April 28, 2006

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“We Ain’t Scared Of Your Jails”

Filed under: Labor by Leo Casey @ 10:14 am

That’s a line from one of the ‘freedom songs’ of the civil rights movement, but these days it seems an appropriate slogan for the American trade union movement, as we struggle against an economic and legal order more and more stacked against American working people. Never have the words Martin Luther King wrote in the Birmingham jail, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” rung so true for the women and men whose labor makes this great nation possible. And in the tradition of King, the time has come to confront that injustice, even when it takes the form of a law.

There has never been a significant movement for progressive social change in this nation that has not had to employ civil disobedience against unjust laws, from the abolitionists who violated the ‘slave fugitive law’ to the feminists who fought for women’s suffrage, from the trade union movement that held ‘sit down’ strikes in automobile factories to the civil rights movement that “sat in” in segregated lunch counters. Today, there would be no American teacher unions if it were not for the courageous New York City teachers who went on strike for recognition as a union in 1960 – in defiance of the New York State law which forbade such a strike. That is our history, one which we will never forget. We are a union that stands proudly in the tradition of King and of his mentor, the African-American trade union leader A. Phillip Randolph.

The editorial page of the New York Post has never struck us a place of deep historical insight, or for that matter, minimal historical literacy. But their editorial this week, “Randi Gets Real,” manages to break new ground in willful historical ignorance. They object to the fact that UFT President Randi Weingarten led a trade union rally in defense of TWU President Roger Toussaint, who was jailed this week for violating an unjust law by leading a strike. And they are galled by Randi’s declaration at that rally that “Any labor leader who believes in the righteousness of our cause knows that at one time or another we may have to go to jail.” Feigning complete ignorance of the democratic tradition of civil disobedience to unjust laws, and of the ways in which labor laws in the United States [including New York State’s Taylor Law] are stacked against workers and unions, they proclaim that Randi is “expressing her regret that there are any legal restraints on unions at all.” Perhaps they are left with this rather lame excuse for commentary because they regret most of the political and economic progress that has come to the United States as a result of citizens who have taken on the sacrifice of jail to challenge unjust laws, but consider it impolitic to say so.

The Post concludes, “for once, it wasn’t about ‘the children.’ How refreshing.” How wrong. The slogan of the UFT in 1960, in that first act of collective civil disobedience, was “Teachers want what students need.” That remains our focus, as we take on a Department of Education that keeps teachers from providing what students need. And what better lesson to give our students than that when moral and political principle demands sacrifice on the part of teachers, we are prepared to assume that burden. “We ain’t scared of your jails.”

April 27, 2006

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Around the Education Blogs

Filed under: Education by Kombiz Lavasany @ 5:12 pm

Ms. Frizzle is helping raise funds for science projects in New York City through the Bloggers Choose Program, which is a part of the Donor’s Choose program. She’s also been profiling each of the ten projects that she’s chosen to help fund. One is for a second grade Brooklyn classroom, and the other is a Kindergarten teacher in Brooklyn who is trying to provide science instruction to students left out of the science rotation.

The Carnival of Education is back home at The Education Wonks’ blog this week.

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Join UFT’ers in marching for an end to the war in Iraq

Filed under: Labor by Kombiz Lavasany @ 4:49 pm

The United Federation of Teachers has joined with the AFL-CIO in calling upon the U.S. government to “bring our troops home [from Iraq] rapidly,” and to “put a stop to the unending military presence that will waste lives and resources, undermine our nation’s security and weaken our military.”

More than 2,300 American armed forces men and women have died and almost 7,500 have been wounded. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died. More than $250 billion has been spent on the war.
On Saturday, April 29, there will be a demonstration in New York City calling for an end to the war. A contingent of UFT members will gather at 11 a.m. on 19th Street, between Broadway and Park Avenue.

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National Demonstration Against Genocide in Darfur

Filed under: Other Topics by Leo Casey @ 12:30 pm

On Sunday, April 30 a national demonstration to Stop the Genocide in Darfur will be held in Washington DC. The rally will be held on the national mall, between 3rd and 4th Streets. There will be an American Federation of Teachers contingent meeting at the rally site at 1:30 PM.

Over the last four years, more than 400,000 lives have been lost and over 2 million people have been forced from their homes as a result of a genocide undertaken against the African peoples of Darfur by the government of the Sudan and its Janjaweed militia. A campaign of the mass murder of unarmed civilians, of mass rape and torture, and the systematic destruction of villages and crops has been waged. Despite condemnations from many quarters, this genocide continues unabated today.

Speakers at the national demonstration will include:
Paul Rusesabagina, whose heroic story was told in the movie Hotel Rwanda • Elie Wiesel • George Clooney • Russel Simmons, Def Jam Recordings • Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Donald Payne, Frank Wolf and Michael Capuano • Governor Jon Corzine • Tragi Mustafa, Save Woman - Sudan, Darfur refugee • Rabbi Marc Schneir • Cardinal Theodore McCarrick • Imam A. Rashied Omar • Reverend Walter Fauntroy • Joey Cheek, Olympic Gold Medalist who donated winnings to Darfur • Manute Bol, former NBA star from the Sudan • Simon Deng, Sudan Freedom Walk •Salih Mahmoud Osman, lawyer and human rights activist from Darfur • Rabbi David Saperstein • Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell • and more.

Various New York City organizations are sponsoring buses. The Jewish Community Center web page has a listing of buses leaving from various points in the city. Go to: http://www.jccnyc.org/category.aspx?catid=2042

April 26, 2006

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Government Watchdog Group Sues Dept. of Labor

Filed under: Labor by Kombiz Lavasany @ 4:39 pm

Government watchdog group Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington initiatated a lawsuit against the Department of Labor over the Labor Department’s refusal to turn over requested documents that could demonstrate collusion between the department and corporate funded union basher Richard Berman.

April 25, 2006

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Talking the Accountable Talk… Without Walking the Accountable Walk

Filed under: NYC DOE by Leo Casey @ 5:30 pm

“Accountable Talk”

New York City public school teachers know that phrase well. It is one of those buzz words that came with the wave of “progressive education” programs from Teachers’ College. As these programs became the “official state ideology” of the Department of Education, stripped of all actual progressive content, terms like “accountable talk” became the by-words of the Bloomberg-Klein era. “Accountable talk” purportedly makes students responsible for their own learning, as they must demonstrate what they have learned in ritualized presentations. Leave it to academics to take a profound thousand year old educational concept like the Socratic dialogues, translate it into an unthinking formula and bestow a ‘new age’ title upon it.

Accountability is all the rage at Tweed these days, so long as it is accountability for schools, educators and students. Before the Spring break, Chancellor Klein unveiled a new accountability plan which would employ rather complex and opaque statistical measures to evaluate the academic progress of student cohorts in schools. Klein pledged that, unlike the absolute standards of No Child Left Behind, the DOE’s new measures will capture the true progress of students, giving schools credit for “value added” to a student’s skills and knowledge. As promising as that may sound, the Tweed’s track record on implementing far less logistically ambitious programs, such as the new programming software used in high schools, has been less than impressive. Count us among the skeptics: we’ll believe it when we see it.

It certainly does not inspire confidence that, according to the New York Times[$], Tweed will employ student performance on SATs as one of the primary measures for assessing the performance and progress of high school students. This is clearly an extraordinary misuse of those exams, as they are not achievement tests designed to assess how well the students have learned the material from their high school classes. The College Board, the creator and marketer of the SATs, explicitly renounces the suggestion that they measure a student’s academic achievement. Instead, it makes the rather limited claim that these tests are somewhat predictive of a student’s prospective performance in the first year of college. What this means in practice, psychologists and psychometricians tell us, is that the SATs test for approximately 18% [within a statistical range of 7% to 25%] of the skills needed to succeed in college. Indeed, as it becomes murkier and murkier exactly what the SATs do test, more and more post-secondary institutions are moving away from requiring them. But Tweed is walking through the swinging door they just exited.

No set of tests have been more carefully and fully studied than the SATs, and few are anywhere as controversial. [The classic text on the subject is Nicholas Lemann’s Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.] Even with all of the disagreement, a few basic facts are clear. SAT scores correlate most closely with the scores of I.Q. tests [as much as they correlate with a second retake of the SATs.] When one considers the origins of the SATs as an assessment of native intelligence, these results are not that surprising. [Originally, SAT stood for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests.] Moreover, SAT scores correlate highly with the socio-economic status of the test taker. Using SAT scores as a measure of student performance benefits those schools which attract the highest socio-economic class of students, and penalizes those who serve the poorest. And exactly how does one measure progress on the SATs, when the tests are designed to produce consistent scores? Tweed’s use of SAT scores is antithetical to its purported desire to employ “value added” assessments.

The immediate target of the Klein accountability plan appears to be the school principals [$], although the measures do have broader applicability. Certainly, the principals – who have gone for many years now without a contract – think so, and they are none too pleased.

But the real story here is who is not being held accountable, once again. For all of Klein’s rhetoric about “holding ourselves more accountable,” what stands out is the continuing total lack of accountability for the DOE’s top management, from the Chancellor himself and the rest of Tweed down to the regional educrats. Nothing reveals that more than the recent events at IS 172 in Harlem, the Adam Clayton Powell Middle School of Law and Social Justice, a school that has had more than its share of troubles.

Early last month, Teach for America announced that it was pulling all of its recruits from IS 172, the first time it has ever done that, because of the unabated violence in the building. Despite this unprecedented vote of no confidence from a nationally recognized organization, and despite intense opposition from teachers and parents from the school, the Department of Education appointed the acting incumbent to the position of principal on March 23rd. The date is significant because two days prior, on March 21st, the same individual had been indicted on six accounts of fraud relating to his actions as principal of a Philadelphia charter school which had had its charter revoked. It was not until the Daily News ran an article exposing the entire sordid affair, “His past tags new principal,” that Tweed actually pulled the newly appointed – and indicted – principal from the school.

The Department of Education claims that it had performed all of the appropriate background checks on this individual, and nothing had come up. [He had been recruited by Tweed’s infamous Leadership Academy.] If they are to be believed, the folks at Tweed never learned how to use Google, since a simple search of the name of the principal and the name of charter school would have yielded a number of news media reports which detailed the travails of the school and the ongoing investigation of alleged wrong doing. Indeed, a Google search the day the principal was appointed would have revealed United States Attorney and Federal Bureau of Investigation press releases announcing his indictment. Moreover, it defies common sense that a background check performed with a minimum of due diligence would not have turned up serious questions about this individual’s tenure at the Philadelphia charter school, given the revocation of its charter. An Associated Press article reported that during the tenure of this principal, “teachers periodically threatened to quit en masse. Standardized test results weren’t reported to the state. Fire code violations once forced cancellation of classes for two weeks. Pennsylvania’s auditor general cited the school for bookkeeping problems.” But according to DOE spokesperson, the only one at fault is the principal, who failed to “inform” them of the investigation and the indictment.

The teachers and parents from IS 172 don’t buy any of it. “When he was first hired, the investigation was not only pending, it was public knowledge,” one English teacher told the Daily News. “Don’t come to me and lie to me, [that] you didn’t see it in his background checks,” the school PTA President complained to the Daily News. “This is disgusting.”

More than forty teachers had signed a petition against giving the principal a permanent appointment, and had been ignored by the powers that be at Tweed and in the region. “The staff was completely demoralized,” another English teacher told Daily News columnist Errol Lewis. “It’s really impossible for us to do our job with the level of the discipline problem.”

Note that this story is part of long term criminal neglect of IS 172 by Tweed. In the last four years, the school has had four separate principals, with cycle after cycle of ineffective leadership. Little surprise, therefore, that 97% of its graduating eighth graders did not meet state standards on the English Language Arts exam, and that 89% did not meet state standards on the Mathematics exam.

But Joel Klein is “serious” about accountability – for the school. If the standardized tests don’t improve, he warns, he will close the school down. No consequences for the Leadership Academy, which recruited the indicted principal without even the most cursory of background investigations; no consequences for the regional Superintendent and LIS, who ignored the pleas of teachers and parents and appointed a principal who had driven Teach for America from the school, who ran his last school into the ground and who was indicted for actions taken at that school; no consequences for the regional Superintendent and LIS who sent a parade of ineffective school leaders through the school for the last four years; no consequences for those in the DOE senior management, starting with Klein himself, responsible for oversight of the Leadership Academy, the Regional Superintendent and the LIS. No, accountability begins and ends at the school, and it alone will be closed down.

Klein talks the accountable talk, but he has yet to walk the accountable walk. Not one step.

April 24, 2006

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Accountability and the “Hick’ry Stick”

Filed under: NCLB Testing by Peter Goodman @ 2:53 pm

School days, school days, dear old golden rule days,
read-in’ and ‘rit-in’ and ‘rithmetic, taught to the tune of a hick-ry stick
 Gus Edwards

As inveterate sports fans we are used to a range of statistics. We blithely discuss batting averages, runs batted in (RBIs), earned run averages (ERAs) and on and on, however, in spite of all the statistics the final judgment is winning the games.

Most teachers are unaware that schools generate a host of statistics that are used to judge the success of the school. Ask your principal: what is your schools Actual Performance Index? (AMO) If you get a blank look your school may be in trouble. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requires that schools meet AMO targets for each cohort of students and the Performance Index goals increase each year. The Performance Index is based upon the number of students in a cohort who are Level 1, Level 2 and Level ¾ in Math and ELA.

Schools that fail to reach their AMO targets are designated Schools in Need of Improvement (SINI) or Schools Requiring Corrective Action and are required to write improvement plans. Eleven thousand schools nationwide have written plans.

If schools fail to meet AMO targets by specific dates under NCLB they must be redesigned, the redesign can result in the school being closed.

In New York State the State Education Department analyzes data each year, and in January designates schools as Schools Under Registration Review (SURR). If the SURR designated school fails to make adequate progress the school can redesigned, the closing of the school is a possibility.

The Department intends to create a new level of school assessment.

The Department has unveiled its new “comprehensive accountability initiative.” As described on the DOE website

each school will receive a Progress Report with an A, B, C, D, and F letter grade beginning in the 2007-08 school year as well as a Quality Score of (well developed) and (underdeveloped) based on an individual onsite Quality Review.

Schools will be evaluated on three separate quantitative measures, (Progress, Performance and School Environment) and qualitative measures that will involve onsite reviewers.

“Schools that receive chronically low grades and Quality Scores” will have serious consequences.

To return to the baseball analogy: more statistics does make for a better baseball team! Believe me: if a school is struggling the school staff knows it!

Individual student data is essential to create plans to meet the needs of individual and groups of students. Effective “data driven” instruction is a key component in an effective school. Unfortunately regionally imposed mega education programs are rarely effective. The practitioners in the classroom, supervisors and teachers, must have access to a range of student achievement data and the responsibility to create and implement programs.

School plans should be “bottom up,” driven by the skills of teachers and result in a school-wide plan that drives school budgets.

The creation of the expanded Autonomy Zone appears is an admission that the current top-down model has failed.

The current Autonomy Zone schools are divided into networks of about a dozen schools each. The networks choose a common professional development provider and work together without a Region and a Local Instructional Superintendent beating on them.

The Department will rollout the expanded Autonomy Zone, scaling up from fifty to two hundred schools in early May.

If the new accountability initiative/Autonomy Zone is simply a new club to threaten and punish principals and teachers these “new initiatives” will simply be more of the same.

The “hick’ry stick” will not result in teachers “teaching better.”

Have you ever noticed the similarity between Steinbrenner and Bloomberg? To continue the baseball analogy: if team is not doing well you fire the manager … is Bloomberg a baseball fan?

April 18, 2006

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It’s almost graduation time

Filed under: NYC DOE by Maisie @ 4:50 pm

Hearing the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” yet? Some researchers sure are. Two new reports on graduation rates are coming out this week. Interestingly, they have diametrically opposite conclusions.

First out of the box is the Manhattan Institute’s prolific Jay Greene, whose “Leaving Boys Behind: Public High School Graduation Rates” is embargoed until midnight tonight. But no worries, there is little new here.

The title is oddly misleading since the report doesn’t focus on gender differences. He “finds” that boys’ graduation rates are lower, but lots of earlier studies could have told him that. The gist of his report is that graduation rates are scandalously lower than states and cities say they are, and that the gap between African-American and Hispanic vs. white graduation rates is also scandalous. He does update his data. He claims the New York City Class of 2003 graduation rate was 43 percent (presumably this is the four-year rate) compared to what the city found, a 53.4% on-time graduation rate that year. But Greene has reported these general findings several times already.

Actually, much of the new Greene report’s introduction is devoted to an attack on the Economic Policy Institute and its forthcoming report on graduation rates by Lawrence Mishel and Joydeep Roy. Now since that report is embargoed for Thursday, one day after Greene’s embargo is lifted, one has to wonder a little about Greene’s timing. Especially as Mishel and Roy find the opposite: that Greene and other scholars have grossly understated the graduation rate and made the public schools look far worse than they actually are.

The Mishel/Roy book is not yet out, but Mishel did write an op-ed in Education Week March 8, “The Exaggerated Dropout Crisis,” which says some of what he’s found. He uses data from the Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics (Mishel and Roy are economists) to calculate that the low graduation rates reported by Greene and others are very unlikely. The BLS workforce surveys show that 80 to 90 percent of all Americans have a regular high school diploma and 70-80 percent of all African-Americans have one. Not exactly the crisis Greene paints.

The dueling databases and methodologies here will be of interest to some and not others. The differences are too much for a late day blog post. But it would be good if some people checked this out carefully. This issue has legs–it will be with us for awhile and it has real consequence in the education world.

An early look, though, suggests Mishel and Roy are the more thorough and their analysis appears more developed. They go against the grain. Since a Harvard Civil Rights Project study a few years ago, everyone is saying that the Black and Hispanic graduation rates are lower than reported and it’s a conspiracy and a scandal. But at least in New York, that has not been proved at all. And Mishel (who’s liberal) won’t score political points with this. But facts are facts.

Mishel writes, “Don’t get me wrong. I am not satisfied with a national black dropout rate of 25 percent, or a much higher urban rate. We must fix this glaring social problem. But to solve it, we need to get our facts right, including the truth that high school graduation rates have been improving… Even with the most extreme assumptions about increased numbers of GEDs and incarcerations, there would still remain a real growth in regular diplomas for blacks and a narrowing the the black-white graduation gap.”

This is an important discussion that’s starting up here, so while the end of the year is in sight, don’t check out quite yet. Instead, check out these reports..

April 17, 2006

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Leonie Haimson on Class Size

Filed under: Class Size NYC DOE by Edwize Admin @ 6:45 pm

One of the few educational issues about which there is no dispute is that the size of classes has a direct and measurable impact on the prospects of student’s success in the classroom. At the forefront of this fight in NYC, is Class Size Matters, an organization providing critical research and advocacy on this issue.

Its Executive Director, Leonie Haimson, works tirelessly to raise awareness of the compelling need to lower class size as a means to educational improvement. The following piece by Leonie Haimson appears with her consent:

During the fall of 2003, Randi Weingarten was the first person to mention to me the possibility of an audit by the State Comptroller’s office of the city’s use of the state class size funds.

We were sitting in court, listening to the lawyers argue, after the city had bumped our coalition’s first proposition off the ballot, that would have created a charter commission on class size. (Coincidentally, at the end of this month, our coalition will be back in court, arguing against the city’s attempt to keep another proposition off the ballot again — this time, to amend the city charter to require smaller classes in all grades.)

That same fall, after I had received numerous complaints from parents and others that class sizes had risen in their schools, I asked the NYC Independent Budget Office to analyze the data on class size and more particularly, the number of classes offered in each grade K-3. In the summer of 2004, after I had studied the state class size law more closely and received convincing evidence of the city’s violations from the IBO, I went to the State Comptroller’s office and asked them for an audit. When they were not forthcoming, I asked Randi to intercede.

Randi called Hevesi promptly to ask him for an audit, and when that didn’t produce results, later met with him personally and asked him again. Still, I never received actual confirmation from his office that they were indeed going to perform the audit until Jan. 05, when then-Speaker Gifford Miller, Councilmember Robert Jackson and Senator Eric Schneiderman publicly asked that the audit be performed.

WHAT DID THE AUDIT FIND? That DOE had been breaking the law in numerous ways. Though the city claimed to have formed 1556 additional classes each year in grades K-3 with almost $89 million in annual funds, there were actually only 20 more classes in these grades last year.

20 extra classes with $89 million means that each class cost an extra $4.5 million. The Comptroller also found that DOE had sharply cut the total number of classes in these grades by almost 900 over the last four years.

If the city had actually formed the additional classes that they claimed, class sizes in grades K-3 would now average 19.1 students per class. Instead, 65% of our K-3 children remain in classes 21 or larger, with 26% of them in classes or 25 students or more.

The Comptroller concluded that the DOE was improperly charging the state for teachers who should have been paid for by the city, counter to the intent of the law, and “inconsistent with the Program’s maintenance of effort requirement.”

Though the audit’s findings were essentially finished in July of 2005, the State Comptroller’s office could not release them until they had held a follow-up meeting with Department of Education officials, and allowed THEM to prepare a formal written response.

DOE asked for and received several extensions for this purpose. The formal written response from Kathleen Grimm, Deputy Chancellor of Finance and Administration, is dated Monday Nov. 7, 2005, the day before the Mayoral elections. In it, she essentially refuses to do anything differently in the future, essentially thumbing her nose at the State Comptroller and the law itself.

She also disputes the Comptroller’s methodology and conclusions, calling them overly “quantitative,” and says that she will not alter the department’s oversight or practices. Instead, she writes, DOE allows for “the holistic judgments of local educational leaders.” (It is interesting that on matters relating to bulletin boards and how children are arranged on rugs, Tweed is happy to prescribe to principals and teachers; but when it comes to matters such as reducing class size, they say they will leave it entirely up to them – even when it comes to the possible violation of state law.)

While the audit found there were schools with little room to form additional classes, it also found that there were many that did indeed have the room, but either were not receiving these funds, or were not using them appropriately. Moreover, the auditors found many instances in which schools were sitting only a few blocks away from each other, one overcrowded and with large class sizes, the other having plenty of room and with extremely small classes. And yet rather than adjust the catchment areas of neighboring schools in order to reduce class size more uniformly, Grimm responded that, “we do not believe any change to our approach to attendance zone boundary lines is necessary at this time.”

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An immigrant’s experience

Filed under: Other Topics by Edwize Admin @ 6:42 pm

Like the population of the city, teachers in New York City come from a myriad of backgrounds. In light of the recent discussions around immigration, I asked several members of various heritage committees’ inside the union to write about their own immigration experience. This post was submitted by Pasquale D’Onofrio.

I was born in Italy during WWII, and I saw some of the damages created by governments dominated by dictators.
America had a great fascination on me, which developed when I learned about Abraham Lincoln, and his ideals of democracy.

Ideals are very important in life, and that explains why so many immigrants did well in this country. So many of us came here with the belief that hard word would have priority on privilege and family connections.

Arriving in America, learning English, earning 5 college degrees, becoming a teacher was not easy for me, but I was inspired by the ideals of freedom, equality which are the fundamentals of the American democracy. (more…)

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