January 31, 2006

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Your school budget–up close and personal

Filed under: Education Funding by Maisie @ 3:23 pm

The Mayor released his planned budget for next year, and perhaps more interesting to us, a new online tool for looking at individual school budgets. This little tool should generate some good questions for your principal.

Ken Lubetsky, UFT’s budget maven, sent the following simple instructions for accessing it.

From Ken: “This morning the DOE added an informative new budget feature to its web site. The steps to access this information are as follows:
(1) First go to the DOE’s main web page at www.nycenet.edu.
(2) Next, scroll down to the Find A School section at the bottom right hand corner of the page.
(3) In the lower box that’s labeled School Name or Number you can type in any school’s code (i.e. P.S. 119X = X119; PS 16R = R016; IS 5Q = Q005; etc.) and click on “Go”. For the first time all District 75 school and alternative high school data is available. [NOTE: District 79 works a little differently. See below.]
(4) The school’s “Home Page” will come up. Along the left hand side of the page there’s a new option called Budget Summary. This summary represents a record of where each school’s allocations have been scheduled to be spent. It is current and is updated nightly.
(5) Directly above this new feature is one labeled Galaxy Budget Allocations. This is a current list of the allocations a school has received to date. By comparing the Galaxy Budget Allocations and the new Budget Summary a viewer can see whether or not all of a school’s available funds have been scheduled.”

If you have trouble understanding their budget terms, click on the “Budget Summary Glossary” highlighted on the left near the top of the page.

Ken adds that to test the new feature, “we looked at a Bronx elementary school’s Budget Summary and Galaxy Budget Allocations. We found there was approximately $12,000 in the Galaxy Budget Allocations that had not yet been scheduled to be spent as reflected in the Budget Summary. This conceivably provides an opportunity for a chapter leader and his/her chapter committee to discuss the use of these funds before they are scheduled.”

He warns:
“I don’t want a reader to conclude that a discrepancy in the received allocations and the spending plan is a sign of something nefarious. It could be as simple as a principal planning to run a spring Saturday or after school program and not having gotten around to scheduling this future expenditure. A discrepancy should lead to the asking of questions. Seeing how funds are being spent should generate a larger discussion about whether or not the school is spending its available resources in the best possible ways. ”

Amy Arundell (UFT budget maven #2) just sent a message that District 79 is accessed slightly differently:
(1) First go to the DOE’s main web page at www.nycenet.edu.
(2) Next, scroll down to the Find A School section at the bottom right hand corner of the page.
(3) In the lower box that’s labeled School Name or Number you can type in any school’s code (i.e. P.S. 119X = X119; PS 16R = R016; IS 5Q = Q005; etc.) and click on “Go”. For the first time all District 75 school and alternative high school data is available.
(4) The school’s homepage will come up. Click on Statistics
(5) Towards the middle of the page you should see Galaxy Budget Allocations and Budget Summary.
(6) Simply click on either link

The overall city budget was also released today: It shows the DOE with a $14.87-billion budget for the 2006-07 year, an increase of $258.8 million from this year. If you have a fondness for tiny print and enormous numbers, just go to nyc.gov and you’ll be able to click on the new budget documents from there. Happy picking.

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New Sandy Feldman Fellowship offers unique experiences for UFT members

Filed under: UFT News by Leo Casey @ 12:10 pm

A joint project by the UFT and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) will establish the Sandy Feldman Fellowships next July and August to improve education for refugees at four sites this summer: Tanzania, Phoenix, San Diego and Dallas.

Two fellowships will be offered in Tanzania to work with local educators who serve the educational needs of refugees from the conflicts of the Central African region. They will strengthen the IRC’s capacity to provide high quality teacher education for primary and secondary school teachers teaching refugee girls.

One fellow each in the three American cities will serve the educational needs of students who are newly arrived refugees. (more…)

January 30, 2006

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We’re Not Running

Filed under: Labor by Leo Casey @ 8:01 am

That’s the response of the UFT and other municipal labor unions to our billionaire Mayor’s State of the City speech, with its suggestion that it was time for the city’s workforce to join the ‘race to the bottom,’ and surrender our current health care benefits and pensions. We’re not running, Mike.

Bloomberg thinks that it is time to take advantage of the corporate onslaught against health care and pensions in the private sector, and he is now pressing municipal unions for concessions in these areas. He sees Delphi [$], IBM [$], United Airlines [$], Verizon, Lockheed, Motorola and other corporate giants [$] on the attack against pensions for their workers, so he figures that they have paved the way for a similar assault in the public sector. It was an open secret that Bloomberg pressured the Metropolitan Transit Authority behind the scenes to hold fast on their demand for pension givebacks in the recent Transit workers strike, in an attempt to create a pattern bargaining precedent which could be used against other unions.

Randi Weingarten, who is head of the Municipal Labor Committee as well as President of the UFT, was clear and unequivocal in her rejection of the Mayor’s suggestion that he could unilaterally impose health care premiums or a fifth pension tier. “She was the only one that criticized my acceptance speech on Jan. 1,” Bloomberg announced in a fit of pique on his weekly radio show, “and the only one really to criticize this yesterday, so she’s being consistent.” Get ready for a whole lot more consistency, Mike.

The Bloomberg strategy is to try to mobilize resentment against municipal workers, since our pensions and health care plans are still intact while so many private sectors workers have had their pensions decimated. This was the same tack taken by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his unsuccessful initiative campaign. [$] We say: the time has come to undo the damage already done, not to spread it. This assault on the economic security of American working people has gone far enough, and it will go no farther.

In the words of the old civil rights and labor song, “we shall not be moved.”

January 28, 2006

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The Study of American Schools John Stossel Did Not Want You to Read

Filed under: Charter School by Leo Casey @ 10:46 pm

Earlier this week, the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education [NCSPE] at Teachers’ College published an important paper by University of Illinois professors Christopher and Sarah Theule Lubienski, Charter, Private, Public Schools and Academic Achievement: New Evidence from NAEP Mathematics Data.

The NAEP exams are without question the best comparative measures of student achievement we have in American education. Unlike the various state exams produced for NCLB purposes, the NAEP assessments are not high stakes tests, and students do not undergo months of test preparation before they take them. Consequently, psychometricians find that the results of the NAEP exams are more reliable than those of the high stakes tests. Moreover, the various state exams are quite uneven in quality, while the NAEP tests are consistently good. The NAEP tests are simply more valid exams. Finally, NAEP assessments are based on a single, rigorous set of standards, while many state exams are notorious in the low standards they employ.

But even data from the best of tests can only tell you so much about student achievement and the quality of education. Students come to schools – and to tests – from a variety of backgrounds, and when it comes to learning, those backgrounds give some students extraordinary advantages and other students immense disadvantages. The greatest challenge in assessment today is how to separate the effects of the education provided in the school from the effects of background. When all the posturing was done, this was the one real issue in the Charter School Dust-Up over the relative performance of district public school students and charter school students on NAEP – to what extent could the poorer performance of charter school students be attributed to the background of the students, as opposed to the education provided by the schools.

This is why the analysis of the Lubienskis is so important. Building upon their earlier work with previous data sets from NAEP Math exams [see, for example, this essay in the May 2005 Kappan], the Lubienskis used a sophisticated statistical analysis that allowed them to control for what they call demographic characteristics [socio-economic class, race, gender, English Language Learners, disability] and school location. With this control, a rather different picture appears.

In fourth grade Mathematics, most school sectors bested district public schools in the raw scores: Catholic school students scored 9.5 points better, Lutheran school students scored 10.7 points better, conservative Christian school students scored 4.2 points better, and non-sectarian private school students scored 11 points better. Only charter school students scored more poorly, by 6.1 points. But when controlled for demography and school location, the picture changed dramatically: the district public school students scored 7.2 points better than the Catholic school students, 4.2 points better than the Lutheran school students, 11.9 points better than the conservative Christian school students and 5.6 points better than the non-sectarian private school students. While district public school students continued to score better than charter school students, the gap shrunk to 4.4 points with the controls in place.

A similar pattern is found in eighth grade Mathematics. In the raw scores, Catholic school students scored 14.3 points better, Lutheran school students scored 21.2 points better, conservative Christian school students scored 5.4 points better, non-sectarian private school students scored 14.3 points better and charter school students scored .9 points better. When controlled for demography and school location, the district public school students scored 3 points better than the Catholic school students, 10.6 points better than the conservative Christian school students and 2.3 points better than the non-sectarian private school students. The gap with Lutheran school students fell 20 points, to 1 point, and the gap with charter school students increased to a 2.4 charter school advantage. The Lubienskis report their most significant findings as the following:

Public schools significantly out-scored Catholic schools (by over 7 points in 4th grade, and almost 4 points in 8th grade).

Of all private school types studied, Lutheran schools performed the best. 4th grade scores in Lutheran schools were roughly 4 points lower than in comparable public schools, but were (a statistically insignificant) 1 point higher at the 8th grade.

The fastest growing segment of the private school sector, conservative Christian schools, were also the lowest performing, trailing public schools by more than 10 points at grades 4 and 8.

Charter schools scored a significant 4.4 points lower than non-charter public schools in 4th grade, but scored (a statistically insignificant) 2.4 points higher in 8th grade.

Interestingly, John Stossel got in touch with the Lubienskis when he was preparing his Stupid in America report, but their research was just one more inconvenient truth.

January 27, 2006

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Defunding the schools?

Filed under: Education by Maisie @ 10:51 am

Chancellor Klein wrote a letter to principals Jan. 19 (not available electronically) in which he pledged to empower school-level leadership and boasted that he’d already redirected $200 million of the schools budget from Central to the school level. Yesterday, in his State of the City address, Bloomberg promised to cut another $200 million from the bureaucracy and put it into classrooms..

How are they doing? So far, not too well.

The Educational Priorities Panel just published Bulletin #2 (pdf) with some surprising findings: steep one-year decreases in spending for general education and special education instruction and services at the school level. EPP’s Noreen Connell has tracked the education budget at the state and city levels for many years and is a whiz at finding where all the budget bodies are buried. She looked over the last three DOE budgets and compared them with the NYC Comptroller’s annual financial statements.

Guess what? Under the first year of mayoral control, special ed spending dropped by $445 million, far more than the DOE budget reported. That kind of fits with what people in the schools were saying–IEPs were being treated like so much dead leaves in the school yard. Special ed spending has still not recovered to its pre-mayoral-control level.

EPP also found that though general-ed instruction spending rose a lot in 2003-04, it fell $144 million last year. When it’s all tallied, DOE expenditures rose $716 million last year, but money for instruction only grew by $41 million, chump change in a $14 billion budget.

“EPP concludes that in the first two years of mayoral control. . . there hasn’t yet been a significant shift of resources to instruction at the school level,” the report says.

Where did most of that $716 million go? The EPP’s three-year “snapshot” showed savings in mid-level administration expenses were offset by increases in central administration spending for a net “no change’ in administrative spending. That fits with what people in the schools were saying too–a lot of MBAs with clipboards, expensive consultants and leadership development programs, while the schools remained as poorly funded as ever.

January 26, 2006

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Mid-Year Evaluation/Where Do I Go From Here?

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by BXMSTeacher @ 4:56 pm

Okay. So, we are midway through the school year, and I have to take time to reflect on where I’ve been, where I am at, and where I am going.

First off, let me say that I love teaching. It’s my first year, and I absolutely love it! My kids are lovely, and I’m finally comfortable with using the Reading and Writing Workshop model–I still have my issues with it. But, I have been able to incorporate what I want to do with the kids in addition to following what the region wants. It’s been a slow, but welcomed period of adjustment.

However, I am really frustrated with middle school. Not with the kids. But, I am so frustrated with how middle schools are managed. And, I am very unhappy with the one I am at. I have struggled for months about whether or not I want to return here for my second year, and I don’t. I really don’t. It has been a difficult decision to make–I’m teaching in one of the honors academies. My students are great kids, and I love them. They love me. But, I’m just bothered by the lack of respect the administration has for teachers AND the kids here.
(more…)

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“Follow The Money”: From Abramoff and Lobbygate to ‘For Profit’ Education

Filed under: Privatization by Leo Casey @ 9:53 am

“Follow the money.” This admonition, Woodward and Bernstein wrote in All The President’s Men, was the advice ‘Deep Throat’ gave as they pursued the Watergate scandal. Last year’s revelation that ‘Deep Throat’ was Mark Felt, second in command at the FBI, came as Washington found itself swept up in the vortex of yet another far-reaching scandal, this time around such key Republican lobbyists and Congressional leaders as Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon and Tom DeLay.

In today’s Lobbygate Scandal, Felt’s counsel to “follow the money” seems almost prescient. The Washington power nexus of money and politics is involved in every public allegation of wrongdoing to date, from the millions of dollars in kickbacks and the defrauding of American Indian tribes to the misuse of charities and the ‘laundering’ of illegal campaign contributions. The DeLay-Abramoff campaign to remake the high finance, special interest world of ‘K’ Street lobbying into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party is an ever-present backdrop to all of these deeds. If we needed reminding, Lobbygate affirms once again an old truth: unregulated and uncontrolled money in politics corrupts republican government “of, by and for the people.”

Now that Abramoff has entered into a guilty plea to charges of conspiracy to bribe elected officials, mail fraud and tax evasion as part of a bargain with prosecutors which requires his cooperation, investigators into Lobbygate have access to his voluminous e-mails and related documents. As many as twenty members of Congress and Congressional aides are believed to be targets of the ongoing investigation, and a small tidal wave of members of Congress has rushed to announce that they were returning campaign donations from Abramoff in the wake of his pleas.
(more…)

January 25, 2006

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Twilight Schools in the Twilight Zone

Filed under: NYC DOE by Peter Goodman @ 4:31 pm

Rod Serling couldn’t have imagined this …

Unfortunately high schools are filled with kids who don’t attend classes regularly, don’t do their homework and end up failing most of their classes. In many schools you have to come to school a half hour early just to get through scanning and get to class on time. During the first few weeks scores of oversize classes result in the equalization, the shuttling of kids from class to class. No wonder that fragile kids simply give up and seek out the streets.

We could have created smaller classes, advisory classes and a range of student friendly interventions: the “answer,” however, is a Twilight School.

Transfer low achieving kids into a Twilight School (formerly known as PM School) that starts in the late afternoon. The student/parent signs a “last chance” contract and is assigned to classes taught by teachers, usually as per session. Instead of teaching five classes a day, how about six or seven. Hey … you gotta pay the mortgage!

Is it any surprise that Twilight Schools have low attendance and low passing rates? A supervisor was chastised when he reported low achievement,” You should have selected smarter kids.”

How do you communicate with a non-English speaker: it’s easy, you speak louder and slower.

* * *

Manhattan Comprehensive Day and Night High School was created by Howard Friedman, a former teacher and chapter leader at City As School High School. The school operates from morning to evening, seven days a week. Teachers teach a flex time schedule. The eight hundred students fit school into their schedule. Some are parents, other work full time jobs, sometimes at night, sometimes during the day. The school provides a wide range of social services: medical, dental and legal. Needless to say the school has wonderful achievement data.

It would be nice if there was a magic bullet. For decades superintendents and chancellors have imposed programs on schools and it is no surprise that the halls of schools are littered with failed programs.

Schools and programs that emanate from practitioners at schools have created a range of wonderful programs, many of which operate under the radar. When will our schools move from the twilight to sunlight?

January 20, 2006

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Blame

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by Bimsmile @ 12:49 am

Blame. As an English teacher, I’d love to explore the etymology of the word. When I have a student who turns in no work, refuses to partake in class, continually fails tests and who appears to not have a care in the world about it all, who is to blame? Did the system fail them? Did their parents fail them? Did I fail them? Or, did they fail themselves?

I called a student’s mother today to let her know that the previous day, I had written up her son for walking out of class. However, before I was even able to inform this mother of that fact, she began to get very defensive. The conversation turned out to be the worst I’ve had yet with a parent. Up until this point my experiences with my students parents have been pleasant and useful. This however, was not.

She was confrontational and quick to point the finger. “Why didn’t you call me sooner. It’s too late now, isn’t it?”

I nicely reminded this mother that I had in fact spoken with her twice prior to this; more than any other of my students’ parents. She rebutted by telling me that that was last term, not this one. If I had called her sooner then she would have been able to do something about it.

I felt sick to my stomach after speaking with this mother. I was left stunned. Why on earth would I want any of my students to fail? Why would I not do everything I could to help them?

After this conversation I went back through my grade book. I looked closely at every grade *Oliver had received, and every assignment he was missing. I tried to find a mistake that I had made. I questioned so much of what I had done with this student in the past few weeks. But the bottom line is, he gave up. He knows the term is coming to an end and that there is no way for him to now catch up, so he’s completely stopped trying. Should I have called his mother yesterday, or the day before? Would it really have made a difference?

This past week, while in between classes, I ran into two students with their parents. I took the liberty of introducing myself and discussing, briefly, their child’s work. *Lisa’s mother gave me a genuine, but generic, response. “Well if there is anything I can do, let me know.”

Victoria and her father looked at me as if I had two heads. Why was I talking to them and what was I talking about? She was leaving school early, before my class, and had failed to hand in a project on time earlier in the week. He had no idea about the project and she seemed to know even less than him. Who is responsible here, the student, the parent, the teacher?

To what extent should teachers push? Was I overstepping my boundaries by stopping them in the main office and discussing this? Should I have just let it slide? I’m inclined to say no, I should not let I slide. It’s not my style, I don’t let things slide.

I watch my students like a hawk watches it prey – but with more tender loving care. I never give up on them. I push and push, because I’m determined. Even if in the end, they accomplish nothing, it was not done without constant nagging. So why can’t parents do the same, push and push until they see progress?

Oliver’s mother said, “I ask him everyday if he has homework, and he always says no. What else am I suppose to do?”

I wanted so badly to scream all of these things…all the things that I would do if I were his parent. Have you ever seen his notebook? He can’t go the entire year without a test or quiz to show you. Have you asked him about any of those? Call his teachers yourself, have you tried that?

Well I did ask her that last question and she told me “the school gives me the run around,” they say parents can’t talk to teachers.

Blame gets thrown around. It seems that communication between parents, students and teachers needs to be more present in the NYC School district. But how far can we, as educators, go to make this happen? What I want to know, is not who is to blame, but how do we fix it?

* Names were changes.

January 19, 2006

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Talking about NCLB

Filed under: NCLB by Kombiz Lavasany @ 2:47 pm

Earlier this week the AFT launched a website, Let’s Get It Right, advocating for changes to "No Child Left Behind."  The website, includes a well written blog. Pay them a visit and join the conversation about NCLB.    

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