DeBlasio pick is experienced tweeder

From Capital New York:

Thanks to his lack of executive experience, de Blasio was widely expected to name a capable administrator to handle city operations, and [Anthony] Shorris would seem to fit the bill.

Shorris served as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ed Koch, and de Blasio called him “one of the central architects of the Koch administration’s affordable housing program,” which is thought of as one of the most successful affordable housing programs in city history.

Shorris went on to become Koch’s finance commissioner, and then served as deputy chancellor for operations at the Department of Education in the Giuliani and Bloomberg administration.

In the summer of 2003, Shorris, whom the Daily News described as a “moonlighting school deputy,” resigned his position following reports that he had a second job consulting for Local 1199.

The 1199 gig had the approval of both schools chancellor Joel Klein and the Conflicts of Interest Board. But, as the News noted, “Public reaction…was less forgiving.”

“‘Who needs this shit?’ Shorris said to a colleague when he told him of his pending departure,” reported the News.

Has Bloomberg dropped the education ball?

From the NY Post:

Remember the time Mike Bloomberg jetted off to sunny Bermuda as a monster snowstorm bore down on the five boroughs? Never again, he said afterward, woefully, while the city ever-so-slowly dug itself out of the drifts.

Well, some tigers just can’t change their stripes.

For there he was last week, down in Maryland giving America a firearms intervention while the United Federation of Teachers and his own crack Department of Education negotiators pulled his pants down on teacher-quality reform.

Transforming the city’s public-school system into a national model for quality and effectiveness was once right at the top of Mayor Mike’s personal legacy list.

But then came the third-term blahs, the departure of Joel Klein as schools chancellor, the ensuing Cathy Black debacle, the ascendancy of the thuggish United Federation of Teachers boss Mike Mulgrew — and the now-pervasive sense that Bloomberg no longer much gives a damn about the city’s 1,400 schools.

Fact is, he’s always been long on big ideas and short on follow-through (congestion pricing, anyone?). The schools seem to be no different.

Meet the new schools chancellor

From the NY Times:

Joel I. Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, is resigning and leaving city government and will be replaced by Cathleen P. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced at City Hall Tuesday afternoon.

Mr. Klein, in turn, will become an executive vice president of the News Corporation.

The mayor called Ms. Black “a superstar manager who has succeeded spectacularly in the private sector” and added, “There’s no one who knows more about the skills our children will need to succeed in the 21st century economy.” A former publisher of New York magazine, she went on to become publisher of USA Today and now heads Hearst, which publishes Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Good Housekeeping and other titles.

The mayor lauded Mr. Klein, whom he appointed in 2002 after gaining control of the city’s schools, for turning “New York City’s long-dysfunctional public school system into one that the Obama administration has hailed as a national model.”

“He leaves a legacy of achievement that makes him one of the most important and transformational educational leaders of our time,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Joel has implemented innovative changes that have made an enormous difference in the lives of millions of children.”

3 failing high schools receive federal funding

From the Times Ledger:

Three low-performing Queens high schools will be receiving more than $1 million each in federal funds each in order to improve their performance.

Flushing and Long Island City high schools will each receive $1.8 million and Queens Vocational and Technical High School will get more than $1.3 million of the $19.8 million city Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced Thursday that the city Department of Education has secured for the program.

President Barack Obama’s administration’s School Improvement Grants Fund requires states and localities to identify their bottom 5 percent of schools and implement one of four school improvement models for each. The three Queens schools, along with eight others in the city, were chosen for the “transformation” turnaround model.

The city’s transformation model will reward highly effective teachers through an evaluation system, allowing the school’s principal’s to attract and retain top-notch faculty. The school’s principals have already hired proven teachers who received 15 to 30 percent bonuses in exchange for working in the identified schools. Other strategies, including leadership changes, the use of data to identify and implement effective instruction for students, an intensive approach to address the social and emotional needs of all students, and partnerships with community groups, are also being used to help increase performance at the schools.

Over the next two years, the schools will be eligible for additional grant funding if they can demonstrate progress in implementing the transformation plans.

Charter schools worse than regular schools

From the NY Post:

Traditional public schools bested the city's charter schools on annual report-card grades for the first time -- scoring 10 points higher on average on a 100-point scale, new data shows.

The city's more than 1,000 public elementary and middle schools averaged a B on their so-called "progress reports," which assign letter grades to schools based largely on how much students improve on state math and reading tests in a given year.

By comparison, the city's 60 charter schools that received letter grades this year averaged a C+.

"This means that either the strategy Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor [Joel] Klein have touted so often for school reform -- the creation of more charter schools -- isn't working, or that the entire progress-report methodology, which relies almost completely on standardized test scores, is flawed," said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.

The waiting game

From the NY Post:

Scores of city high-school students have no class -- liter ally.

Nearly 200 students at William Cullen Bryant HS in Astoria, Queens, got a tutorial on tedium at the start of the school year, herded into the auditorium and forced to sit idle for some or all of their first six days. The delays have never been worse, sources said.

Administrators at Bryant -- Chancellor Joel Klein's alma mater -- had no schedules for them, blaming late registrations and crashing computers. Attendance was taken every half-hour, but no learning occurred.

"All we did was sit and do nothing. It was so boring. It was just horrible," said ninth-grader Melissa Galarza, who waited all week without classes. She went home Friday still without being assigned a single class.

Melissa joined a jam-packed auditorium on Sept. 8, the first day of school. Last week, the crowd of close to 200 dropped to 100, then to 50 or so by Friday.

"Don't worry about it. There's hundreds of other kids who still don't have a program," she said a guidance counselor told her.

Principal Aaron Perez referred questions to the Department of Education, which gave no explanation for the delays or the warehousing of kids without classes.

"Any student without a schedule will receive it by Monday," said DOE spokeswoman Margie Feinberg.

And it's still just a drop in the bucket...

From NY1:

About 17,000 thousand students will walk into brand new classrooms next week, and city officials say it is the most new space the School Construction Authority has ever opened in a single year since it was created in 1988.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said he could not be happier.

"There are colleagues of mine, they don't see 30 buildings in the course of a lifetime, and we are seeing that basically this year in New York City," said Klein.

Despite all the new seats, though, schools are still overcrowded in many neighborhoods. A report by the Independent Budget Office last month found half of high school students attended overcrowded schools last year. That is down 15 percent, thanks to the capital plan construction, but is still an ongoing problem.

Time for another edition of "Phony Stats with Joel & Mike!"

From the NY Times:

Two years ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, testified before Congress about the city’s impressive progress in closing the gulf in performance between minority and white children. The gains were historic, all but unheard of in recent decades.

“Over the past six years, we’ve done everything possible to narrow the achievement gap — and we have,” Mr. Bloomberg testified. “In some cases, we’ve reduced it by half.”

“We are closing the shameful achievement gap faster than ever,” the mayor said again in 2009, as city reading scores — now acknowledged as the height of a test score bubble — showed nearly 70 percent of children had met state standards.

When results from the 2010 tests, which state officials said presented a more accurate portrayal of students’ abilities, were released last month, they came as a blow to the legacy of the mayor and the chancellor, as passing rates dropped by more than 25 percentage points on most tests. But the most painful part might well have been the evaporation of one of their signature accomplishments: the closing of the racial achievement gap.

Among the students in the city’s third through eighth grades, 40 percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students met state standards in math, compared with 75 percent of white students and 82 percent of Asian students. In English, 33 percent of black students and 34 percent of Hispanic students are now proficient, compared with 64 percent among whites and Asians.

Court slaps BloomKlein

From the NY Times:

A state appellate court ruled unanimously Thursday that the city must keep open the 19 schools it moved to close for poor performance, upholding a March ruling from a lower court.

The decision (see below) is a blow to one of the Bloomberg administration’s major efforts to turn around the city school system by shutting down schools it deems failing. Now, the city will be forced to place new students in those schools, although some have fewer than a dozen freshmen expected to enter.

The court, the Appellate Division, First Department, found that the city’s Education Department did not comply with the 2009 state law on mayoral control of the city schools in that it failed to indicate the ramifications of the school closings.

Instead, the court wrote in its opinion, the city’s educational impact statement “merely indicates the number of school seats that will be eliminated as a result of the proposed phaseout and states that the seats will be recovered through the phase-in of other new schools or through available seats in existing schools.”

The city failed to meet its obligation, the court wrote, “by providing nothing more than boilerplate information about seat availability.” The court wrote that education officials abused the discretion allowed by law by “limiting the information they provided to the obvious.” The decision concludes by noting that the court disagrees with the city’s contention that the violations were “so insignificant as to be totally inconsequential.”

The ruling represents a major victory for the city’s teachers union, which, along with the New York chapter of the NAACP, sued the city.

From the Daily News:

"There's a whole bunch of kids that at least for one year will get a terrible education that ... they'll probably never recover from," Mayor Bloomberg told reporters.

To match the terrible mayor and schools chancellor that the city will probably never recover from.

Klein takes axe to school budget

From WNYC:

Back in March, when the city was still trying to get a handle on its education budget, City Councilman Robert Jackson noted that there were two different scenarios for the coming fiscal year: "bad" and "horrid."

Today, the education committee chairman said, there's only one: "horrid."

Jackson repeated that word at least nine times during the education committee's hearing on proposed budget cuts. He said the loss of $500 million in state aid would mean laying off 4,400 teachers, letting another 2,000 go through attrition, and eliminating almost 600 other support staffers and cafeteria workers. Which was why he wanted to know how Chancellor Joel Klein could justify hiring two more deputy chancellors who are each paid almost $200,000 a year, and giving raises to several more. He noted that there are now eight deputy chancellors.

Klein testified that one of those deputies is actually a new Chief Operating Officer and said the job is needed now more than ever because he's cut $38 million from central offices. The chancellor said another deputy is dealing with new schools and enrollment, and said the rest were given promotions. As for the raises, he called them "small adjustments" and said their salaries had been "out of line."

The chancellor insisted he had done all he could to protect classrooms from budget cuts. Several council members expressed great skepticism about his department's contracts with outside vendors at a time when it's projecting teacher layoffs. But Klein said the city retained a $5 million contract with The New Teacher Project to hire new teachers because there aren't enough with special education licenses to meet demand. And he said most of the city's other contracts are for special education services and busing that's legally mandated.

Klein sharpens his axe

From the Daily News:

Now that the city has a plan for shutting down the notorious rubber rooms, a more expensive pool of teachers is in the city's crosshairs.

Unassigned school staffers who act as substitutes while raking in their regular salaries cost the city more than $134 million this school year, Education Department data shows.

And at least 342 of them are taking home more than $100,000 annually.

Unlike the staff in the so-called rubber rooms that the city and teachers union agreed to abolish last week, these educators have not been accused of any wrong doing. They lost their jobs due to shrinking enrollment or school closings, and they spend their days covering classes or performing other jobs at schools.

But Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has said that he wants the teachers tossed after one year, instead of having them linger.

About 150 teachers in the pool are at the top pay rate, and about 60% have been on the job for more than 10 years.

State senator to youth: "Raise your pants"

From the Village Voice:

State Senator Eric Adams of Brooklyn really wants young people in Brooklyn to pull their pants up, and he's putting up billboards to tell them so. On Monday, billboards with pictures of models in ultra-low-riding jeans reading, "We are better than this! Stop the sag! Raise your pants, raise your image!" will be going up in 6 locations in Brooklyn. Adams says the 22-foot-tall billboards were paid for with $2K in campaign funds.

Adams, a former captain in the NYPD and the cofounder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, calls sagging a trend which started in prison, and worries that what he calls "the sagging culture" is perpetuating negative cultural stereotypes. Moving forward, he plans to petition Joel Klein to pass an anti-sagging dress code in city public schools.

We can file this one with the ban on the N-word.

Like 2 peas in a pod

From the Daily News:

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein often lauds a small group of Harlem charter schools founded by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.

But few New Yorkers are aware of the access Moskowitz has to the chancellor or the special support he has bestowed on her program, whose four schools enroll just 1,300 of the city's more than 1 million public school students.

Since Moskowitz launched her first Harlem Success Academy in August 2006, Klein has attended at least 13 events for her schools, including several fund-raisers and private meetings with her, 125 e-mails between them show.

The e-mails, obtained by the Daily News under a Freedom of Information request, provide a glimpse into the close relationship - one that would make most principals green with envy.

They show that in addition to Klein's visits, Moskowitz:

- Secured the chancellor's help last year in landing a $1 million donation from a private Los Angeles foundation.

- Got Klein to intervene on her behalf in clashes she had with his subordinates.

- Boasted to him of organizing parent "armies" to advocate for Mayor Bloomberg's educational policies - and of flooding politicians with thousands of pro-charter school postcards.

And there's more.

Charter schools a way to get rid of union?

Bonus footage: Joel Klein getting ripped a new one.


From the Riverdale Press:

To the editor:

The New York City Department of Education has been trying to convince the public that charter schools are the answer to all of the problems in city schools. That is because, in actuality, the goal of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s charter school movement is to destroy the teachers’ union — the UFT — and privatize education.

Parents should be alarmed. The teachers who work with their children every day have long been the champions of the students in bargaining about the issues that affect students directly, including two of the most important: class size and safety. If you take away the power of the teachers to negotiate with the city, you take away the power of the advocates for the students to negotiate on their behalf. Remember: parents are not at the bargaining table.

Furthermore, the policies of the Department of Education are prejudiced against experienced teachers. Experienced teachers cost more than high-turnover Teach for America recruits and Teaching Fellows, and they know their union rights. However, experienced teachers have made teaching New York City’s children their life’s mission. They have devoted decades to professional development. If you eliminate the experienced teachers, you are left with teachers with limited experience, many working under administrators with limited experience, and no one for either group to turn to for advice.

The business-oriented leadership of the current Department of Education seems to be more concerned with money than quality. Did they not learn while they were in the business world that you get what you pay for?

The closing of schools based on questionable criteria and the shuffling of school staff, combined with a financial disincentive for schools to hire higher-paid seasoned teachers, has resulted in an unprecedented pool of talented, experienced teachers without permanent positions in schools — only because they cost more.

Now the Bloomberg administration is demanding a contract that would allow this underutilized pool that he created to be fired rather than be assigned to schools, even the large public schools that most of the city’s children attend, where these policies have created ever-increasing overcrowding and class size.

Placing a charter elementary school where it is not needed harms the underutilized public schools in the same neighborhood. The charter school solution that Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein advocate diverts public attention from the Department of Education’s failure to support and provide resources to make all our public schools, both small, and especially, large, successful. They are all under his control, and all his responsibility

SHEILA KRSTEVSKI

The DOE is also now considering performance-based tenure. Which sucks if you are assigned to a sucky school.

Teachers must keep political opinions out of classroom

From the Gotham Gazette:

Public school teachers have constitutional rights to wear political buttons while in school, according to the United Federation of Teachers. But not according to the United States District Court in Manhattan.

In Weingarten v. Board of Education, a case first brought in 2008, a presidential election year, the plaintiffs, United Federation of Teachers and several individual teachers, claimed that the school chancellor’s regulations banning campaign buttons and distribution of political materials among teachers in Board of Education buildings, i.e., schools, violated the teachers' free speech rights under the federal and state constitutions. (The case refers to the Board of Education throughout -- not the Department of Education.)

The chancellor's regulations provided that "while on duty or in contact with students, all school personnel should maintain a posture of complete neutrality with respect to all candidates.” The regulation also banned the distribution, posting, of displaying of "material supporting any candidate, candidates, slate of candidates, or political organizations/committees" in any school building. While there were exceptions for political items of interest that might appear in teachers’ newsletters, for example, the regulation generally prevented teachers from placing political material in colleagues' mailboxes or on teachers’ bulletin boards in teachers' meeting places.

[Judge Lewis A.] Kaplan found plaintiffs' contentions lacked merit and dismissed the suit without it ever going to trial. In his written opinion, he said that policy makers overseeing "public schools are constitutionality permitted, within reason, to regulate the speech of teachers in the classroom for legitimate pedagogical reasons." The court then concluded that the appearance of political buttons worn by teachers, "may improperly influence children and impinge on the rights of students to learn in an environment free of partisan political influence."

The judge found that the regulation, when carried out in a professional manner and in good faith, is not a "covert attempt to favor one viewpoint over another." After more than a year of litigation, he declared the regulations to be constitutional.

All about the sad state of education

From the Indypendent:

The drama that unfolded at the PEP meeting was the product of years of simmering frustration in communities across the city. When Bloomberg plucked Klein, a lawyer, out the corporate world in 2002 to oversee over a school system that educates 1.1 million children in more than 1,500 schools, he promised a new era of mayoral accountability.

Instead, critics say the two men have exercised their power in an arbitrary and reckless manner — reorganizing the system’s administrative structures to be more remote from parents, spending millions on high-priced consultants and no-bid contracts, pushing high-stakes testing regimes that lack a sound pedagogical basis and closing scores of neighborhood schools.

From the Daily News:

Mayor Bloomberg has ignited a firestorm among parents and teachers with his latest move to shut down 19 more low-performing schools - including many of the city's biggest high schools.

The hundreds who filled Brooklyn Technical High School Tuesday night to protest a vote on the closings by the mayor's Panel for Educational Policy sent a clear signal: The tide of public sentiment has turned against Bloomberg's dictatorial school reforms.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, those parents say, stacked their schools in recent years with huge numbers of special needs kids - especially English language learners and special education students.

Here's NYC schools by the numbers and Bloomberg’s 12-Step Method to Close Down Public Schools.

From the Daily News:

Fewer than six months after the vast majority of elementary and middle schools received A's on school report cards, the city announced plans Friday to overhaul the grading system.

First off, officials said, they'll be grading on a curve: only 25% of schools can get A's the next time around.

Last fall, 84% of elementary and middle schools got the top grade after state test scores skyrocketed.

State officials have vowed to make the tests tougher, although the city did not blame the tests for the skewed report card results.

In fact, they said at the time, they didn't see a problem at all.

"There's nothing wrong with anything," Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said in September.

BloomKlein gets its way

From the NY Times:

More than 300 speakers addressed the board, the Panel for Educational Policy, beginning at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene. By the time the panel began voting at 2:40 a.m. they had heard a litany of complaints from hundreds of parents, students, teachers and administrators and just a handful of speakers who said they supported closing the schools.

But as expected, the panel overwhelmingly approved the closures recommended by the Education Department. The votes to close down the schools fell along political lines, with the appointees of the Manhattan, Queens, Bronx and Brooklyn borough presidents voting against the closings while each of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s appointees approved them without question. Nearly every school shutdown was approved with an 8 to 4 vote, while the audience shouted “shame on you” and “disgrace.”

The panel has been widely criticized as a rubber-stamp to the Bloomberg administration and has largely held an obscure role in education policy. But under new laws governing the mayor’s control of the school system, the panel was required to make the final approval of closures of low performing schools, a centerpiece of the mayor and Chancellor Joel I. Klein’s effort to overhaul the school system.

Phony stats used to close Jamaica High?

Hi Queens Crapper,

I notice that you post clippings from the Post and News about Jamaica. Given your apparent point of view, I thought you might be interested in something edgier, specifically things I've been posting at Gotham Schools:

http://gothamschools.org/author/arthur-goldstein/

My most recent column is a collaboration with Jamaica HS Chapter Leader James Eterno. It reveals the statistics Klein is using to close Jamaica are fraudulent.

Please feel free to use any of my stuff on the blog. We're particularly keen on getting out as much as we can this week, before the PEP decides Jamaica's fate next week. The closing of Jamaica will cause a chain reaction, perhaps hitting current C-rated John Bowne and Martin Van Buren next year, and certainly hitting us eventually.

I'll have another piece on Gotham soon about how Bloomberg is killing neighborhood schools and what an awful idea that is.

Thanks for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Arthur Goldstein, ESL Teacher/ UFT Chapter Leader
Francis Lewis High School

Assembly won't lift limit on charter schools

From the Daily News:

New York's Race to the Top never got out of the starting gate.

Bickering state lawmakers could not agree on a plan to lift the cap on charter schools by Tuesday's 4:30 p.m. deadline to apply for up to $700 million in federal education money.

"It's dead," Assembly Education Committee Chairwoman Catherine Nolan declared moments before the deadline passed.

Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg called the failure a "sad day for the children" and said it torpedoed the state's chances of winning substantial federal money.

"It is unthinkable that after being advised to make specific changes to enhance our application, the legislative leaders could not come to an agreement," Paterson and Bloomberg said in a joint statement.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) blamed Bloomberg and city Schools Chancellor Joel Klein for the Legislature's inaction.

"Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein were willing to sacrifice the creation of 200 more charter schools rather than accept any limitation on their unchecked power to ignore the voices of parents and displace traditional public schools from existing classroom space," Silver said.

From the NY Times:

The bill favored by the leaders of the Senate and Assembly would have raised the limit on the number of charter schools in the state to 400 from 200, but added restrictions on how they are created and run. Giving voice to complaints that the mayor and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, were championing charter schools at the expense of traditional schools, the bill would have stripped the city of the power to recommend the creation of charter schools, leaving that authority with the state Board of Regents. The bill also would have prevented charter schools from moving into traditional public school buildings unless parents of the public school students approved.

The plan favored by the governor and the mayor would have raised the limit on the number of charter schools to 460. That bill also omitted most of the Legislature’s proposed restrictions.

The delay forced the state into a nerve-racking waiting game. The signed application needed to be federal officials’ hands in Washington by 4:30 p.m. The distance between New York State’s Washington office and the federal Department of Education offices is about two miles.

At about 4 p.m., the governor instructed the state’s Washington office to go ahead. Two state employees took the application in a cab and handed it in at 4:10 p.m., the governor’s office said.

Missing the deadline would have meant forfeiting round one of the competition and waiting until round two; applications for that round are due in June. But legislators gave no indication of if or when they would take up the charter school bill again.

School raffle rules revised

From the NY Times:

At a time when New York City schools are struggling with budget cuts, the Department of Education proposed a regulation this month that would ban parent-teacher associations from holding raffles, a mainstay of fund-raising — especially after the city effectively banned PTA bake sales in June.

On Wednesday, however, education officials said that Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein had not known about the proposed raffle ban before it was published, and that he had decided to rescind it.

The department also said it was considering whether to ease the ban on PTA bake sales during the school day, to make it easier for parent groups to raise money, which they use to plug budget gaps in school programs.

While the rationale for the ban on bake sales was student health, the raffle ban was judged to be a potential legal liability. Raffles can be considered a form of gambling under state laws, and holding one without following a complex array of rules could result in a misdemeanor.

Because of legal concerns, the city’s Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy, which regulates parent groups, used to say no to PTA’s that asked to hold raffles, even though some schools had raffles without asking permission. There was no official ban.