SNOWGATE: First, the Lies, Then The Lies

NYC Chancellor Carmen Farina looks a little unhappy as she struggles with her soon-to-be-public anger and frustration with reporters, parents and teachers who will just not stop throwing darts at her for keeping the schools open during the latest snowstorm on February 13, 2014.

Carmen does not like people who expose her inner corruption and arrogance, or who dare to challenge her and not be afraid of the ever-present threats to life and family.

Just wait.

SNOWGATE is only the first scandal.

After Storm, 100% Attendance Is Not 100% Accurate

De Blasio: Keeping New York City schools open was right decision

Kids in NYC Have to Go to School on Thursday, Or Declare Their Own Snow Day

On Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio issued a hazardous travel advisory for Thursday and Friday, warning New Yorkers that the latest round of the never-ending Snowpocalypse will make the morning and evening commute "extremely difficult." "If you do not need to drive, you will help yourself and everyone else by staying off the roads," said De Blasio. "Take mass transit and leave extra time — it will be slow-going for everyone tomorrow." That sounds like the prelude to a school-closing announcement, but the Department of Education said classes are still on for tomorrow – though last time, more than half of all students just didn't show up.

There's only been one snow day so far in De Blasio's New York, and many parents were angry that school remained open during the last big storm. "Damned if you do, damned if you don't," Carmen Farina, the New York City Schools Chancellor, told ABC New York, adding that many kids only get a hot meal at school, and no one will be home to care for them. "Parents have to go to work. You didn't hear of any businesses in the city of New York closed down. Macy's was open. So if people can go shopping and go to work, then kids can go to school," Farina said.

The federal government has already closed its offices in the D.C. area for Thursday, and on Twitter many are calling for Netflix to make the snow day even sweeter by posting season two of House of Cards a day early. Netflix has yet to respond, but it does seem like something they'd do. In that case, it's going to be a particularly rough day for the many NYC schoolchildren desperate to see what Frank Underwood does next.

NYC Schools Chief Carmen Farina Channels Cathie Black and Keeps All Schools Open During The Blizzard Saying "It's A Beautiful Day" - After all, Macy's is Open

SNOWGATE.

We all remember the short - 3 month - Chancellorship of Cathie Black, right? Let's hope we can remove Carmen Farina in less time.

My 2 cents.

The Case Against Carmen Farina, Former Bloomberg/Diana Lam Partner in Crime

 

A Question For Carmen Farina, NYC Chancellor: Where is the Money?

 

The Carmen Farina Chronicles: NY Times Starts The Carmen Spin

Betsy Combier

oh - here is the NYC DOE announcement on their website:

Chancellor Fariña Announces All Student After-School and PSAL Activities Are Cancelled

 02/13/2014  

Schools Are Open
Due to inclement weather conditions, all student after-school and PSAL activities are cancelled today, Thursday, February 13, 2014. Schools are open. Families with busing questions should contact the Office of Pupil Transportation at 718-392-8855. Parents, as always, should exercise their own judgment with regard to their children. Safety is a top priority for the Department.

and here is a study done by Harvard University which concludes that students do not fall behind when there are snow days:

School administrators may want to be even more aggressive in calling for weather-related closures. A new study conducted by Harvard Kennedy School Assistant Professor Joshua Goodman finds that snow days do not impact student learning. In fact, he finds, keeping schools open during a storm is more detrimental to learning than a closure.

The findings are “consistent with a model in which the central challenge of teaching is coordination of students,” Goodman writes. “With slack time in the schedule, the time lost to closure can be regained. Student absences, however, force teachers to expend time getting students on the same page as their classmates.”

Goodman, a former school teacher, began his study at the behest of the Massachusetts Department of Education, which wanted to know more about the impact of snow days on student achievement. He examined reams of data in grades three through 10 from 2003 to 2010. One conclusion — that snow days are less detrimental to student performance than other absences — can be explained by the fact that school districts typically plan for weather-related disruptions and tack on extra days in the schedule to compensate. They do not, however, typically schedule make-up days for other student absences.

The lesson for administrators might be considered somewhat counterintuitive. “They need to consider the downside when deciding not to declare a snow day during a storm — the fact that many kids will miss school regardless, either because of transportation issues or parental discretion. And because those absences typically aren’t made up in the school calendar, those kids can fall behind.”

Goodman, an assistant professor of public policy, teaches empirical methods and the economics of education. His research interests include labor and public economics, with a particular focus on education policy.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/01/snow-days-dont-subtract-from-learning/

Cathie Black speaks after being appointed New York City Schools Chancellor while her predecessor
Joel Klein (left) and Mayor Michael Bloomberg look on. The appointment of Black, who had a troubled

three-month tenure, is seen as one of Bloomberg's worst missteps.

 Clueless schools chief: ‘It’s a beautiful day’

By Bob Fredericks and Yoav Gonen

, Feb. 13, 2014

LINK

Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina cluelessly defended the decision to keep schools open during Thursday’s lethal Nor’easter – incredibly saying “it’s a beautiful day out there,” as snow and freezing rain fell outside.

“It has totally stopped snowing. It’s absolutely a beautiful day out there right now,” she said at a morning news conference in Brooklyn with Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Asked to elaborate, Farina said, “Coming down the stairs, the most obvious thing is it stopped snowing. The second thing, it’s getting warmer – which means that theoretically the snow will start melting.”

She also said that because people were out and about, it must be nicer out.

“I guess the other thing, in looking out the window … there’s a lot of people on the streets,” she said before cracking a flippant joke.

“Obviously it’s not as nice as it is where my husband is in South Beach, but it’s a lot better than it was before.” ” she said, as she and de Blasio burst out laughing.

“It’s getting warmer … theoretically, the snow will start melting,” Farina added.

 

De Blasio and Farina then haughtily defended their call Wednesday night at 10:33 p.m. to keep schools open – at the same time forecasters were predicting up to 10 inches of snow in the city.

 “Unlike some cities, we don’t shut down in the face of adversity. I’m going to make decisions based on the information we have,” de Blasio boasted.

“There is the illusion you can have perfect information and perfect decisions,” de Blasio said.

“We made the right decision.”

But their comments did little to mollify parents, teachers and students who took to social media to harshly criticize their decision to keep schools open.

“Why the public school system is open today in these conditions is astounding. Putting the lives of teachers, administrators, and most importantly, children, in danger by telling them to travel in this weather is incomprehensible.



Chancellor Farina and the DOE staff: you have some serious explaining to do,” said James Hong on the Department of Education’s Facebook page, which had hundreds of negative comments.

School attendance was down to 45%, according to the Department of Education.

The mayor also said Farina was spot on when she said earlier that it is important for the schools to be open because for many kids it’s the only place they can get a decent meal — a comment that angered many parents.

“We have a huge number of parents, their kids getting to school means their children will have a good meal, in some cases two meals,” the mayor said. “A lot of parents get frustrated” if school is closed, he said.

“The bottom line is, we made a decision that was right,” de Blasio stubbornly insisted.

“The facts on the ground speak for themselves. Throughout the city public transportation has been running. the precipitation levels were such that we could sustain school opening today. it’s our job to do … it’s out job to make the city function,” he said.

The mayor also took a veiled shot at the National Weather Service, suggesting they low-balled their predictions.

“We don’t second guess the National Weather Service. The low end suggested 2 or 3 inches by this morning. The high end estimate was more problematic, but not enough to close schools,” he said.

The effort was too much for TV personality and weatherman Al Roker, who tweeted a response – from the Olympics in Sochi.

“How dare @NYCMayorsOffice @NYCSchools throw NWS under the school bus. Forecast was on time and on the money,” Roker wrote.

Forecasters had predicted anywhere from 6 to 10 inches of snow for the city – and the National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning, the highest level of alert.

Asked how much snow there would have to be before schools were closed, de Blasio replied, “If you guaranteed me a foot of snow between midnight and 6 a.m., I guarantee you schools would be closed.”

Farina also callously declared that students who were absent from school Thursday would not be given a pass for taking the day off.

“At the course of a whole day, you can still get to school,” she said.

The mayor and Farina also pointed out that city students have the entire week off next week, and that they were loath to give them another day off Thursday for fear that students would backslide.

 

NYC Mayor And Schools Chancellor Blasted For Keeping Schools Open During Snow Storm

The Huffington Post  | by  Inae Oh                        

• LINK



 

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña came under fire for their decision to keep public schools open amid a heavy snow storm Thursday morning.
During a press conference updating New Yorkers on the city's response, Fariña went as far as to say "it is absolutely a beautiful day out there right now."
The remark prompted raised eyebrows, with many urging de Blasio to take responsibility for what they believed was a poor judgment call. "Today Show" host Al Roker took to Twitter to chide officials:

 

 

 

De Blasio addressed the criticism during the update, saying it's a "different thing to run the city than to give the weather on TV."
The city announced the decision to keep schools open late Wednesday evening.
The city's teachers union was also among the mayor's critics.
"I understand the desire to keep schools open. The only thing that trumps that is safety," United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said in a statement. "Having students, parents and staff traveling in these conditions was unwarranted. It was a mistake to open schools today."

Sol Stern: Who Is Carmen Farina?

Carmen Farina

Sol Stern

Sol Stern

 

LINK

 

Who Is Carmen Fariña?

 

Mayor De Blasio’s new schools chancellor is a longtime champion of failed progressive pedagogy.

 

In his press conference introducing Carmen Fariña as New York City’s next schools chancellor, Mayor Bill de Blasio suggested that he had picked her over several other candidates because she was on the same page with him in opposing Bloomberg-era education reforms. Most of the city’s education reporters took the new mayor’s spin and ran with it, even though Fariña had served loyally as Michael Bloomberg’s second-highest-ranking education official. Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez predicted that Fariña would now bring “revolutionary” changes to the department of education that she left in 2006. A headline in The Hechinger Report claimed that Fariña wanted DRAMATIC—EVEN JOYFUL—DEPARTURE FROM BLOOMBERG ERA. But that depends on what Bloomberg era you’re talking about: during the years that she served in the administration, Fariña was fully on board with its education policies.

In fact, considering Fariña’s pivotal role during the first Bloomberg term in shaping the Department of Education’s radical initiatives, portraying her as a dissident from within seems absurd. Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in June 2002, but he knew little about what actually went on in the city’s classrooms. He appointed Joel Klein, a corporate lawyer with no background in instructional issues, as his first schools chancellor.

 Bloomberg and Klein deferred virtually all decision-making on classroom instruction and curriculum to a cadre of veteran progressive educators led by Diana Lam, Klein’s first deputy chancellor for teaching and learning. Lam and Fariña  convinced Klein to introduce the constructivist “balanced-literacy” reading and writing program, developed by Lucy Calkins of Columbia Teachers College, along with a fuzzy constructivist-math program called Everyday Math, into just about every elementary school classroom in the city. (Klein would eventually realize that adopting balanced literacy was a serious mistake.)

In an early 2003 speech presenting his administration’s new education reforms, Mayor Bloomberg declared that the “experience of other urban school districts shows that a standardized approach to reading, writing, and math is the best way to raise student performance across the board in all subjects,” and therefore that “the chancellor’s office will dictate the curriculum.” And so it did. Lam soon became embroiled in a nepotism scandal and had to resign.

Fariña then took over as deputy chancellor for instruction. She became the DOE’s enforcer, making sure that all teachers in the elementary schools toed the line and implemented Calkins’s constructivist methods for teaching reading and writing. Teachers received a list of “nonnegotiable” guidelines for arranging their classrooms, including such minute details as the requirement that there must be a rug on the floor for students to sit on in the early grades and that nothing but student work be posted on the walls.

Balanced literacy has no track record of raising the academic performance of poor minority children. No independent research study has ever evaluated its methodology. Nevertheless, it was popular in education schools because it promulgated two of progressive education’s key commandments: that teachers must abandon deadening “drill and kill” methods and that students are capable of “constructing their own knowledge.” Progressives such as Calkins evoked ideal classrooms, where young children naturally find their way to literacy without enduring boring, scripted phonics drills forced on them by automaton teachers. Instead, in a balanced-literacy classroom, students work in small groups and follow what Calkins calls the “workshop model” of cooperative learning. The program takes for granted that children can learn to read and write naturally, with minimal guidance. Calkins rejects E.D. Hirsch’s finding (based on an overwhelming consensus in cognitive-science research) that the key to improving children’s reading comprehension is grounding them in broad knowledge, which she and other progressives dismiss as “mere facts.” Calkins also believes that her model classrooms promote “social justice” for all. In an interview I conducted with her at the time the DOE selected her program, she told me that “It’s a great move to social justice to bring [balanced literacy] to every school in the city.”

That’s what Fariña tried to accomplish in the early years of the Bloomberg administration—including the social-justice part. She was instrumental in creating the most centralized, top-down instructional system in the recent history of American public education. Agents of the deputy chancellor (euphemistically called “coaches”) fanned out to almost all city elementary schools to make sure that every teacher was marching in lockstep with the department of education’s new pedagogical approach. Under the rubric of “professional development,” DOE central headquarters launched an aggressive campaign to force teachers to teach literacy and math only one way—the progressive way. Each of the city’s 80,000 teachers got a six-hour CD-ROM laying out the philosophy behind the new standardized curriculum and pedagogy. The CD portrayed the world of progressive education writ large, with all its romantic assumptions about how children learn. In addition to inculcating Calkins’s balanced literacy, the DOE’s training manual celebrated the theories of an obscure Australian education guru—Brian Cambourne of Wollongong University in New South Wales, a leader of the whole-language movement (a cousin of balanced literacy) then dominating Australian public schools. Cambourne’s ideas gave city teachers not only more balanced literacy (or whole language) theory, but also a warrant for social-justice teaching.

Cambourne claims that as a young teacher, he discovered that many of his poorly performing students were actually quite bright. To his surprise, almost all demonstrated extraordinary competence in performing challenging tasks. The son of the local bookie, for example, “couldn’t learn basic math,” according to Cambourne, “but could calculate the probability the Queen of Spades was in the deck faster than I could.” Cambourne decided that children learn better in natural settings, with a minimum of adult help—a staple of progressive-education thought. Thus the role of the educator should be to create classroom environments that stimulate children but also closely resemble the way adults work and learn. Children should no longer sit in rows facing the teacher; instead, the room should be arranged with work areas where children can construct their own knowledge, much as in Calkins’s workshop model of balanced literacy.

Such constructivist assumptions about how to teach literacy were enforced with draconian discipline in city schools for several years. Progressives like Calkins, Cambourne, and Fariña don’t insist that more learning occurs when children work in groups and in “natural” settings because they’ve followed any evidence. To the contrary, as much as it tells us anything on this issue, science makes clear that, particularly for disadvantaged children, direct, explicit instruction works best. But under Fariña, reeducation sessions for teachers were meant to overcome dissenting opinion and drive home the progressive party line. To quote the directives to teachers included on the CD: “Your students must not be sitting in rows. You must not stand at the head of the class. You must not do ‘chalk and talk’ at the blackboard. You must have a ‘workshop’ in every single reading period. Your students must be ‘active learners,’ and they must work in groups.”

As I reported at the time, some brave teachers objected. At Junior High School 44 in Manhattan, a teacher tried to point out to his supervisor, quite reasonably, that some teachers feel more comfortable with and get better results through direct instruction and other traditional methods. The school’s literacy coach, sent by the DOE, then responded: “This is the way it is. Everyone will do it this way, or you can change schools.”

Calkins was grateful for Carmen Fariña’s efforts in advancing her instructional agenda, her career, and her organization’s bottom line. (Calkins’s Readers and Writers Program at Teachers College received over $10 million in no-bid contracts from the city.) Calkins expressed her appreciation in a foreword she penned for Fariña’s book, A School Leader’s Guide to Excellence, coauthored with Laura Koch, Fariña’s closest associate and collaborator at the DOE. “When Carmen and Laura took the helm of New York City’s school system, teachers, staff developers, and principals across the entire city let out a collective cheer of enthusiasm,” Calkins writes. She conjures a glorious history: “Within a week [of Fariña’s promotion to deputy chancellor for instruction] our education system began to change. Educators at every level could feel possibility in the air; the excitement was palpable.” And because of Fariña’s magic, “sound practices in the teaching of reading and writing became the talk of the town—the subject of study groups and hallway conversations in every school . . . The entire city began working together afresh to meet the challenge of improving education for all children.”

In reality, though, the balanced-literacy advocates failed in this task. The city’s eighth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests barely budged over 12 years, despite a doubling of education spending—from $12 billion to $24 billion. There was no narrowing of the racial achievement gap. (In sounding his tale of two cities theme, Mayor de Blasio makes no accounting for the failure of progressive education programs to reduce the academic achievement gap between poor and middle-class children.)

Recognizing balanced literacy’s meager results, Chancellor Klein reverted to a system of more autonomous schools, giving principals far more discretion over instructional matters. Klein apparently came to believe that he had been misled by Fariña and Calkins. The chancellor then became a supporter of Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, with its focus on direct instruction and the teaching of broad content knowledge. He set up a three-year pilot program, matching ten elementary schools using the Hirsch early-grade literacy curriculum against a demographically similar cohort of ten schools that used balanced literacy. The children in the Core Knowledge schools significantly outperformed those in the schools using the Calkins approach.

Still opposing the direct teaching of factual knowledge, Fariña recently shrugged off the pilot study, saying that not enough schools were involved. But if Fariña is serious about that criticism, she now has an opportunity to run a much larger evaluation of Core Knowledge. As a result of the city’s adoption of the Common Core State Standards and of aligned curricula emphasizing the “rich content knowledge” that the standards require, 71 elementary school principals have chosen to use Hirsch’s Core Knowledge literacy program in their schools.

Let Fariña visit and study those schools over the next year. If she really is committed to changing the tale of two cities, as she and the new mayor claim to be, one way to start would be to cast aside ideology and judge whether those Core Knowledge classrooms, drenched in “mere facts,” are actually the key to narrowing the devastating knowledge gap between middle-class kids and poor children, who begin school with little knowledge of the world and with a stunted vocabulary. She might also find that there is at least as much “joy” in classrooms in which children get taught explicitly about the world around them as there is in classrooms in which children “construct” their own knowledge.

Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.

 

Diana Lam

 

On the Lam

LINK

The mayor wanted basic change in the schools, and Diana Lam provided it—until unsavory tactics proved her undoing. Where does the chancellor turn now?

By Robert Kolker              

Joel Klein is not the man he was two years ago when Mike Bloomberg asked him to head the nation’s largest public-school system, and much of his evolution—especially his belief that children learn as much reading alone as they do from being taught by teachers—took place at the knee of Diana Lam. In a cabinet of private-sector and think-tank émigrés, Lam, Klein’s deputy for instruction, was the only career educator; while most of his team focused on rejiggering the bureaucracy, Lam introduced the one piece of reform that actually had to do with the way kids are taught. But now that she has left in disgrace—forced out for nepotism, igniting the mayor’s first major personnel scandal—Klein finds himself in an awkward position: He feels the need to defend her as an educator while condemning her sin. And yet, even as the scandal grows, Klein’s condemnation seems halfhearted.

“Some people for ideological reasons disagreed with her about the curriculum,” Klein says. “That became an issue. And in this business, people get polarized. That’s unfortunate. But I think that she was a sound educator, and I have confidence in her educational judgments.”

Klein defended Lam to Bloomberg, too, before the mayor finally persuaded him to get her resignation, which suggests either a certain political myopia or a devotedness to the deputy who became his mentor. In the beginning, Klein had hired her to be a change agent, offering her the job after just a few meetings not because of her educational philosophy but because they clicked. “I liked her style,” he told me last year. Did he know anything about the educational programs she used? “No,” he admitted. But he did know this: Four times, in four different cities, Lam would start up a campaign of parental engagement, introduce a new curriculum, and see test scores bump up a tick or two. And for an education novice whose boss needed the scores to go up before the next election, that seemed like a good deal.

In Lam, Klein had found a fellow anti-incrementalist; in a pedagogical culture of marathoners, she was a sprinter. Revamp the middle schools? No problem. Cut out social promotion in the third grade? Done. Devise a special-ed plan and break up the big high schools? You got it. She was dynamic and uncompromising at a time when managing the educational bureaucracy was at the forefront of the mayor’s thinking about education.

She was also impolitic, a lousy listener. She didn’t mind whom she provoked. The $800,000 buyout in San Antonio. The wacky three-day campaign for mayor in Boston. The bad blood in Dubuque. And the last few months in Providence, where she rigged a bidding war with Portland, Oregon, to boost her salary and then abruptly accepted the job in New York, giving notice by e-mail. In the end, Lam didn’t need any help imploding.

Last summer, newspapers were tipped off that her husband, Peter Plattes, was working in a department that reports directly to her. Lam claimed that Plattes never formally accepted the job, but another tipster revealed this to be a lie. Guessing who whispered to investigators about Lam’s indiscretions has become a parlor game at Tweed Courthouse. “She was done in by people inside the system who work for her,” says one source who sat on a board with Lam. “Not by reporters or teachers.”

In the final act last week, when a report by the schools investigator forced Bloomberg’s hand, Lam made sure she wouldn’t flame out alone: She said she’d been given the blessing of general counsel Chad Vignola, who resigned a few days later. For a mayor who has staked his reelection on cleaning up the schools, this is no time for an accountability crisis. But Klein, claiming all is well, continues to cast himself as a reformer—and Lam as a target of those who opposed reform.

“She didn’t mind whom she provoked. In the end, Lam didn’t need any help imploding.”
Lam’s enemies were ideological and political as well as personal. Phonics fans like Diane Ravitch were appalled by her philosophy of allowing long blocks of unstructured time for children to simply read and write on their own. Liberals hated the pressure the program put on teachers. The joke around Tweed was that for the first time, teachers-union chief Randi Weingarten and Manhattan Institute pundit Sol Stern agreed on something—that Diana Lam was a disaster.

“Wherever she went, the teachers hated her,” says Stern. “Her forte is a tremendous emphasis on top-down staff development. You haul all of the teachers and principals out of the classrooms constantly and pound into them what it is you want done.” Those headlines about how teachers are shocked that they have to keep lessons to less than eleven minutes—Lam took the blame for that. Which is why Weingarten felt comfortable sending Lam off last week with the hope that “we can start making educational decisions based on what works for children rather than on one administrator’s personal ideology.”

In recasting the system in Lam’s image, Klein embraced a curriculum already used in wealthier parts of town like the Upper West and Upper East sides—alarming conservatives who believe poor kids need something more structured, like phonics. Klein and Lam capitulated, making a phonics program available to qualify for federal money, but it’s clear Klein still believes in Lam’s approach. “People want to put adjectives on it instead of understanding the texture and nuance,” Klein says, “which is a much more complicated set of issues about how you not only teach children how to read words but to have an excitement for reading—to share ideas. So I think this is the right solution, and I think people are giving this a bad rap.”
In the last several months, Lam had become so disliked that Klein was shielding her from public exposure. “Clearly, she was the lead educational thinker,” says Eva Moskowitz, chair of the City Council’s education committee. “But there was a vacuum when it came to who would be allowed to publicly defend the rationale. I don’t think either Klein or Lam really took seriously the level of dissatisfaction in the system.”

Now that she’s gone, there’s not much of a chance for Klein to exhale. “I think we have the right mix of talent,” he says. “Let’s wait and see if we bring in somebody else to fill that role on a permanent basis.”

If?

“Well, it’ll depend, obviously, on whether we find the right person,” he says.

Much of what people found provocative about Diana Lam—the new curricula, the speed of the reforms—remains in place. But from here on out, Klein will be taking the heat alone. He’s graduated.