estate front, a couple more homebuilders filed for bankruptcy (see here and here) while another of the nation's largest homebuilders, Beazer, stopped paying subcontractors working with them.

The New York City real estate market hasn't taken a hit from the bursting of housing bubble yet, but that's not exactly good news for the American economy either.

With the dollar at an all-time low against a host of other currencies, foreigners are coming in to snap up New York real estate at bargain prices.

While that helps prop up the real estate market for now, it does suggest that long-term economic growth will be hurt as the American dollar approaches bargain basement status.

As Steve Forbes is so fond of saying on CNBC, no country has ever devalued itself into prosperity.

As for the New York market, demand continues to outstrip available homes and apartments in every borough but Staten Island, but much of the demand is fueled by healthy activity on Wall Street.

If the markets continue to tank and Wall Street companies ratchet up lay-offs (so far lay-offs have been limited to divisions of financial companies related to sub-prime mortgages, CDO's, et al.), the New York real estate market will take a hit just like most of the rest of the country already is.

Which brings me back to what I was saying a couple of week's ago - the problems bubbling under the surface of what looks to be a fairly good economy (4.6% unemployment, 1.9% core inflation, stock indices still up for the year) are going to start exploding.

With hundreds of billions of sub-prime and Alt-A mortgages ready to reset to higher rates by the middle of next year and with foreclosure rates already increasing all over the country, the write-downs resulting from the mortgage mess by the financial companies aren't close to being finished.

Which means Wall Street hasn't seen an end to turbulence just yet.

Usually the end of the year brings a stock market rally and big Christmas bonuses for many Wall Streeters.

This year may be a little different.

The Dow has already fallen 7.9% from its record close just one month ago.

As I wrote earlier, a couple of percentage points more and we'll officially be in a correction.

With commodity prices through the roof and the dollar through the floor, it seems unlikely that the Fed will be able to cut rates much more before doing serious harm to the economy (like stagflation.)

Consumers, already overburdened by high debt levels and falling home values, are going to be further hurt by increased commodity prices.

If the consumer stops spending (and the October retail sales data seems to show this already happening), you can bet the economy will fall into an official recession by the middle of next year.

Which means the bull may be out of this market for a while, no matter what Helicopter Ben and his merry money printers at the Fed do to try and save it.

Look Under Every Rock

When UFT President Randi Weingarten approved a merit pay scheme (which isn't merit pay, according to Ms. Weingarten), she included an Easter egg for Chancellor Klein. Apparently, as Woodlass discovered, there could be dire consequences for those who opt out:

A school’s agreement to participate in the bonus program shall be considered, along with other criteria, as a positive factor in determining whether the Participant School is to be phased out or given a year’s moratorium on a possible phase-out. Nothing herein alters applicable law with regard to school closings. [Memorandum, Oct. 23, 2007, no.6]

That is to say, if your school is about to be closed, whether or not it chose to adopt merit pay could be a factor. So if you don't feel like becoming an ATR teacher, wandering the DoE landscape as a permanent sub (at least until the UFT twists the knife they've placed in your back and has you fired), you'd goshdarn well better consider opting into that "optional" merit pay program.

Let's talk charter schools for a moment. Over at Edwize, they've added to their comments section by including incoming links from sites they consider acceptable (not this one, of course--voices of real dissenting teachers can be dangerous). In their most recent attempt to pimp the union-busting, tenure-busting, seniority-busting Green Dot incursion, they included a link to "Democrats for Education Reform."

This group reveals the following:

...the UFT's Jon Gyurko (who used to be the charter school czar in the NYC Department of Education) has a blog post today on EdWize about the union's partnership with Green Dot to do a charter high school in the South Bronx.

It's telling that the UFT sees fit to employ the DoE's former "charter school czar" and of course this speaks volumes as to the priorities of our leadership. The "Democrats" continue:

A very interesting development: Essentially, for example, you have the nation's largest teachers union local endorsing a common-sense, site-based labor contract which doesn't have things like set working hours and is focused on results.

By "common-sense," of course, read no tenure and no seniority rights. By "site-based," infer Green Dot employees will not have the protections in the UFT contract Ms. Weingarten has not yet bargained away. By no "set working hours," read you will work whenever the hell Steve Barr tells you, you won't be compensated for extended jury duty, and you'll be docked whenever you get called away to care for your sick child.

By "focused on results" infer they can hound you out of your job whenever the mood strikes them. The laughable "just cause" job protection has never even been tested. Since there are no seniority rights, they can simply eliminate your position "just cause" they feel like it.

Shame on the UFT, ostensibly a pro-labor organization, for enabling this "union lite" nonsense, which will further erode working conditions for middle-class Americans.

The Backlash Continues

The Times, Sun, Post and Daily News editorial boards may have loved Mayor Bloomberg's and Chancellor Klein's new school report card grading system based upon a complex formula of standardized test score progress, student/parent satisfaction and school environment rather than overall achievement, but parents, educators and even some education reformers are crying foul.

Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, called the DOE's school grading system "reductive" and "depressing."

Bard High School Early College, a school where students can earn not only a high school diploma but also two years' worth of college credits and an Associates' degree, received a C in the latest DOE assessment.

Apparently the Bard high school is not making enough yearly progress in turning out students even though the overwhelming majority have completed all of their Regents exam requirements by sophomore year and are holding an AA degree by the time they rent the limo for their high school prom.

Botstein has some pull with the city, so he's getting a second look from the DOE. No doubt Chancellor Klein will do the politically expedient thing, replace the Bard high school's C with an A, and try and put this public embarrassment behind him.

But what about the hundreds of other quality schools with high graduation rates and excellent test scores that have received crappy grades from the DOE because of the reductive nature of the formula the DOE is using?

Sure, those schools can ask for a second look at the report card from the DOE, but I can guarantee you that if they are not high profile schools like the Bard high school or do not have someone in the school or a parent of one of the students with some political muscle, that second look will be pretty cursory.

Andrew Wolf, columnist at the NY Sun who says he first introduced the idea for school report cards in the paper five years ago, issued an apology for that mistake today:

Assigning letter grades to schools may lend itself to press coverage, but does little to improve education. The value added concept, which could and should stand on its own, is now corrupted with a bagful of subjective adjustments, bonus points, and bureaucratic discretions. Once boiled down to the single familiar letter grade, we end up with nothing.

Wolf writes that the tests the DOE are using to cook up their school grades are "poorly conceived or administered" (and if you've ever tried administering a Task I ELA Regents Listening Passage to kids, you'll know what he means.) They have not been designed for the kind of systematic assessments the DOE is doing with these report cards.

On top of that, he notes how using only two years of testing data is problematic because it increases the likelihood of anomalies. He says that this is the most frequent criticism he has heard from testing professionals. You need more than two years of data to get a reasonably accurate measurement.

Wolf concludes by saying that

But most important to me is that trying to boil everything down to a letter grade distorts the process. The weighting of the many factors that comprise the grade become political decisions, open to question after the fact.

Each datum could stand on its own. We should use value added test results to inform instructional decisions about individual students, and instructional strategies for the whole school and, indeed, the entire system.

Similarly, the opinion surveys of teachers, parents, and students can stand on their own. So can attendance figures and the dozens of other indicators that make up the score. Weighting all of this and distilling an artificial letter grade may be newsworthy, but not productive.

Finally, there's the question of the city administering, grading, and evaluating the school system it itself runs. The legislature should insist on turning these functions over to an independent entity, one that would ensure that the conclusions are objective, not part of an enterprise whose goal includes advancing the political fortunes of whoever happens to be mayor.

Indeed, that seems to be what much of this is all about - increasing the political fortunes of Mayor Bloomberg (erstwhile independent presidential candidate) and Chancellor Klein (erstwhile Attorney General or Secretary of Education in either a Bloomberg or Clinton administration.)

Both Bloomberg and Klein knew that editorial writers and tabloid editors would eat up a school grading system that could be boiled down to a simple letter grade, even if that system is a hodgepodge of data that ultimately distorts the actual performance of students, teachers, and administrators at many (especially high-performing) schools.

They got what they wanted - headlines declaring how innovative the grading system is and TV coverage of Mayor Bloomberg lecturing the TV audience about school accountability.

But in reality, this vaunted new school grading system - propped up by no-bid testing contracts and an $80 million computer system - is doing more harm than good to students, educators and schools.

But as I noted earlier, the report cards haven't been created to help students, educators, or schools.

They've been created to help the political fortunes of Bloomberg and Klein.

Y'all Come Back Now, Hear?

NYC Educator received 890 visitors yesterday. That may not sound like much compared to big time blogs, but it's a pretty good day for us.

Thanks very much for reading.

Green Dots on the Big Apple

In the most recent issue of New York Teacher, an article celebrates the coming of Green Dot charter schools to NYC:

The new school will also give its unionized teachers an explicit say in school policy and curriculum; a full and fair disciplinary process based on a “just cause” standard from the first day an educator is employed; a professional work day rather than one defined in minutes; and the flexibility to adjust the contract in critical areas over time.

Note the "just cause" standard, which does not appear to have been tested in practice, is not tenure. Green Dot has very particular notions about tenure. Here's what Steve Barr said while guest blogging on Eduwonk:

...our teachers gladly give up tenure for a more relevant just cause.

Just cause indeed. Here's what Green Dot's website says their teachers have:

...no tenure or seniority preference...

That's fairly straightforward, isn't it?

...a professional work day rather than defined minutes...

Does this mean you'll be executives, making your own hours? Then why do they dock you if you have to leave for an emergency?

Are you content to rely on the kindness of Steve Barr? He does seem like a nice guy. I understand he buys pizza for teachers when he visits schools to encourage them to dump their unions. And he's utterly charming in interviews. Here's how he describes comments from A.J. Duffy, a real live LA union leader, who suggested he might be cherry-picking students:

“It’s bullshit,” says Barr. “It’s like me saying, ‘Duffy’s a pig fucker.’ Have I seen him fuck a pig? Do I have photos? No. So I can’t say it. He should check these things out before he says them.”

I can certainly see why Ms. Weingarten is so thrilled about partnering up with him. And there are other tangible benefits for teachers. Let's just check some other goodies from the Green Dot contract:

1. Teachers are encouraged to do jury duty during vacation time. Jury duty is compensated up to five days. If you’re stuck beyond that, too bad for you.

2. If your kid’s school calls, or anything happens requiring you to leave more than half a day, you’re docked a full day’s pay. If you miss less than half, you’re docked a half day’s pay.

3. Layoffs are based on “legal requirements and qualifications,” “satisfactory evaluation,” and “expertise and relevant experience.” Seniority is considered only if they’re not able to make a determination based on these factors.

4. Strikes are not permitted, and violations will go to binding arbitration.

5. If teachers choose a PPO health plan (like GHI), Green Dot will pay a maximum of $525 a month.

6. Maximum teacher salary is $74,182.

That's an interesting twist on giving higher pay to teachers, as the UFT article claims. And you'll find a lot more on what "just cause" is right here (Scroll to the bottom). The UFT has never addressed any of these points, and they've been completely silent on the absence of seniority rights at Green Dot.

Green Dot is very important to the UFT. That's why the UFT Academic High School VP doesn't hesitate to libel me in Edwize (blatantly attributing an LA Times statement to me) when I criticize it. It's high time our union stopped representing charter schools (which are not subject to the grading system that may cost you your jobs) and started representing working teachers again.

Working Americans are not much in need of union-lite systems where you can be dismissed "just cause" your boss feels like it.

Holding Charter Schools Accountable

As I noted yesterday, the NY Post reports that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have decided that New York City's charter schools do not have to operate under the same accountability rules as New York City's public schools.

While all of the city's 1,224 public schools either received a report card or will receive one in the very near future based upon a complex combination of test score progress, student/parent satisfaction with the school and graduation rate, the city's 60 charter schools will not.

According to the Department of Education, charter schools cannot be judged by the same accountability rules as public schools because "they don't measure student, teacher and parent satisfaction using the same Department of Education surveys."

Even some charter school advocates say the DOE's failure to issue report cards for charters makes it look like the charter's have something to hide.

Other charter school advocates dismiss the criticism, noting that the high level of accountability built into charter school contracts serves as enough of a public record.

But if that's so, then why not hand out the DOE surveys to parents, teachers, and students at charter schools the way they were handed out at public schools and grade charters under the exact same accountability standards as the public schools?

If charter schools operators and advocates want to be taken seriously in this debate, then they need to force the DOE to issue report cards using the same ridiculous accountability measurements for charters as they used for public schools (see here for just how ridiculous the standards used are.)

Eva Moskowitz, former mayoral candidate and current charter school operator, said as much to the Post:

"There's no reason we couldn't fill [the survey] out. We'd be happy to do that," said Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Charter Network, which operates a school in Harlem. "If you were a charter-school operator and the chancellor asked you to fill out a survey, would you do it? I would.

And Merryl Tisch, vice chancellor of the state Board of Regents, noted that not issuing report cards for charters makes the whole movement look suspicious:

"I think it's a mistake not to assess them the same way public schools are assessed. "There have been charter schools that have really struggled along the way," she said. "What's wrong with letting people know that?"

Indeed.

While charter schools in New York City are being given a pass by city officials, Ohio officials, led by Democratic Attorney General Marc Dann and Democratic governor Ted Strickland (pictured above), are cracking down on poor quality/failing charter schools.

You see, in Ohio, any idiot who wants to operate a charter school can get one.

Republicans, friendly to charter schools, ran all the statewide offices in Ohio for a very long time and helped license tons of charters since 1998.

According to the NY Times, Ohio has over 70 groups, including universities, nonprofits and many unconventional agencies, who can authorize charter schools.

Major Republicans donors, former Ohio football stars and lots of other people with no experience or knowledge of education have been allowed to open charter schools in Ohio.

As you can imagine, many of these schools are not so good.

William Peterson, a former University of Dayton football star with no experience in school administration, opened four charter schools.

All are now in "academic emergency" and the state's attorney general is suing to close at least one of them.

Commercial companies run plenty of charter schools in Ohio as well.

The Times reports that David Brennan, an Akron industrialist and a major donor to Republican candidates, has been authorized by the state to run 30 charter schools.

Most of his 30 charters are on academic watch or academic emergency.

In 2007, the state’s school report card gave more than half of Ohio’s 328 charter schools a D or an F.

Before 2007, little oversight was done to assure that failing charters either improved or closed.

It's probable that failing charters would have continued to be given free passes by Republican officials in Ohio, but last year's election swept most of them out of office.

Corruption scandals involving stolen pension funds regulated by the former state attorney general Ken Blackwell and pay-for-play episodes involving the former governor Robert Taft helped end the GOP's decades-long reign of Ohio.

At the federal level, Ohio Republican Congressman Bob Ney was sentenced to 30 months in jail in the Jack Abramoff scandal.

Democrats took five out of the top six offices in the state and began exerting oversight powers upon the state's charter schools.

The NY Times reports that Attorney General Dann is suing to close down three failing charter schools and is investigating dozens of others.

According to the Times, it is the first effort by any state attorney general to close down failing charter schools.

Governor Strickland has backed Dann up in his efforts:

“Perhaps somewhere, charter schools have been implemented in a defensible manner, where they have provided quality,” he said. “But the way they’ve been implemented in Ohio has been shameful. I think charter schools have been harmful, very harmful, to Ohio students.”

Charter school advocates are not sitting still as their beloved charter school movement comes under assault. They are alleging that the attorney general's attempts to close failing charter schools are a political attack:

“These suits are the latest in a long line of Democratic assaults on the charter school program in Ohio,” said Terry Ryan, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which sponsors several Ohio charter schools. Mr. Ryan said it was hypocritical to sue failing charters without moving against Ohio’s scores of failing neighborhood schools.

The Times says that a pro-charter group is helping to pay the legal fees for the three failing charter schools that Attorney General Dann is trying to close down.

Attorney General Dann dismisses charter school proponents' criticism that he is launching a political attack against charters, saying that he simply is using oversight powers to regulate charters more vigorously than did his Republican predecessors:

“We’re already changing behavior,” he said. “If you think all the other failing charter schools aren’t trying to figure out how to improve their academic performance, you’re mistaken.”

He added, “There are some great charter schools in Ohio that fill a gap in our education system.”

Perhaps there are some great charter schools in Ohio.

But with at least half of them given D or F grades and with charter school advocates supporting all charter schools whether they are successful or not and helping to provide legal fees to keep failing charter schools opened and operating, it looks like the great ones are being swamped by the tons of bad ones.

I'm all for closing truly bad public schools.

I do not believe the 50 public schools Mayor Bloomberg is threatening to close here in New York City all deserved to be closed.

For example, PS 35 in Staten Island has 98% of students passing the math test and 86% passing the reading test, yet the school received an F from the DOE in the latest assessment.

Clearly, PS 35 should not be considered a failing school, nor should it be a candidate for closure.

I am sure, however, that there are a few schools in that list of 50 F's that have chronically bad records and ought to be closed down.

You can be sure that the charter school advocates like the folks at the Fordham Foundation will be screaming bloody murder if they are not closed down.

And yet those same charter school advocates aren't screaming bloody murder that charter schools aren't being held to the same accountability standards as public schools by the NYCDOE and they certainly aren't screaming bloody murder to have failing charter schools in Ohio shut down.

Instead charter school advocates are defending those failing charter schools and providing money for legal fees and lawyers to help keep those failing charter schools opened and operating.

As I said yesterday, all schools are created equal, but charter school seems to be just a little more equal than others.

Right Wing Prof Holds Court...

..and presents this week's Carnival of Education.

The Backlash Starts

The day after Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein released 1,224 public school report cards based upon a complex formula of increased performance on test scores and oblique comparisons to a few other "similar" schools, a backlash from parents has started.

The NY Times reports that some parents of students in schools with sterling reputations are hopping mad that some of these schools received less than sterling grades from the Department of Education in the latest DOE assessment.

Many schools that received accolades in last year's Department of Education-sponsored Quality Review assessment received mediocre or downright bad grades in the latest progress-based DOE assessment.

Many schools where students regularly do exceedingly well on No Child Left Behind assessments were also given mediocre grades. Some were even given F's.

The NY Daily News looks at one school - PS 35 in Staten Island - where students ace the standardized tests (86% of students pass the reading test, 98% pass the math test) and reports that the school received a failing grade because

Schools are judged on whether student test scores were higher in 2007 than the prior year. At PS 35, where kids had among the best scores, only 35% showed improvement in reading and only 23% in math.

Because scores were up across the city in 2007, PS 35 actually earned negative points when compared both with the city and its peers. Its average rating came to -0.239. That was multiplied by 55 to give the school -13.1 points.

There you have it, folks - a school where 86% of the kids pass the reading test and 98% pass the math test is "failing" because it only showed 35% improvement in reading and 23% in math from 2006 to 2007.

On the face of it, that assessment is ridiculous.

Sure, PS 35 could have improved more in their reading test scores, but should the school really be labeled "failing" and become a candidate for closure because only 86% of students passed the reading test and only 35% showed improvement on the test from 2006 to 2007?

Should PS 35 be considered failing because only 98% of students passed the math test and only 23% showed improvement on the test from 2006 to 2007?

I think most rational people would say that PS 35 should not be labeled a "failing school" under such a misguided assessment.

Yet Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein, obsessed with data and intent upon shaking up the school system as much as possible before their autocratic tenure comes to a merciful end (three Department of Education reorganizations and counting!), have decided that it is perfectly rationale to say that PS 35 is a "failing school."

Presumably the closure notice will come later in the year, the principal will be fired and half the staff will be dumped into the system-wide substitute teacher pool.

And the education reformers and their supporters - folks like Errol Louis at the NY Daily News and the editorial boards at the Times, Post, News and Sun - will all cheer and say "Hurrah!!! Those lazy educators who are hurting our children are being held accountable by the mayor and the chancellor!!! Now we know which teachers should be fired and which teachers should be given merit pay and which teachers should be placed on notice that if they don't shape up, they'll follow some of their colleagues into career oblivion!!! Hurrah!!!"

And a school like PS 35 - where students overwhelmingly meet proficiency, where 35% of students showed improvement on the reading test and 23% showed improvement on the math test in 2007, where 86% passed the reading test and 98% passed the math test - will be closed.

What a victory for education reform!

Heckuva job, education reformers!

Heckuva job, Mr. Mayor and Mr. Klein!

You've really showed the nation how to proceed with education reform.

Label schools where 86% of students are proficient at reading and 98% are proficient at math as "failing" and close 'em.

That'll bring "real reform" to the system.

POSTSCRIPT: The NY Post reports that while all 1,224 public schools in the city received grades under the DOE's new progress-based assessment initiative, the city's 60 charter schools did not.

According to the Department of Education, charter schools "don't measure student, teacher and parent satisfaction using the same Department of Education survey" as the other public schools, therefore they cannot be held accountable under the same progress-based assessment initiative.

Charter school advocates say charter schools already have a "high level of accountability built into charter school contracts" and that should be enough.

Yet if charter schools are so doing so well at educating students, why shouldn't they be held to the same accountability standards as regular public schools?

If regular schools can be placed in a pool of "similar schools" and rated according to overall test score achievement and yearly progress, then so can charter schools.

The fact that they were not held accountable under the same progress-based assessment standards is not a surprise, however.

Some of the city's new small schools - part of the mayor's vaunted "small schools initiative" - were also not given grades under the new DOE assessment.

It seems that all public schools are equal but charter schools and small schools opened by the mayor and the Gates Foundation are created just a little more equal than others.

School Grades

Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein unveiled their vaunted school report cards yesterday.

50 schools received F's, another 99 received D's.

The NY Sun reports that the mayor and the chancellor usually close between 5 and 15 schools a year, but the mayor threatened to close as many as 149 schools this year.

But some of the schools that received poor grades in the latest DOE assessment received good grades under other assessments.

For instance, some schools that do well under No Child Left Behind measurements received low grades in the latest DOE assessment while other schools that have low tests scores received high grades from the DOE.

The Daily News reports that

The prestigious Center School on the upper West Side - a sought-after school that had a 91% passing rate on eighth-grade state math exams - was slapped with a D.

Public School 35 on Staten Island received an F despite 98% of fourth-graders passing math exams. Junior High School 151 in the South Bronx earned a B even though just just 8.5% of eighth-graders passed math.

The NY Times also lists schools with excellent reputations that were slapped with some surprisingly low grades by the DOE:

Several esteemed elementary schools that middle-class parents often factor in to their real estate decisions — including Public School 6 on the Upper East Side, P.S. 87 on the Upper West Side, P.S. 234 in TriBeCa and P.S. 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, — received B’s. Other popular schools fared worse. P.S. 154 in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, received a D, as did Central Park East I in Harlem.

The chancellor responded to criticism from parents and educators that some schools have been short-changed by the grading system that relies on improved test scores each year by saying that

The city is trying to create a "rising tide," and all schools at all levels need to continue moving upward.

"If you're not making progress, if your kids are not moving forward, then I don't think the school is doing well," Klein said.

Of course, if you take that statement to its logical conclusion, it means that all schools will have to eventually reach 100% proficiency for all students on every test or risk being labeled "failing" by the DOE assessment and thus at risk for closing.

It's ridiculous to say that because a school doesn't have 100% proficiency every year, it ultimately has "failed."

And yet that's exactly what No Child Left Behind (which also uses 100% proficiency as a benchmark) and the latest Kleinberg school assessment movement are doing.

Chester Finn wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the quest for 100% proficiency is a fantasy:

No educator in America believes this can be achieved anytime soon, not with 100% of the kids and by any reasonable standard of proficiency. The truth is that boosting our students' proficiency from today's 35% to 70% or 80% would be a transformative accomplishment. But no politician dares say that, lest he instantly be skewered with "which 20% of the kids don't you care about?"

Meanwhile, the federal mandate to produce 100% proficiency fosters low standards, game-playing by states and districts, and cynicism and rear-end-covering by educators.

You can bet that the latest DOE assessment will garner more game-playing with tests, cynicism and rear-end covering.

Remember, many of the tests used in the DOE assessment are graded in-school.

Anybody want to bet some principals and assistant principals are going to put pressure on teachers to grade a little easier on tests that have already been dumbed down by the city and the state?

When those test scores magically increase next year, will that be cause for celebration?

And how about those schools that received A's this year? What happens when a school with 90%+ proficiency doesn't increase next year?

Will that mean that the school is "failing" and needs to be threatened with a shutdown or will it mean that educators at that school are already doing an excellent job of helping as many students as they can to do as well as they can?

Randi Weingarten, president of the UFT, noted that high-performing schools are disadvantaged by the new DOE assessment:

“If you have kids that are high-performing kids, you have to continue to push them in lots of different areas, not narrow the curriculum to math and English.”

Of course it was Weingarten and the UFT that allowed hooey like school report cards, additional standardized tests, and teacher merit pay tied to those tests to happen in the first place by enabling total mayoral control for the Little Autocrat Mayor.

Unfortunately with the mayor able to make all decisions for the school system without input or accountability from anybody outside of his own circle of cronies, students are just going to have to put up with more and more test prep and less and less real learning.

Art, music, drama, and other enrichment activities will continue to disappear from the curriculum as schools spend more and more time and resources on math and reading. Science and history will also take a back seat to the subjects that count for the tests.

At the end of the day, Bloomberg, Klein and the other education reformers will continue to pat themselves on the back that they are increasing education standards and helping better achievement for students from all backgrounds.

And they have - no generation of children has ever been better at filling in little circles with number two pencils than this one.

As for actually being able to think critically, appreciate art, music, and drama, or read or write anything that doesn't have a test prompt above it, not so much.

And personal growth or life skills like financial literacy and conflict resolution - sorry, that will have to be done on their own time.

Heckuva job, Kleinberg.

Heckuva job, education reformers.

No Bathroom For You

The NY Daily News reports that students at Bronx Little School have to share one bathroom for both boys and girls.

Over the summer, the Department of Education began remodeling work on the girls' bathroom.

The boys' bathroom has become a unisex bathroom for both boys and girls

As a result, teachers have to take boys and girls to the bathroom in separate shifts.

Some students in the pre-K to fifth grade school, unable to wait for teachers to take them to the bathroom, suffer accidents in the classroom.

Parents have begun sending kids off to school with book bags, lunch boxes and extra pants to change into after they soil themselves.

Parents want to know why the bathroom is being remodeled during the school year instead of the summer.

Principal Janice Gordon said through a DOE spokesman that parents were overstating the number of bathroom accidents and the school keeps extra clothes around anyway just in case young students have accidents.

Plus two regular bathroom breaks are scheduled throughout the 6 hour school day and kids ought to be able to hold it until those regularly scheduled breaks.

After reading yesterday's cover story about Mayor Bloomberg's life in Newsweek, I suspect the mayor is less than sympathetic to kids who don't have the willpower to keep from going to the bathroom.

In the Newsweek article, Jon Meacham writes about how Mayor Bloomberg learned valuable lessons growing up as a little Jewish boy among a bunch of Boston hooligans and anti-Semites who used to be mean to him.

From this tough upbringing, the mayor learned self-reliance, determination, ambition, and direction.

He also learned how to hold it when the Boston toughs wouldn't let him use the school bathroom without paying for it.

The kids at Boston Little School really should feel special.

Like Mayor Bloomberg got when he was a kid, they're getting very valuable lessons in self-reliance, determination, ambition, direction, and of course how to hold for hours at a time when you gotta go.

So take that, parents of Boston Little School students.

This has been a teachable moment for your kids.

And who knows better about teachable moments than Mayor Bloomberg and his newly reorganized Department of Education.

Newsweek Does Bloomberg's P.R. For Him

When you're a media mogul with a billionaire dollar TV, radio, and Internet empire, you can drive your own press coverage.

Mayor Moneybags, ever the savvy media mogul, managed to get editor Jon Meacham to put him on the cover of the latest edition of Newsweek and write a glowing 11 page article about him and his presidential ambitions.

The article reads like little more than a press release from Bloomberg LP's p.r. department with Meacham slobbering all over the little mayor with such sycophantic assessments as this one:

From TR to FDR to Reagan, our greatest politicians have understood that showmanship is a critical element of leadership, and Bloomberg is among the best showmen and leaders at work in American politics.

Much of the rest of the article is full of similarly laudatory drivel. Clearly Bloomberg would not have given Meacham access to him if the article wasn't going to be overwhelmingly positive and help him drive home important campaign themes and memes for his future White House bid in 2008.

So Bloomberg is allowed to wax nostalgic about growing up in New England and tell what it was like to face the challenge of anti-semitism and still come out ahead by working harder than everybody else and believing in the American Dream.

Bloomberg is described as a man who is a "good father" (take that bad daddy Rudy Giuliani) with "limitless energy" (take that lazy Fred Thompson) who has "patriotism in his blood" (take that Super Patriot John McCain) and plenty of "sanity" (take that Ross Perot.)

He is lauded as a someone who "has learned a lot in his city-hall years" (take that George W. Bush, who has apparently learned nothing during his White House years) and prides himself on his "candor" (take that super-secretive Hillary Clinton) and "centrism" (take that John Edwards.)

Most of all, Bloomberg's pals and Bloomberg himself are given space to tell what a wonderful guy he is and how he has brought everybody together in New York City in ways that Bad Daddy Rudy Giuliani didn't and couldn't.

Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch (the guy who supported "uniter" George W. Bush in 2004) says Bloomberg has made New York a "more tolerant place" by "virtue of his personality."

Bloomberg himself says he can do for the country and the world what he has done for New York City:

"The job of being president is to lead the country and the legislature, and it is pulling those together. And because America is the only remaining superpower, you are the leader of the free world, it is having the credibility and working with other countries to get them all to work together to stop genocide, to stop nuclear proliferation, to make sure we have fair trade among countries … Trade, immigration, terrorism, fighting disease—all of those things require cooperation. And one of the sad things is that at the moment America is not liked around the world. We are closing our eyes. We have this view that we can do it alone, as we are getting more into a world where you can't. You couldn't do it before, and you certainly can't do it now, and it's inconceivable that you could do it tomorrow. And I don't hear from the candidates how they would go about pulling the world together, getting people to respect us. How do you get people to respect you? Show them recognition, respect, that you are listening to them. I don't care how smart we are, other people have good ideas, and what works here isn't perfect for them."

So there you have it - vote for Bloomberg in '08.

He's a uniter who listens to others, can make the world a more tolerant place, knows what problems need to be solved and knows how to solve them.

Plus he's a nice guy and his ex-wife loves him.

Oh, and the press love him too (Little Tommy Friedman of the New York Times all but declared his support for a Bloomberg presidency at a dinner for Conservation International when he introduced Bloomberg by saying "The only thing a lot of us would like to change about Michael is his job title, but I won't go there …")

It's not until page 8 that Meacham manages to mention the sexual harassment and gender discrimination allegations that have plagued Bloomberg throughout his career:

he is far from a universally revered boss; there have been serious questions raised about the treatment of women within the Bloomberg corporate culture. In 1998, in a complaint against Bloomberg and the company filed in federal court in Manhattan, Sekiko Garrison, one of the earliest recruits to Bloomberg's largely female sales force, claimed that Bloomberg insulted and harassed her and other female employees. Garrison's most startling allegation was that when she told Bloomberg she had become pregnant, he told her to "kill it." She said that Bloomberg also expressed dismay that she was the 16th company employee to go on maternity leave. (A Bloomberg LP official called the allegations about discrimination against pregnant women "ridiculous … untrue," and said that the company "really goes above and beyond the norm in providing family benefits, and it's an incredibly family-friendly culture.")

In 2000, Bloomberg tried to walk out of a deposition after being asked about claims that he had pointed to various women in his office with the explanation, "I'd do her." "It was resolved," Neal Brickman, Garrison's lawyer, told NEWSWEEK. "I'm very happy with the resolution." He added that he could provide no further details—including financial details—about the settlement because the terms were "confidential." (Bloomberg and his city-hall office declined to comment on the details of the lawsuit. "We made a settlement and agreed not to talk about it," Bloomberg told me.)

But even here Meacham does Bloomberg's public relations work for him and dismisses the charges, writing that Bloomberg's friends say Bloomberg has "steadily grown out of a prolonged adolescence" which presumably means he's no longer telling female staffers he wants to "do" them.

I guess that means he's safe to be around White House interns.

At any rate, the Newsweek cover story will get the Washington CW class all atwitter about a potential Bloomberg bid.

You can bet that most of the Beltway press are rooting for Bloomberg to run (as Little Tommy Friedman acknowledged this week), especially as the current press favorite, Barack Obama, continues to peter out as a candidate (the latest Newsweek poll shows Obama trailing Hillary Clinton by 20 points even after the Democratic debate in Philly last week in which Clinton was hammered from all sides as "phony," "dishonest" and a "loser.")

With over a billion bucks to throw into the race and with plenty of cronies in the media like Jon Meacham at Newsweek and Little Tommy Friedman at the NY Times to do much of his public relations work for him, Bloomberg will have a much easier shot at running for the presidency as an independent than any other independent candidate in recent history.

This doesn't mean he actually has a shot to win.

He doesn't.

But he will affect the race in ways that are difficult to figure right now.

The latest Newsweek poll finds a Bloomberg candidacy hurts Republicans and helps Dems, but I still find it hard to believe that pro-gun control, pro-carbon emissions tax, pro-gay rights guy who the NRA loathes takes votes away from the GOP.

I will make one prediction that I think is a gimme: as we get closer to the primary season and as the Republican and Democratic nominees for president become clearer, additional laudatory Bloomberg stories will show up in the mainstream media, planted by the mayor's top political aide Kevin Sheekey (the same Bloomberg aide embroiled in a lobbying scandal that the Daily News reported on last week.)

Bloomberg hopes that voters will be turned off by the polarizing figures of Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani and he can come in as the "uniter" with the can-do spirit and "limitless energy" who can "go about pulling the world together."

With Jon Meacham, Little Tommy Friedman and so many other reporters and press people waving their pom-poms for Mayor Moneybags, I wouldn't totally count him out even against long odds.

A billion dollars and positive press coverage can go a long way toward making Moneybags into a viable presidential alternative to Rudy and Hillary.

Saint Rudy Talks Numbers

Well, we all know Saint Rudy's favorite number--9/11. After all, on 9/10 he was a bum, about to slink away from NYC, and the next day he was America's sweetheart. That's pretty good for a guy most people would be afraid to invite to their houses for spaghetti.

And it's damn good for a guy who went to court to demand the right to bring his mistress to a home he shared with his wife and young children. No Bill Clinton there. More like, "Damn right I was with Ms. Lewinski, and I'm bringing her home to meet the wife and kids right now."

But now Rudy is on a mission to make sure health care doesn't get to the bootless and unhorsed. To that end, he put an ad on the radio:

In the radio ad, Giuliani, who has suffered prostate cancer, said the U.S. survival rate for the disease was 82 percent, but the survival rate in Britain was just 44 percent "under socialized medicine."

It appears, though, that Mr. Giuliani got his statistics from the same folks who said we needed to invade Iraq:

A health department spokesman said the latest figures from Britain's Office of National Statistics showed a five-year survival rate of 74.4 percent for prostate cancer.

That's a significant difference. And that's not all:

Even that difference, as experts explained, probably has nothing to do with the British National Health Service and much to do with the aggressive screening programs employed in this country. (And for the moment, let's merely mention another highly pertinent issue, namely that the great majority of prostate cancers occur in men over 65, which indicates that many if not most are treated successfully under Medicare -- our version of national health insurance for the elderly -- or by the Department of Veterans Affairs, which comes as close to truly socialist healthcare as any system in the world.)

But the supreme irony is this--Saint Rudy was actually treated under a government program--specifically GHI, then a non-profit health care network popular with New York City employees (like me). So I guess it's easy for him to say we don't need to help those who've got nothing. After all, that was his entire approach to the school system--My kids don't go there, so what the hell do I care? That's why he had no problem proposing welfare recipients be required to work in public schools. Why shouldn't people chronically unable to find jobs serve as role models for our kids? After all, they're not his kids.

Sadly, that approach is precisely the one taken by the current administration, which has no qualms about sending kids to toxic waste sites or fighting tooth and nail when people ask leased schools be inspected as thoroughly as city-owned schools. Note they don't build sports stadiums on toxic waste sites. The billionaires who own the teams would never put up with that.

I read somewhere, "If Rudy becomes president, every day will be 9/11"

Free Samples

Click here if you'd like to hear Raising Sand, the new CD by Robert Plant and angelic Alison Krauss.

Including Through the Morning, Through the Night, by Gene Clark, one of the best songs ever, and some great, quirky all-around rockabilly and blues stuff.

We Get Letters

As you may have heard, Ms. Randi Weingarten, UFT President, has interrupted her ascension to DC and whatever else it is she does to examine the problems of teachers in rubber rooms. She also has several members of the UFT patronage mill looking into this issue. Here's an account of one instance of her involvement:

I'm sure you know that Randi had a Rubber Room Meeting at 52 Broadway. She had at least 200 RR people show up. After showing up at 5:00PM instead of 4:10PM...,

First of all, it's well known that Ms. Weingarten travels in a chauffeured car paid for through UFT dues. How many times have you told the chauffeur to garage the limo, only to have him drive around the block in an effort to impress his girlfriends? So you can't automatically assume the lateness was her fault. Furthermore, every teacher has had to deal with late students, and as far as I can tell, lateness is never their fault.

...she listed "10 Points" in a Power Point presentation that she was going to address concerning the TRC. Most of them were nebulous. The weasel, of course, did not hand out a copy of any of them to the attendees. What she is a master of however is filibustering. After each comment by a teacher she'd talk as long as possible to change the topic to nonsensical issues or to obfuscate the issue.

Well, let's give credit where credit is due. At least Ms. Weingarten takes the time to ostensibly answer questions. Over at Edwize, her minions simply delete inconvenient comments and pretend they don't exist. So you're ahead of the game right there.

We listened to a lot of horror stories about what principals can do to teachers. One story was about how one administrator was sentenced to 30 years in prison for some sex crime. Nevertheless, this administrators U evaluation of a teacher was used to send a teacher to the rubber room. You can't make this stuff up.

Well, that's not entirely Ms. Weingarten's fault. The creation of the "imperial principal" was made possible not only by the UFT, but by Bloomberg and Klein as well. Ms. Weingarten did not actually write the "reforms." She simply declined to oppose them and accepted them for compensation increases that failed to meet cost of living.

Here at NYC Educator, we endeavor to tell the whole truth, and we certainly hope Ms. Weingarten will appreciate our spirited defense of her actions. That's just the kind of folks we are.

Mayor Bloomberg Wants To Give Students Cell Phones

Remember Mayor Bloomberg's war against cell phones in the public schools?

Remember how Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein refused to listen to parents implore him to overturn the ban on students carrying cell phones in public schools?

Remember how he vetoed a city council bill that gave students permission to carry, though not use, cell phones in schools (just in case they need to talk to mom or dad in an emergency)?

Remember how the city council overrode his veto 46-2 back in September, but Mayor Bloomberg said "Nahh, nahh, I don't have to enforce your stupid bill!!!"?

Well, I remember, and I have to tell you that I was quite surprised today to read in the NY Times that Mayor Bloomberg plans to give cell phones away to students as rewards for good grades.

The giveaway will part of the mayor's "merit" program that pays students for achievement and doles out "school-wide bonuses" to teachers based on standardized test scores.

The mayor, not often given to noticing irony in his proposals and policies, sees no contradiction in his proposing to give students free cell phones if they get good grades but guaranteeing confiscation of them if they carry them into their schools.

Luckily other people get the irony:

Councilman Lewis A. Fidler, who sponsored a bill to try to loosen the cellphone ban by requiring schools to allow students to carry phones to and from school, said the proposal was “almost funny.”

“The fact that they even would think that this might be a powerful incentive for students is delicious,” Mr. Fidler said. “It’s a clear indication that people at a level below the mayor and the chancellor realize that this is a vital piece of technology.”

Yes, a cell phone IS a vital piece of technology these days, especially after 9/11 when we learned that it is important parents be able to contact their children wherever they may be.

I can understand why Bloomberg doesn't want students to use cell phones in schools, but I have to tell you, I have never had a problem with kids and their cell phones.

Whenever I see a kid using his cell phone in class, I simply ask the student to please put the cell phone away.

He or she has always complied with my request.

I know occasionally kids give teachers a hard time over cell phone use, but by and large most kids know they're not supposed to be using the phones in school and put them away when asked.

So come on Mr. Mayor, why not comply with the overwhelming wishes of parents, students and city council members and allow students to carry cell phones in school?

I mean, you can't offer a cell phone to a student as reward for achievement and then not actually let him or her carry it.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

In Leo Casey's most recent column on Edwize, he decries the politics of personal attack. I found that ironic, and posted this response:

When the LA Times suggested teachers were throwing tenure out the window to join Green Dot, I reported it. Mr. Casey then suggested I was making up facts to suit my daily rant, or some such thing.

It's always illuminating to hear Mr. Casey's denunciations of personal attacks. However, Mr. Casey has no qualms about publicly libeling real working teachers when it suits his convenience.

What a disgrace that 80,000 working teachers must subsidize such blatant hypocrisy.

Minutes later, the reliable UFT censors deleted my comment. Apparently, personal attacks are fine if you're part of the UFT aristocracy. Responding to them, however, is strictly forbidden. In fact, Edwize is supposedly non-political, so you may not even mention caucuses, particularly the Unity Caucus and its monopolistic antics. Nonetheless, Edwize has no problem mentioning ICE, the opposition caucus. in an article entitled "A Grave Injustice to the UFT Tradition of Union Democracy."

Speaking of union democracy, here's an apt quote from Life After the Rubber Room:

When I was chapter chair the representative from the Manhattan High Schools was not part of the ruling Unity party. This apparently bothered the UFT leadership so much that they changed the way people vote. They used an old trick used by segregationists in the 60's. If you were afraid that a minority group would elect representatives you switched to an at-large system. If you had 10 house representatives and 20% of your population was black you changed the way voting was done to have the representatives elected at large. This almost assured that all of the representatives were white.

In our case, of course, they ensured that all the representatives were from Unity. It was designed to shut out New Action. New Action used to be a viable opposition party, but now endorses Ms. Weingarten in exchange for patronage gigs and double pensions for its leaders. Ms. Weingarten now calls them the "responsible opposition," and greatly respects them for not actually opposing her. Now they throw a few seats to New Action, and work to shut out ICE, the opposition party that actually opposes the patronage mill.

As a teacher and a parent, I find the notion of saying one thing and doing another repugnant. Unfortunately, when you don't have the truth on your side, there are few viable alternatives. Perhaps the UFT's peculiar notion of democracy is a contributing factor when over 75% of teachers don't even bother voting in the union election.