E-Accountability. It's Time.

As we head into the campaign season, let's all remember the people who have stood up and said "No" and "No way" to Mayor Mike Bloomberg for 12 years. Then we all should - no, must -hold Mayor Bloomberg, Joel Klein, Cathie Black, Dennis Walcott and all their willing subordinates accountable for denying employees, parents and children their due process rights while in office. 

Definition of ACCOUNTABILITY: the quality or state of being accountable; especially : an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions."

Accountability matters. Anyone "suddenly" changing his or her mind now in order to curry favor is not worth voting for, in my opinion.

Betsy Combier
Editor of NYC Rubber Rook Reporter
President, The E-Accountability Foundation, a 501 (C) 3 which holds people accountable for their actions online

Education, Vision and the Mayor’s Race

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

LINK

The Democratic candidates for New York mayor, whirling around the boroughs on the debate-and-forum carousel, have been struggling for advantage and the attention of tuned-out voters. But they have had no trouble infuriating the Bloomberg administration, which seems to be getting touchier about criticism as it heads to the exits.

Exhibit A was a candidates’ forum on May 11 with the United Federation of Teachers, where they took turns blasting the mayor’s record on school reform. It was five Democrats — and Adolfo Carrión Jr., who’s running on the Independence Party line — in pursuit of an endorsement, so flattery and incumbent-bashing were expected. But the jabs made the mayor go all-but-apocalyptic in reply: “If the next mayor really is serious about kowtowing to demands from some radicals in a union,” he said, “then this city does not have a future.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s schools chancellor, Dennis Walcott, called the criticism an “unconscionable” assault on the Education Department and accused the candidates of lacking vision. On Saturday, at a conference in Brooklyn for school administrators, he foretold a “tragedy” if the next mayor did not continue Mr. Bloomberg’s policies.

But after 12 years, this mayor’s ideas are due for a counterargument. The critiques the candidates are offering hardly shock the conscience, and their complaints about the Bloomberg administration can be heard from teachers and parents in any school in the city.

The school system has indeed gone overboard in relying on standardized testing. Tests need to be a means to the end of better instruction, not the pedagogical obsession they have become. Yes, Mr. Bloomberg has shown disdain for consultation, as in his rush to close underperforming schools without the full and meaningful involvement of affected communities. The system needs to strengthen neighborhoods’ connection to schools and reconnect with parents who feel shut out. And while charter schools can be a path to excellence, they can also cause problems. Shoehorning them into existing school buildings over local objections can alienate parents and reinforce among students a harmful sense of being separate and unequal.

When Mr. Bloomberg won direct control of public education in 2002, it was a historic and necessary victory, ending a system of local districts that was grossly dysfunctional and unaccountable. The candidates should not be allowed to downplay or deny how bad things were when nobody was in charge.

But there can be truth in applause lines. Comptroller John Liu spoke for many at the forum when he told of his frustrating inability, as a parent, to give input to school officials. And William Thompson Jr., a former city comptroller, answered Mr. Walcott in a statement on Saturday by noting the incompleteness of educational gains: “For 12 years, the mayor has vilified teachers, shut out parents, turned classrooms into test prep centers and closed community schools. We have tried those policies, and our kids are still not receiving the education they deserve.”

The candidates are not above campaign mushiness and overpromising. While they support a long list of desirable things, like arts and music, smaller classes and community schools that provide health and social services in poor neighborhoods, they have been vague about how to pay for them. When asked at the U.F.T. forum to embrace the union dogma that only an educator can be chancellor, they all did, except for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who said, sensibly, “Not necessarily.” Nobody vowed to be tough in negotiating a new teachers’ contract. But that wasn’t going to happen before this group anyway.

The Democrats have work to do before the September primary to persuasively show how — and with what money — they would make the city’s schools better. They will be competing not only with a defensive mayor, but with voters’ inattention and distractions, especially if former Congressman Anthony Weiner cannonballs into the pool.

They have begun laying out ideas. Mayor Bloomberg and his aides are upset that the visions aren’t his. But they should not deny that alternate visions could exist, or the possibility that they could be better than the one we have.

Canada’s Legend-ary TED Talk Lie

by Gary Rubinstein

LINK

Video Link

 

Geoffrey Canada recently did a TED talk entitled ‘Our failing schools.  Enough is enough.’  Canada is the president and CEO of The Harlem Children’s Zone and star of ‘Waiting For Superman.’

The premise of Harlem Children’s Zone is a good one.  It serves to provide school and complete wrap-around services (health, mental health, nutrition, etc.) to kids from Harlem beginning at birth and supporting them all the way through college.  The program, you might imagine, is very costly — hundreds of millions of dollars — and Canada, himself, pulls in about $400,000 a year.

During the question and answer section of the talk, Canada called on musician and TFA board member John Legend who asked the very relevant question:

John Legend: So what is the high school dropout rate at Harlem Children’s Zone?

Geoffrey Canada: Well, you know, John,100 percent of our kids graduated high school last year in my school.  A hundred percent of them went to college.This year’s seniors will have 100 percent graduating high school.Last I heard we had 93 percent accepted to college.We’d better get that other seven percent.So that’s just how this goes. (Applause)

Now I know that generally when a ‘reformer’ brags about a 100% graduation rate, he means that 100% of the students who made it to senior year also graduated while neglecting to mention what percent of the cohort had not made it to senior year.  This is the statistic that is quite easy to find by looking at the New York State report cards.  Here are seven consecutive years of enrollment statistics I got from there:

So the 62 graduates in 2012 had been the 97 6th graders in 2006.  This does not represent a 0% dropout rate, as Canada implied to John Legend, but a 36% dropout rate.

But looking at these numbers also reveals two large scandals of which I had only been aware of one before looking into this:  First, notice how there are 68 8th graders in 2007 (down from 100 6th graders in 2005) but no 9th graders in 2008.  This is because Canada ‘fired’ the entire group of what would have been their first 9th graders and first graduating class.  This story is not a big secret anymore, though Canada doesn’t seem to have lost much of his credibility for it.  For the second scandal, notice that in the 2007-2008 school year there were 88 6th graders but in 2008-2009 there are no seventh graders.  This is because they also rid themselves of an entire class of 6th graders that year.  The next year they decided to only take new 5th graders which is why we see they had 12th graders and 11th graders in 2011-2012 but no 9th or 10th graders.

Regardless of how poor the performance of those two lost classes were, Harlem Children’s Zone could have easily kept those students and have been able to answer critics of their test scores by saying that those two classes of students were students who had started as 6th graders in the school and that HCZ should only be judged by the performance of the classes of 2016 and beyond since those students will have completed their entire schooling through the program.  I guess that this could have been construed as an ‘excuse’ which would have gone against the ‘no excuses’ ideology.

As far a performance goes, the HCZ Promise Academy high school may have decent state test scores, but when it comes to national tests they only had on the ACT a 20 in Math, a 15 in English, a 15 in Reading, and a 17 in Science.  Aside from Math, this puts them in under the 20th percentile for those tests.

I’ve spoken to two teachers who have worked at Promise Academy, one is a former elementary school teacher there and another is a current middle school teacher.  The middle school teacher said that the school had recently had almost a complete turnover in staff.  When a place is supposedly so great, teachers would want to spend some time there, in my experience.  The elementary teacher described a horrible abusive working condition where uncertified co-teachers often taught test prep and where there was little support from the administration for teachers and nearly zero interaction with Canada, despite his nearly half a million dollar a year salary.

To see Canada get publicly humiliated in a debate with Diane Ravitch from September 2011, watch the live version of Meet The Press from Education Nation here.

  

Categories: Research · 16 Comments

1. Emily Becker

   So I can see that 100% of the students who started in 9th grade were no longer at the school. But couldn’t they have just transferred to another school? You say they dropped out; how do you know?

   Frankly until we get all kids tattooed and tracked by their SS numbers, I don’t think we will ever get reliable data on graduation.

   on May 12, 2013 at 7:04 pm · Reply
   • Iteach

     Watch the video linked at the very bottom of Gary’s article. Canada admits it, but he lamely says they weren’t ready to start a high school after their 8th grade year when in reality he knew their test scores wouldn’t make Canada look good so he sent them packing. Watch him snake out of it…slick they are these corporate privatizers. It’s all about their reputations.

     on May 12, 2013 at 10:34 pm · Reply
2. Meg

   I understand the point you’re trying to make about student attrition. However, while it is inaccurate for Canada to suggest that 100% of his students have graduated high school, it is equally inaccurate for you to suggest that they have a 36% dropout rate. Transferring to a different school is not equivalent to dropping out. Particularly in NYC, isn’t it possible that some of those 8th graders went on to exam, magnet, or private high schools? Unless you have documentation proving that all of those 6th graders who were not part of the subsequent graduating class did not complete high school, you are being dangerously misleading (and a bit irresponsible) with your claims here.

   In regards to the lost classes – this may be unrelated – but I had heard that Canada shut down one of his own middle schools because it was underperforming. Might this be the same case?

   on May 12, 2013 at 7:18 pm · Reply
   • Manuel

     Indeed, it is not easy to track students when talking about “dropping out.” They could have gone to another school, left the state, whatever.

     But the cold fact is that they have “dropped out” of whatever program they were in. Do we know the reason? Doesn’t matter. If the school is so wonderful, then why is it that they end up with fewer students than they started with?

     BTW, this same metric is applied to public school systems. Live by the sword…

     on May 13, 2013 at 9:04 pm · Reply
   • CarolineSF

     Dropout may not be the perfect term, but it’s attrition.

     on May 17, 2013 at 6:16 am · Reply
3. Jack

   $400,000 / year…

   Geoffrey Canada is a poverty pimp… PERIOD. THE END,

   on May 12, 2013 at 11:07 pm · Reply
4. Cosmic Tinkerer

   “A hundred percent of them went to college.”

   Notice Canada did not say what percentage of his students went to 4 year colleges. With those ACT scores, it’s very likely a large number went to community college.

   Considering the amount of money that has been poured into HCZ, all the wrap around services and Canada’s insistence on extended day and year policies, I would have thought he’d have had a MUCH higher success rate than this.

   on May 13, 2013 at 12:02 am · Reply
5. Steve M

   Here’s an easy way for a public high school to bolster its college attendance rates:

   Have a community college open a couple sections of “Introduction to Underwater Basket Weaving” on your campus. The high school provides the facilities (during a reasonable hour…say 2:00-3:00, or 3:00-4:00) and a majority of the students, and it’s a double win for the institutions involved: the community college bolsters its numbers and gets more funding; the high school ensures that its students enroll in college classes and can also utilize its own teachers in different classrooms. This is an idea that has been around for a while.

   I’m not alleging such a thing has been done, only that it is very easy to implement.

   Regarding Gary’s choice of words:
   Yeah, Gary, you used the term “dropout rate” (which you do know has a specific meaning) when you should have simply said that they were no longer students at the school. However, no harm.

   Lastly:
   We don’t know whether the students enrolled three or four years later are even the same kids that were in the school’s sixth grade. All we know are the raw numbers. It could be that the school had 0% carry over…who know? it certainly wasn’t better than 64%.

   on May 13, 2013 at 2:27 am · Reply
   • Michael Paul Goldenberg

     As a Ph.D in underwater basket weaving, I resent that comment.

     on May 13, 2013 at 12:07 pm · Reply
6. KrazyTA

   Gary: with all due respect for those who post here, thank you for your patience with nit-picking, e.g., we could argue interminably over the use of the terms “validity” and “reliability” and “bias” as they are used generally and as they are used in very specific ways by psychometricians when talking about the construction and administration of standardized tests and the inferences that could be drawn about test scores.

   That is not what this blog is about. Thankfully.

   The essential point you make about ‘disappearing’ classes is very revealing, especially since folks like Mr. Canada ‘neglect’ to mention how they achieve their $tudent $ucce$$ by ‘disappearing’ their customers, er, clients, er, students.

   Thank you in this case and others for not ‘neglecting’ to point out what the champions of the education status quo seem to keep forgetting.

   :)

   on May 13, 2013 at 6:39 am · Reply
7. Geoffrey Canada: Just Tell the Truth | Diane Ravitch's blog linked to this post.

   on May 13, 2013 at 11:06 am · Reply
8. Will Fitzhugh

   If you have a $200 million endowment, as Mr. Canada has, perhaps it is not so necessary to tell the truth?

   on May 13, 2013 at 11:37 am · Reply
9. What If “Reformers” Adopted a Positive Agenda? – @ THE CHALK FACE knows SCHOOLS MATTER linked to this post.

   on May 13, 2013 at 7:18 pm · Reply
10. Manuel

    Speaking of money: Mr. Canada’s enterprises (his Zone and the two charter schools) are all run under the umbrella of three distinct non-profits. Thus, their 990s are available from at least one source: guidestar.org (you’ll have to register to get the 990s, but it is free). I have downloaded the last available ones (for 2010, with the fiscal year starting on 07-11-2010 and ending 06-30-2011), and found that the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy Charter School (I) and II had incomes of $15,419,729 and $8,373,431, respectively.

    The first school has four individuals identified as principal, while the II has two. The total annual compensations of these principals are between $190k and $288k. Yet, the total number of students is less than 1000? And with scores in the 20 percentile? So what is all this money buying?

    Please note that Mr. Canada’s total compensation, $469,614, was derived from the Zone itself not the schools. His highest compensated employees were also handsomely rewarded (e.g., the VP of Development was paid $418,056). All this on revenues of $213,627,619.

    We are all in the wrong line of “work.” :-)

    on May 13, 2013 at 9:31 pm · Reply
11. Educator

    I don’t think the major issue is with the revenue. Typical public school Districts also receive tens of millions of dollars (they just don’t pay their administrators as much as HCZ). The major issue is when chains like HCZ claim to be doing better than typical districts using the “same” resources with the “same” students. See the “Miracle Schools Wiki” in the top-right corner of this page.

    But what many of them are really doing is 1) self selecting students into their school via a lottery 2) lower % of ELL and SPED kids, who are more challenging and expensive to educate 3) kicking students out who can’t cut it 4) claiming 100% graduation rates or college admissions rates, unlike those terrible local traditional public schools

    So politicians and education policy folk who don’t look into this think “well let’s just do what HCZ does” and they try to enact these policies on cities/districts. This is very dangerous to students. These policies are based on statistical manipulation.

    There needs to be more honesty. For example, some people believe that it’s better to self select students and kick difficult students out, so they’re OK with charters doing this. “We ought to educate kids and families who care about education. You can’t educate everyone.” Although many would disagree with this thinking, it’s at least honest.

    on May 16, 2013 at 5:27 am · Reply
12. elinor

    and the numbers do not show that Canada expels kindergarten children.

    on May 18, 2013 at 5:14 pm · Reply
    
    
    
    
    From Betsy Combier: A source of mine, a teacher at Canada's school, told me that Canada gives students money if they will come to class.
    

What Does The "Unwarranted Invasion Of Personal Privacy" in Section 87(2)(b) Mean?

Anyone who has filed a Freedom of Information request knows that the response will include an "invasion of privacy".

What does this mean? No one knows.

Prepared for publication by the New York State Association of Town Clerks.

FOIL and Privacy: Where Do We Draw the Line?

LINK

Many of you know that the issue of privacy has been the subject of a great deal of discussion recently.  You also know that one of the exceptions in FOIL authorizes an agency, such as a town, to withhold records or portions of records when disclosure would result in “an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” [section 87(2)(b)].   Additionally, FOIL includes a series of examples of unwarranted invasions of personal privacy [section 89(2)(b)].  Those examples offer guidance, but they don’t deal directly with numerous issues that arise which involve consideration of where to draw the line between unwarranted, as opposed to a permissible invasion of personal privacy.

When I give a presentation and the topic comes up, I often ask the crowd:  “’unwarranted invasion of personal privacy’ - - does anyone know what that means?”  Nobody raises a hand, because nobody clearly knows what it means, and in my opinion, nobody will ever know what it means. 

Society’s views regarding privacy are constantly changing about what might be viewed as intimate or highly personal.  Would the Victoria’s Secret ads that we’ve seen on network tv have been aired twenty years ago?  Probably not.   Well then, why are they airing today?  It seems that the sensibilities of society have changed.  What used to be so intimate or risqué that we wouldn’t have seen it on tv now seems to be more acceptable.

If you know teenage kids and others who partake in Facebook, you know that they share information with their friends (often hundreds) that their parents would never share.  There are generational distinctions in views about privacy.

The reality is that two equally reasonable people can consider the same item of personal information and disagree. Certainly that is so in my house, and my guess is that it may be so in many of yours.

So what do we do about privacy?

One of the problems is that our laws are not necessarily consistent.  You may know that section 89(7) states that FOIL does not require the disclosure of the home address of either a present or former public officer or employee.  But if you’re a good citizen registered to vote, the Election Law states that your name and address are public.  If you own a home, your name, address and the assessed value of your home are accessible to anyone.  What do we do?

We consider the possibility that the law may provide guidance.  When one statute focuses on a particular record, it prevails over a statute, like FOIL, that deals with government records generally.  That’s why names and addresses of persons who receive public assistance, receive unemployment insurance or are the subject of medical or mental health care are out of bounds.  In each instance, there is a statute specifying that those items cannot be disclosed.  It’s also why voter registration lists and assessment records that include our names and addresses are public.  They’re public because statutes separate from FOIL require disclosure.

But what if there is no statute that provides specific direction and FOIL is the statute that determines what’s public and what’s not?  Fortunately, we have guidance from the courts.

First, it’s clear that the phrase unwarranted invasion of personal privacy involves items identifiable to natural persons, humans.  The exception does not apply to things, such as corporations.  If a request is made, for example, for a list of vendors doing business with the town, it would be available because there is nothing “personal” about the information, even if it includes the identity of an individual; he/she is identified in relation to his/her business or professional capacity

.

Second, the courts have made distinctions between ordinary people who are identified in government records and people like us, public officers or employees.

When the items relate to ordinary people, I refer to “the gut test.”  In considering access to personally identifiable information contained in agency records, the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, used the “reasonable person” standard and found that disclosure would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy when an item “would ordinarily and reasonably be regarded as intimate, private information” [Hanig v. NYS Department of Motor Vehicle, 79 NY2d 106 (1992)]. When a request is made that includes items of a personal nature and you conclude that those items are nobody’s business, that disclosure would be offensive to the average person, or that they may be characterized as “intimate”, usually you will have the ability to redact those items.

  

For example, if a senior citizen submits his/her income tax form to seek a reduction in a real property tax assessment, it has been advised that the information in the tax form is nobody’s business.  In Hanig, the request involved the portion of a driver’s license application that might have indicated that the applicant had a disability.  Although it was argued that the item did not consist of medical information, the Court found that it was like medical information and is, indeed, intimate, personal and could be withheld.  Similarly, it has been advised that personally identifying details regarding those who have applied for or been granted handicapped parking permits or tags may be withheld to protect their privacy.

With respect to the privacy of public officers and employees, the courts have told us that we have less privacy than others.  In short, we are required to be more accountable than others; the public is stuck with us - - until the next election, budget cuts, or in my case, retirement or death, whichever comes first (I’m eligible for both).  More importantly, in many instances, the courts have determined that items that relate to our duties are generally accessible to the public under FOIL.  In those situations, disclosure would result in a permissible, not an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. 

Our salaries and our gross wages are public.  Our attendance records involving time in, time out, leave time accrued or used have been found to be public.  If there are certain criteria that must be met to be eligible for a position, such as a degree in a certain area, a license or a certification, those portions of a resume or application indicating that the person in that position is qualified are accessible; on the other hand, other portions of the resume or application that are unrelated to the position, such as a social security number, marital status, employment at McDonald’s, hobbies and the like may be withheld.

Again, there are many laws, and often, they may lead to inconsistent results concerning what must be disclosed, or conversely, what may or must be withheld.  In most cases, if the issue involves the privacy of ordinary people who are identified in records, the gut test will work.  What would the average reasonable person feel about disclosure of this item?  If it involves public officers or employees, often the dividing line can be drawn between the items that relate to one’s duties, in which case disclosure would be the general rule, as opposed to those are irrelevant to those duties, in which case, the items can likely be withheld.