Saturday, October 27, 2018

de Blasio's Planned Education Failure


 

NYC’s schools chief shows his ignorance(nyp)

Since becoming New York City schools chancellor six months ago, Richard Carranza has made clear that he has a broad vision for reform. But the leader of the nation’s largest school system appears to have only a tenuous understanding of how complicated that system is, and his many erroneous statements suggest that he is in over his head.
This month, Carranza attended a town hall meeting in District 5, which includes most of central Harlem. Fielding questions about school funding, equity and charter schools, he presented a version of reality at odds with the facts.
“If you want any evidence of the haves and have nots, I want you to look where resources have been invested,” he said. “I will tell you that Harlem, and The Bronx and central Brooklyn, the Rockaways . . . these communities have been under-served for years.”
He’s wrong. For years, per-pupil expenditures have been significantly higher in poorer New York City communities, including the ones Carranza mentions. The most recent school-based expenditure reports demonstrate this clearly.
Districts 16 and 23, representing central Brooklyn, receive the most funding per student, at $29,668 and $27,191 respectively, as compared with the system-wide average of $24,533. Districts 7, 5 and 4, covering Harlem and the South Bronx, are the next best-funded districts, followed by 32 and 19, representing Bushwick and East New York.
These seven districts all receive per-pupil funding above the citywide average.
The emphasis on funding the poorest and most disadvantaged districts is not new to the de Blasio administration.
The city’s Independent Budget Office reported that in 2013–14, the last year in which Michael Bloomberg’s Department of Education set budgets, “the largest per pupil allocations [were] found in the South Bronx (district 7), Central Brooklyn (district 16), Upper Manhattan (districts 4 and 5), and the Lower East Side (district 1).”

 



Mays you know that most of these new jobs are going to the new residents of NYC coming from all over. Yes there will be a couple of public schools with programs and pols hogging for pictures but the die is cast WHO ARE YOU KIDDING THE WONDERFUL PEOPLE ON THE 3 FLOOR LUNCHROOM?

100,000 New Jobs for New York: Will Enough Go to Poorer Workers ...(nyt)




With Democratic Wins, Charter Schools Face a Backlash in N.Y. and Other States (NYT)







De Blasio knew he was condemning kids to failed schools (NYP Oct. 26, 2018)

For years, Post reporters Susan Edelman, Selim Algar and others detailed the failings of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Renewal Schools program — reports the mayor and his allies dismissed as ideologically driven. Now it turns out he was ignoring the same warnings from his own people.
Friday’s New York Times revealed internal City Hall communications that signaled Renewal’s failure early on. Yet de Blasio refused to end or even alter the program.
In December 2015, the Times reports, a Department of Education memo warned, “For these schools to reach their targets for 2017, the interventions would need to produce truly exceptional improvements.”
At the time, Eric Nadelstern, a former deputy chancellor, told The Post that Renewal should “reward success and penalize failure” but “does exactly the opposite.”
Rather than admit failure,   de Blasio continued to trap children in schools that wouldn’t improve no matter how much money or “wraparound” social services he threw at them. Four years and $773 million later, he looks ready to throw in the towel — with no apology to the children left to rot in schools the mayor knew he wasn’t fixing.
Clearly, he didn’t care about delivering for the children, but only about having a program he could point to and pretend he was doing something. Only the politics mattered.
Which also explains de Blasio’s cold war on the charter schools that are delivering for poor and minority students. Charters outperform the regular public schools, and have even closed the racial achievement gap. That doesn’t matter, because the mayor sees them as the enemy.
Nor is he changing his approach. His new drive to impose quotas on the city’s top high and middle schools also has nothing to do with helping the kids. It’s all about scoring ideological points, and distracting from his refusal to focus on creating more good schools for all students. What a fraud.
It is about the UFT protecting teachers rather than putting children first like we read on all the campaign flyers (2014)
Principal of Failing BrooklynSchool Quits, Saying CityLacks an Education Plan(NYT) “The problem is, there is no plan,” the principal, Bernard Gassaway of Boys and Girls High School, said of the city’s approach to struggling schools. “They’re making it up as they go along.”Mr. Gassaway said the de Blasio administration did not provide a coherent vision of how it planned to improve Boys and Girls, and he said the approaches the city planned to use, like social services for the students and increased professional development for the staff, were not sufficient. (Mr. Gassaway has not been shy about criticizing the Education Department. A former superintendent under Mr. Bloomberg, he publicly rebuked that administration after leaving the post.) His voice joins a small chorus of those questioning the city’s plans for struggling schools, and for struggling high schools in particular. Last week,charter school supporters held a rally to call attention to the city’s failing schools and to demand that the city come up with a strategy to address them. Mr. Bloomberg often gave charter schools the space freed up by the closing of schools.* Boys and Girls HS student said he was pressured to transfer,30 students have left in 3 weeks 

Over the last week, New York City's education reform movement has done its best to focus media and public attention on Brooklyn's Boys and GirlsHigh School and its recently departed principal, Bernard Gassaway. The effort is part of broader but equally disciplined effort to pressure the de Blasio administration and the city Department of Education to release a plan for struggling schools. Gassaway's resignation was first reported by the New York Post on Friday, then followed with a New York Times profile calling the resignation one of the D.O.E.'s "sternest public rebukes."* Charter movement adopts controversial principal (Capital) 

Public School Officials Are Artificially Inflating GraduationGrades


Fraudulent graduation practice give the false sense of progress