Bloomberg for Perpetuity

After 12 years of his machinations, which is four more years than the millions of New Yorkers who twice voted for term limits demanded, it is doubtful that anyone in NYC above the age of, say, five, has any doubts of the completely ruthless and anti- democratic spirit of Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Still, even those who have tasted Bloomberg’s contempt for the democratic process and ethos may be taken aback by the spiteful little man’s latest stunt: the hiring of the consulting firm The Parthenon Group to craft a plan that will preserve Bloomberg’s dreadful Children First Network, a key component in Bloomberg’s destruction of the New York Public School System, created ostensibly to assist principals and teachers in their ever more complex work loads. They are perhaps the only structure in Bloomberg’s DOE that is loathed in equal measure by administrators, teachers and parent groups. The reason for the mass loathing is simple: the Networks are both crazily expensive and largely incompetent. For an extra bonus they are created not out of geographic communities but rather on abstract demographics, the better to insure relationships are as strained and a-human and as corporate as possible.

Nobody seems to know how one is hired and by what criteria. I’ve been advised by “experts” in my field who never taught a day in their life. The same principals who hire Networks somehow also take orders from them and also live in fear of them. For the past year or so, it seems every time I’ve heard the Networks mentioned it was always in the context of how, come January 2014, they would face the same good riddance as their creator Bloomberg. But their creator, it turns out, has other ideas and would like to extend the Networks well into the mayoralty of whoever it is who comes after him regardless if he or she wants it. To be sure, Mike Bloomberg would like to extend all his ideas into perpetuity if he could,just as he would use his billions to purchase an army of shills to defend them, which is just one of the reasons that New Yorkers will rue the day they allowed a sociopath like Bloomberg anywhere near power for a very long time.

See Gotham Schools article below.

JUNE 10, 2013
DOE secretly enlisted Parthenon to devise plan to save networks
by Geoff Decker, at 8:27 pm
Intent on preserving the Bloomberg administration’s education legacy, the Department of Education has hired a favored consulting firm to craft a plan that would safeguard a signature policy.

The city has hired the Parthenon Group to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the system through which principals choose support organizations to provide professional development, curriculum, and budgeting help.

The consulting firm, which has previously studied school closures and small schools for the department, is charged with crafting a strategic vision to ensure that Children First Networks are preserved when another mayor takes over next year.

“While there is no set of actions that can perfectly ensure ‘sustainability’ of the network model, the goal of the project will be to identify a series of steps that can bolster the odds of sustaining those elements the DOE views as most essential,” the firm wrote in its bid for the project. The confidential bid was submitted in April and obtained by GothamSchools.

The Common Core: A Bizarre but Revealing Picture Tells a Thousand Words

A couple of days ago a bizarre if not surreal poster appeared on the entranceway wall of the school in which I work. Issued by the New York City Department of Education, touting both the challenges and wonders of the highly dubious educational cure all Common Core State Standards, the poster is aimed at New York City parents. In large print are the words: “ This Spring We’re Aiming Higher.” It makes a point of warning parents, among lots of fluff, that on account of the rising standards of the Common Core, their childrens’ all revealing test scores will go down this year.

But not to worry, parents, the poster goes on to say, in the end, because of the Common Core, your kids will be prepared “for college and a career.”

Nothing new here. This kind of drivel about the wholly untested Common Core has been repeated with cast iron certainty ad nauseum from coast to coast.
But the words are accompanied by a photograph and it is here that things get interesting. The picture of what appears to be a 10 year old boy shooting a basketball at a basket that is not merely distant but ludicrously distant. The child appears to be almost beneath the opposite basket on the other side of the court. To tell this child making this shot is “a challenge” is to not understand the meaning of the word. Or, worse it is to understand the word. In either case the child has not a prayer of making the shot. It is an act of cruelty to propose that he can. Indeed, neither would many grown men make the shot — and if they did, it would be more luck than skill. But then again, most grown men would know what the little boy in the picture would not: there is only one scenario where one would even consider taking such a shot — a moment of absolute desperation when your team is behind at the buzzer and you fling the ball and hope you get lucky. And they would know something else: they would know that only an absolute fool or an absolute sadist would have you practice such a shot.

It is, to say the least, a curiously cruel choice of a metaphor, particularly considering the audience it is aimed at. If some gym teacher had my kid taking such shots I’d question not merely his or her competence, but his or her sanity. Indeed, only someone with no knowledge whatsoever of basketball or the fragility of a child’s psyche would ever request such a moronic task. It virtually insures failure. Yet, for all its absurdity it is completely consistent with the towering arrogance and self-righteous certainty of the promoters ( and owners and profiteers ) of the Common Core and indeed, all of the “education reformers.” After all, this is the same crew that under the No Child Left Behind Act insanely demand that every child in America be proficient in English and Math or they shut down their schools and fire their teachers.

That’ll show ‘em.

All of this, of course, could be dismissed as making too much of a silly poster but for the fact that while musing over the image I could not help but recall Diane Ravitch’s prescient comments on a purloined copy of this years Common Core aligned fifth grade English Language Arts test: “ I read the passages and the questions based on them. My reaction was that the difficulty level of the passages and the questions was not age-appropriate. Based on test questions I had reviewed for seven years when I was a member of the NAEP ( National Assessment of Educational Progress ) board, it seemed to me that the test was pitched at an eighth grade level. The passages were very long, about twice as long as a typical passage on NAEP for eighth grade. The questions involved interpretation, inference, and required re-reading of the passage for each question.”

Ravitch’s conclusions on the actual (still secret, still hidden) test – that fifth graders were tested with eighth grade level work — could easily be seen as the intellectual equivalent of demanding that little kids shoot a basket from the opposite side of the court: could easily be seen, that is, as exposing either an imbecile’s idea of raising standards or as an integral part an extraordinarily cynical long term plot to set American children up to fail by the millions to create a rationale for privatizing public education.

I see the latter.

Fear and Loathing and the Common Core

This morning, like yesterday morning and the morning before that, I was complicit in the wholesale corporatization of American public school education, playing my small but essential role in a corporate experiment of unprecedented proportions and titanic intent.     This morning and yesterday morning and the morning before that, I, like thousands of my fellow teachers, administered to my students the first of a promised endless battery of New York State standardized tests.

It is hard not to feel demoralized if not utterly invisible administering such things, that much the more when you know that few in your profession had any say at all  in the production  of such things, that such tests are incapable of measuring and therefore subtly  dismiss the most sublime human gifts such as creativity,   and that they are designed, in large part, to strip teachers of our  autonomy.

And more than that:  you know that under the current data crazed evaluation systems, the outcomes of such these tests threaten your very livelihood.

It is harder still to believe that such emotions are not part of the design of the entire project.  After all, a cowed, terrified workforce is a compliant workforce and no word is more operative in today’s “new normal” school system than “compliance.”

The Pearson produced tests are all aligned to what are deceitfully  called the  Common Core State Standards, the first of countless tests to be so,  and as such are designed to insure the ten year olds in my charge were on track to be “college and career ready”, the better to help them succeed in the global economy and “win the future.”

And who can argue with that ?

I can.

I can because not only is such a notion of education limited and limiting to the point of vulgarity, but because everything about the Common Core State Standards Initiative, beginning with its name, stinks to high heaven. Everything about this privately funded, privately owned, secretly created scheme, sponsored by the un-elected National Governors Association and given pseudo academic legitimacy by the equally unelected but lofty sounding Council Of Chief State School Officers, is meant to obscure or hide altogether what the Common Core is, why it exists and how it came — ready or not –  to be rammed down the throat of almost every school kid in America  – including the ten year olds I saw pointlessly suffer through  it the  past three days.

Search the New York State Education website and you will find nothing about the Core’s (as it is now called) main funders, Bill and Melinda Gates, nothing about its fantastically lucrative connection to Pearson Publishing, who have already made millions and stand to reap billions of tax payer bucks creating more tests for our kids — beginning in kindergarten — than have ever been seen before in human history, nothing about the multi million dollar Common Core paraphernalia industry.

Lord of American Education

Seek and you will find nothing to indicate the “Core”, in Common Core is, in fact, nothing less than the arbitrary selections of educational entrepreneur and non teacher, David Coleman, pal of Michelle Rhee; he , who gets to pretty much single handedly decide what is and what is not important in our children’s education.

The Divine Decider

And this, does he , from sea to shining sea.

Seek and you will find nothing about the grossly coercive manner in which the Obama administration forced the Common Core upon cash starved states in exchange for their autonomy and enough strings attached to slowly strangle their teacher unions who insanely went along with it;  nothing about  the totalitarian ethic inherent in the Core that mandates that once “adopted “ ( what a disgracefully manipulative use of our language !) by a state not a single comma of the holy document could be altered.

Seek and you will find nothing to indicate the fact the “initiative” in the Common Core State Standard Initiative is the initiative not of states, teachers, or parents  but only that of its  super rich sponsors and   corporations. Seek and you will find nothing about the incredible fact that the vast experiment called the Common Core has never even been field-tested — even as it is utterly remaking the American public  school system as we breathe.

What kind of  people would do this ?

Nothing I can  think of  in the current political landscape more clearly illuminates the insidious transformation of the United States from a problematic democracy into an outright oligarchy and corporate fiefdom than the remarkable series of outrageous experiments currently  being performed on American public school children at the behest of a handful of unelected, wholly unaccountable,  madly narcissistic billionaires and their  corporate allies via the  machinations of their hirelings in elected office.  As yet, the most outrageous of these experiments is the Common Core and its concomitant testing frenzy than comes with it.  As many have pointed out,  the children of the  proponents of the Common Core go to schools that hold such stuff in outright disdain.

We should do as well. Those intrepid parents in the Opt Out movement are showing the way.  The testing industry is the central nervous system of the entire corporate education reform campaign.  If enough refuse to  feed it,  it will die.  If we continue to accept it,  our already deeply enfeebled democracy will.

Next year my child will enter  “a testing grade” and is therefore meant to share in the glories of the Common Core Initiative.  Let me rephrase that:  She will be forced to share in the glories of the Common Core Initiative.

Note:  as they are expanding their empire to kindergarten, next year just about everyone’s child is meant to share in the glories of the Common Core State Standard Initiative.

I do not know what will happen from now till then but I know this: My child will partake in this ruthless, rapacious corporate hustle over my dead body.

Educators 4 Excellence and the Strings They Pull

Once again the farce that calls itself Educators for Excellence, a minuscule organization existing solely to implement the will of its hubristic and anti-democratic billionaire backers, most prominently Bill Gates and the hedge fund gang that calls itself Democrats for Education Reform, have managed to land yet another editorial in a major New York paper, this time the New York Daily News.

There is, of course, no sane reason that as microscopic an organization as is E4E would be treated with such respect and prominence other than the fact that the same people who have ponied up over two million dollars for the two year old propaganda group paid other people to make   some serious phone calls to the honchos at the DN and the heroes of the “Liberal Media” found it advantageous to do their bidding. Hence, another editorial for E4E.

It is more than ironic that these people have the gall to speak of merit.

The editorial, like Educators 4 Excellence itself, is pathetic.   And, like all the times I have actually encountered this deceptive little group, I was almost initially disarmed by pathos.  The last time was a few weeks back at a tiny and tinny E4E rally for the same cause in which head shill Evan Stone, with characteristic humility, bellowed idiotically into a microphone to his 30 or so followers, “ I am not satisfactory!  I am excellent!” with all the energy and passion of a depressed salamander.

For a moment I could not help but pity the poor fool who was trying so hard to please his ultra-wealthy employers who have removed him from the hard work of teaching so as to allow him to play dummy to their ventriloquist.     What else can one feel but pathos?

For a moment, anyway.

In the editorial, pathetically tilted  “Please help me to be a better teacher ” you have the same message, slightly augmented.   You might call this an Educators 4 Excellence version of   Paradise Lost desiring deeply to enter Paradise Regained.

Here you have the song of a teacher who claims that she relocated from the middle of the country “after working as a public school teacher for five years in Colorado” and  “moved to New York City because of its reputation for being on the cutting edge of innovation in all things,” assuming, of course, in education.

Here “cutting edge” needs be understood as the educational version of a century old scientific management, also called Taylorism: “a theory of management that analyzed and synthesized workflows. Its main objective was improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering of processes and to management. Its development began with Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s within the manufacturing industries.”

Taylorism was beloved by Henry Ford and any number of industrialists.

“Value added metrics” or VAM is a great grand child of Taylorism and as such is a half-baked completely unreliable and fraudulent method of evaluation that links students test scores to their teachers. It can torpedo teaching careers with no justification whatsoever.     Only a person utterly without an ethical center would inflict this crazy system on any teachers.  E4E, like their corporate overlords, are gaga over VAM.  At   least those who know of VAM’s existence, which, at least in terms of their rally, were very, very few.

Alas, hoping to encounter Paradise in “cutting edge” New York, the angst-ridden   author encounters only Paradise Lost and found herself longing for the system she had fled in which Denver  “successfully implemented a teacher evaluation and compensation system known as ProComp when I was working there. Under ProComp, teachers are evaluated by multiple measures, including student growth data, the amount of professional development they participate in and thoughtful, meaningful classroom observations.”

Ah, for the happy days of ProComp!  Alas, one wonders why she fled such an educational Eden in the first place.

Her next lines read as if they were penned by a committee.

“The city and the teachers union have until Jan. 17 to negotiate such a system or risk losing $300 million in state education aid. And if they don’t, we’ll lose a lot more than money, missing an important opportunity to create a world-class teaching force that can provide a great education to every child in the city no matter where they live or which classroom they end up in each year.”

The writer either does not know or  does not care that not a thin dime of the $300 million is  destined for the classroom.  The writer either does not know or does not care that the evaluation system is based partly on the presumption of good faith on the part of administrators – a good faith precious few NYC teachers have seen evidence of since the advent of the Eternal Mayor and his eternal war upon them — and partly on demonstrably bad science called Value Added Metrics.  In short, to implement such an evaluation system as it stands would be to treat the career of New York City teachers as if with a roll of the dice, a scenario that would not seem to faze Mr. Bloomberg in the least.  Or E4E.  Or Bill Gates. Or Democrats for Education Reform.  Or Andy Cuomo.  Or Barack Obama.

Sorry, we need to take your license.  You can never work as a teacher again.  But it’s for the kids, you understand.

Another part of her letter, considering that it entirely concerned with the appalling shortcomings of appalling administrators,  is nothing short of an unintended exposure and indictment of the Bloomberg administration.

“My experience in New York has been quite different. In my first job here, working with students who were considered some have the most disabled in the city, I received tenure without so much as ever having the principal observe me teach. The feedback I received was limited to a checklist that included things like the quality of my bulletin boards.

Never did I get useful feedback on my classroom management; never did I get quality advice on how to better differentiate my instruction to reach more students, and never did I receive insights from coaches or mentors on what had or hadn’t worked for them.”

The author seems to be clueless as to who is responsible for the above but assumes, somehow, the new evaluation plan will transform these incompetents into stellar performers – to use a word cherished by Ed reformers.

Finally there is yet another pathetic attempt to frame the argument in hipster language.

“There is simply no reason New York cannot do the same for its teachers. There is simply no reason that a city that has been at the leading edge on so many other things can’t lead on this.”

But all of this nonsense begs the question of why does this infinitesimal organization which represents less than 1% of teachers and would vanish back in to the hell from which it came the moment its sugar daddies ceased bankrolling it, repeatedly land editorials in widely circulated newspapers, seats on educational forums and interviews with Fox News and the Wall Street Journal ?

Of course, in a nation in which the 1% are waging eternal war against all those who are not them, it is apposite that it is so.  It is also reprehensible.

I said earlier that my dealing with E4E have sometimes led me to be almost disarmed by their pathos.  For a time,  for a time.

But then I think about what they doing, their level of their conscious deceit and cynicism masquerading as innocence and honesty. I think about the cold blooded hubris it takes to try and undermine the last standing union of size in the nation because it will land you a soft cozy job on billionaire welfare.  But mostly I think about the almost animal like lack of empathy embedded in the reckless, unproven, untested policies they promote and the ruthless, predator nature for those they work for.  I think about all the fine teachers I know who have been thoroughly demoralized by the likes of the polices E4E and its masters so insidiously work to implement. I think of dear friends and fine beloved teachers with families whose careers have been destroyed by the same a-human impulse that drives all of this corporate reformer psychosis.

And then I feel something very different than pathos.

I moved here from Denver, where evaluations are more rigorous

Comments (12)

BY SUSAN KEYOCK / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2, 2013, 2:55 AM

Print

ADAMS IV

Mayor Bloomberg (l.) and UFT head Michael Mulgrew (r.) have frequently clashed over education reform.

After working as a public school teacher for five years in Colorado, I moved to New York City because of its reputation for being on the cutting edge of innovation in all things. Little did I know that when it came to teacher preparation and support, I’d be taking a big step backward.

Today, five years after my move, our schools still haven’t caught up to forward-looking states like Colorado — and parents and students are left to wonder why there is often such a disparity in teacher quality from classroom to classroom.

A robust teacher evaluation system would begin to help change that by providing educators with meaningful, data-driven feedback about their performance — hopefully leading to training and mentoring opportunities to help us improve in the areas where we struggle.

The city and the teachers union have until Jan. 17 to negotiate such a system or risk losing $300 million in state education aid. And if they don’t, we’ll lose a lot more than money, missing an important opportunity to create a world-class teaching force that can provide a great education to every child in the city no matter where they live or which classroom they end up in each year.

Better evaluation is hardly a novel concept. In Denver, which is a fraction of the size of New York, we successfully implemented a teacher evaluation and compensation system known as ProComp when I was working there. Under ProComp, teachers are evaluated by multiple measures, including student growth data, the amount of professional development they participate in and thoughtful, meaningful classroom observations.

In turn, highly effective teachers in Denver can receive financial bonuses and leadership opportunities — things that signal to educators that performance matters. Studies have shown a positive impact on student achievement, and Denver is now evolving the system to meet new needs and challenges.

My experience in New York has been quite different. In my first job here, working with students who were considered some of the most disabled in the city, I received tenure without so much as ever having the principal observe me teach. The feedback I received was limited to a checklist that included things like the quality of my bulletin boards.

Never did I get useful feedback on my classroom management; never did I get quality advice on how to better differentiate my instruction to reach more students, and never did I receive insights from coaches or mentors on what had or hadn’t worked for them.

I’m currently working at a school where my principal recognizes the value of observing her teachers and working with them to improve their practice. I’ve been fortunate to receive her feedback promptly — and I incorporate her assessments into my planning to enhance the education I am providing. It makes coming to work that much more rewarding, but receiving that support shouldn’t depend on the principal. Rather, it should be offered to every teacher in every school.

Across the country — from Los Angeles to Newark to Washington — many districts have successfully negotiated new evaluation measures.

There is simply no reason New York cannot do the same for its teachers. There is simply no reason that a city that has been at the leading edge on so many other things can’t lead on this.

City officials and the city’s teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, need to get beyond their eternal grudge match and start thinking about how they can help teachers enhance their profession — which, in turn, can only increase student performance. They can start by providing us with a stronger means to evaluate our work.

Keyock is a special-education teacher at Metropolitan High School in the Bronx and a member of Educators 4 Excellence.

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Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/better-teacher-article-1.1230605#ixzz2GtqchgA7

Michelle Rhee Exploits Sandy Hook Slaughter to Plug Studentsfirst Organization

 What can you say about a person who uses an event as unspeakable as the massacre in Sandy Hook to promote her organization ?  Please read the following and draw your own conclusions. The bold Italics are mine.

Statement by Michelle Rhee on the School Shooting tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut

“Following today’s tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the entire StudentsFirst family is mourning with the victims, their families, and the entire community of Newtown, Connecticut. We have offered our colleagues in the state any assistance they may need.

There are no adequate words to express the horror and senseless nature of violence in our schools. It happens far too often in our country.  As a mother myself, I understand the hesitation every parent will feel in the coming days when they kiss their children and send them off to school — to a place of learning and growth that ought to be a safe haven from violence.

Our children are our most valuable assets, and we lost too many of them today. Today’s event forces us to ask ourselves: how are we expected to foster an environment in which students can learn, grow, thrive, and set off on positive life-paths when we cannot guarantee basic needs such as their safety?

But events like these also strengthen our resolve to do exactly that — improve schools for children and thereby improve entire communities. The entire StudentsFirst organization — including the members of our team in Connecticut — recommit ourselves to that mission today, as we pause to send our thoughts and prayers to those affected in Newtown.”

• 

• • Addendum:  We would do well to remember here Secretary Of Education Arne Duncan’s equally grotesques comment on Hurricane Katrina.  Duncan, an important figure in the creation of the Cult of Rhee and a central figure in the designed destruction of the public school system nation wide, stated that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans” because it gave the city a chance to rebuild and improve its failing public schools.

  Such are two of the morally depraved self righteous superstars of the corporate reform industrial complex coming soon to take your child’s school.