What Will the New NYC Department of Education Look Like After The PAUSE in NYC Ends? We Know We Are Not Getting Accurate Data

Principal Alice Hom (left) and teacher Laura Lai start the school day remotely with 

students at Yung Wing School P.S. 124.

The pandemic that hit the United States will forever be known here in New York City as the event that changed everything for kids, parents, and advocates in New York City's public schools. 

New York City has been described as the most corrupt city with the largest public school system in the US. My perspective comes from my activities as a parent and education advocate who has 4 children who went through the NYC public schools. Discrimination, segregation,deceit and fraud are imbedded into the structure of the NYC Department of Education. Change happens rarely because the Courts and State legislature are bought by the same people who benefit from the inequality. Lawsuits are won on a case by case basis, not by touching the underlying foundation. Its like turning off the water but not fixing the pipe.

All public schools are not included in the pile of trash, and it can be said that NYC public schools have the best education programs in the world as well as the worst, only here money is distributed through a prism of implicit bias and racial segregation. It's the geography of the city that has made this happen. It's always about the money. Always. In general terms those with money have what they need to succeed; those without, don't and cannot get what they need unless they go to the "right" people who are not bought or co-opted out by nefarious people or other powerful forces.

Pat Romandetto

For years parents, teachers, and concerned others in Harlem and the South Bronx have cried out in vain that there are no good public schools in these neighborhoods. I witnessed blatant hypocrisy and segregation in Booker T. Washington MS 54 when I was PTA President (1999-2001), and I tried to equalize the resources and was attacked by white parents who did not want their kids to lose their privileged position in the Delta Honors Program. Delta had the third floor at the school, and the other 4 programs, whose rosters included community kids and special education students, occupied the second and first floors. Principal Larry Lynch made a mistake when he "borrowed" the check my PTA raised for more than $13,700 and told me that Superintendent Pat Romandetto had to "see" it. He then delivered a Comprehensive Education Plan to Pat that had a fraudulent signature page re-used from a prior year, in order to hide all data of MS 54's systemic misallocation of funds from the School Leadership Team, where I was a member.

I still remember a meeting I had as PTA President with Pat and Larry in the District 3 office where I heard Pat and Larry laughingly say how they obtained $1 million in Title 1 funding although Booker T. no longer qualified to get those funds. I reported this to the Special Commissioner and New York State Education Department.

Back to my missing PTA check.We needed the money for science equipment, so I spent a school year trying to get the money back while I was vilified by the white Delta parents and the District 3 Officer for Family Engagement, D.J. Sheppard. It was rough. Through the entire time I had a whistleblower parent who pretended she was part of the gang and gave me everything they emailed and or handed out. Staff in the main office at MS 54 secretly gave me documents, budgets, rosters, everything I needed. Thanks to them, I got through the bad stuff and learned how the DOE worked. I took notes and recorded conversations (legal in New York State, which is a one-party state).

In 2001 after 9-11, the late former Chancellor Harold Levy moved into the conference room right outside of Principal Stanley Teitel's office at Stuyvesant High School. As I was on the PA Executive Board as Editor of the PA Bulletin, the newspaper, Stan asked me to keep Harold company. So I did.  I told him all about Booker T. and what I saw. He told me to talk with his buddy Deputy Chancellor Burt Sacks, so I did, and Burt told me that all principals take money. I wrote it all up for the new Chancellor Joel Klein and handed it to him personally as he was about to start a meeting at Tweed. He fired Burt Sacks on the spot, and Randi Weingarten hired him as a Special Representative/Assistant to her, within a few weeks or days, I do not remember. He later went to CUNY. Larry Lynch was removed from the school and I heard that he was hired by New York University. Pat Romandetto was replaced and sued for racial discrimination. I went to her trial. While she was on the witness stand the lighting in the Courtroom put Pat and her fur coat in such a light that she looked exactly like Cruella De Vil ("Devil"). It was warm in the Courtroom, but she kept that fur coat on, just like Cruella.

The reason I have spent a little time on some background is to back up what I am about to say. This is an important time in the history of public schools in NYC, and not only for the students, but for parents and educators.

Without students attending classes inside the Department of Education buildings, theft of federal and state funding is going to have to change. What will "proof of attendance" look like? How are schools going to get money for "seat time"?

With remote teaching the 3020-a arbitration panel for incompetence and/or misconduct charges will have to be re-designed or put on hold, long-term. How are teachers going to be evaluated? Chancellor Carranza said this past week that no one will be, and he hopes that everyone can work together. I'm all for that. Is the Danielson rubric over, done, trash? I hope so.

With no teachers or Guidance Counselors in a school, no corporal punishment charges can be proven. Notice I am not saying that charges wont be brought, because we all know that anyone can accuse anyone of anything and have the person terminated in a 3020-a hearing (if the Respondent does not have a good rep. fighting for him/her). Proving there was no information of intent or harm is what I do. Show me the facts, the doctors' reports, police complaints, dispositions. Otherwise, stop talking and withdraw the charges. 

3020-a arbitration hearings are Big Business, with $millions spent every school year so that 4+ people can sit in a small room at 100 Gold Street, 3rd floor, and lie about a DOE tenured employee without a proper determination of probable cause.

Without grades for K-8, and systemic false data posted into school VADIR or NYSED data, how will private schools and higher education/colleges/universities look at students from NYC for potential placement?

What about 1:1 paraprofessionals and therapists? How can they do their work remotely? How are they going to be evaluated?

The list goes on and on.

So, new techniques of assessment and accountability must be created. We need new security measures and ways to monitor data and people. We are not seeing this yet.

I have to tell ya, COVID-19, you have really been a gold digger for the corruption police. Everything false, misleading and not valid is bubbling up to the top.

I'm excited to see what happens next with the new normal NYC Department of Education and it's thorns and scorns.

Betsy Combier
Editor, ADVOCATZ.com
Editor, ADVOCATZ blog
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials 

NYC teachers say DOE’s remote learning interaction stats are nonsense

by Susan Edelman, NY POST, May 30, 2020

The city boasts that 89 percent of school kids are engaging in “daily interactions” with their teachers during coronavirus-sparked remote learning. But educators dismiss the statistics as smoke and mirrors.

“A student can literally text or email ‘F–k you’ — and that counts as a meaningful interaction,” an elementary school teacher told The Post.

Interactions do not mean class attendance or completed assignments.

“All a student needs to do is hit ‘turn in’ on Google Classroom without doing the assignment and that counts,” the teacher said.

Contact with parents can also be tallied, but it does not necessarily indicate learning. “A text from a parent saying ‘My child isn’t doing the work’ counts as a daily interaction,” the teacher added.

For the past seven weeks, since remote instruction began, the city Department of Education has issued reports on “student daily interactions” as a purported measure of whether kids are engaged.

The DOE leaves it up to each school to define interactions, but says they may include a submitted assignment, joining an online discussion, a student’s or parent’s phone call or email or response to a message, or “other evidence of participation as determined by the principal.”

At some schools, teachers report students simply signing in — but then disappearing for the day and turning in no work — is defined as an “interaction.”

According to a DOE press release Wednesday, the agency tallied an average 88.6 percent of students in Pre-K through grade 12 had “daily interactions” from May 18-22.

An impressive total, but even if true it leaves some 128,500 kids a day who did not even check-in. The DOE has nearly 1.1 million students enrolled.

It’s unclear if the absent kids are playing virtual hooky, lack an iPad, laptop and Internet access, or can’t take part because of personal or family hardships.

All three reasons are possible, teachers say.

“A big part of the job has been playing ‘phone number detective,’” a Brooklyn high-school teacher said, describing efforts to track down missing kids.

“Some students who were doing excellent in class have fallen off the face of the earth,” the humanities teacher said.

A couple of his students are homeless and living in shelters where they don’t have a place to sit and learn, or parents who can support them. Other no-shows are Spanish-speaking immigrants.

Another reason for their disappearance: “They’ve got jobs,” the teacher said. One teen, whose mother died when she was young, is working in a supermarket.

School staffers spend hours every day trying to contact no-shows.

“We call, we text, we email to get students to sign on for live instruction. It’s extremely frustrating,” a Harlem special-ed teacher said. ”Some kids go MIA for days at a time.”

Last week, the teacher contacted every parent of kids in her class with the message, “Your child needs to attend Google Meet at 11 a.m. for live math instruction.”

“No one showed up. No one,” she said.

All her students have iPads or laptops, but some parents say they run into Internet problems or can’t help their kids because they’re working. Babysitters or grandparents may not speak English.

The most students who have attended her live classes was about 50 percent, she said. Students who do log on are so “desperate” to catch up with friends the teacher gives them 10 minutes or so to chat.

A City Council hearing on remote instruction last week left City Councilman Mark Treyger, education committee chairman, frustrated, he told The Post.

“The DOE did not know how many students have never logged on, or don’t log on regularly. The DOE did not know how many students are receiving live instruction. The DOE did not know how many students received wellness-check calls, and how often those calls are made.”

Chief Academic Officer Linda Chen could not answer Treyger’s questions.

The DOE could not answer Treyger’s questions, but insisted that absenteeism is no greater for online classes.

“On any given day during in-person schooling, nearly 10 percent of students may be absent, and our current interaction data is comparable,” said spokeswoman Danielle Filson.

“We are checking in with students and families everyday, and we intensify our outreach when students are chronically absent. We’re going above and beyond to keep kids on track and make sure they’re okay during this pandemic.”

NYC DOE doesn’t know how many students are being live taught at home amid lockdown

by Selim Algar, NY POST, May 27, 2020

The city Department of Education doesn’t know how many of its students are actually being live taught at home during the coronavirus lockdown, officials conceded Wednesday.

Asked if they were keeping track of live lesson provision in the wake of the closure of schools in March, a top DOE official had no answers at a City Council meeting Wednesday.

“We don’t have exact data on how many students are receiving it or for how long,” said chief academic officer Linda Chen.

As first reported by The Post, parents across the city have complained that their kids were not receiving any live instruction — with some not hearing directly from their teachers for weeks at a time.

Those parents said they were provided worksheets via email and ended up providing more instruction to their kids than DOE staffers.

While many city teachers have gamely managed to retain live teaching through video apps, many have opted out of the practice.

Instructors have relayed a raft of challenges associated with remote teaching, from uneven tech resources among students and cybersecurity concerns to haphazard administrative direction and shoddy training.

The effort was also complicated by the DOE’s ban on the use of video app Zoom and subsequent about-face.

Teachers union chief Michael Mulgrew called remote learning a “success” overall Wednesday and said many teachers have embraced live teaching under extreme duress.

Citing the variety of hurdles teachers face to recreate their classrooms from afar, the United Federation of Teachers has told members they are not obligated to practice it even if administrators demand it.

“Every teacher in every school community and administrative staff in New York City had to learn how to go to remote learning,” Mulgrew said Wednesday. “There was no plan in place, there was no support system in place, there was no training in place. Every school had to figure it out on their own.”

While he voiced concerns over the uneven provision of live teaching, Councilman Mark Treyger urged city residents to empathize with the position city educators have been placed in.

“I remind folks that educators are also human beings, they have experienced loss of colleagues, they have experienced loss in their families,” he said. “They are in many cases the primary caretakers for families at home.”

The DOE stressed that it tracks daily remote involvement of city kids to monitor “attendance” – although each school has a different threshold for what it considers engagement.

“There is no one-size fits all approach, and teachers are structuring their day to best meet the needs of their students and families,” said DOE spokeswoman Danielle Filson. “Teachers have been using tools and techniques to engage students, mixing live and self-paced instruction to accommodate other responsibilities faced by students and employees during these times.”

Filson said live teaching has “value” and that the DOE was facilitating it “when possible.”

The NYC DOE Gives Money Bonuses To Schools Which Need It The Least

The swimming pool at Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan:

and the well-funded library of PS 6 on the Upper East Side:

When I asked the School Leadership Team, Parents Association, and Principal Stanley Teitel where the money was being allocated at Stuyvesant High School, the AP for Special Education Jay Biegelson, the AP for Guidance Gene Blaufarb (now at CUNY), and AP Eleanor Archie put Jay Biegelson's name on the parent line of my oldest daughter's Individualized Education Plan which decertified her, all without telling me anything.

These administrators told the NYC DOE Committee on Special Education that I would not respond to their requests to meet with them, even though I was the Editor of the PA Bulletin and on the Executive Board of the school.

The Stuyvesant PA turned on me and attacked me (Paola De Kock led the attacks on the Chinese parents at Stuy and now is, ironically, the Senior Director of NYC DOE Parent Engagement) and the chinese coalition I  was helping, who uncovered the missing money.

Stuy parent Paola De Kock who became the ally of Leonie Haimson

When I cited the missing $13,000 missing from the PTA at Booker T. Washington MS 54, I was attacked by the white parents who saw their precious entitlement being threatened.

When I asked where the money was that Carmen Farina was, as Principal, in control of at PS 6 as the grant from the Annenberg Challenge For The Arts, Carmen called me up on May 23, 2000 and screamed that I was a bitch, a witch, a thief, a liar and much worse. I listened to her screaming for 20 minutes then hung up on her, and a few weeks later reported her for violation of SLT rules  (the NYC DOE reprimanded her, then removed her as principal in February, 2001) by having only 4 hand-picked people on the School Leadership Team.

So if anyone finds out about theft in their school I suggest going immediately to the police. Dont stop at the principal's office on the way there, but on the way back after you file a complaint.

FYI: my 4 daughters attended Stuyvesant High School (2), the "FAME" HS La Guardia, and the G&T school NEST+M

Betsy Combier
betsy@advocatz.com

Editor, Advocatz

Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Mysterious Bonus Makes Rich NYC Schools Richer, Critics Say
Nov 8, 2017 · by Mike Elsen-Rooney

When New York City officials revamped the way public schools were funded more than a decade ago, they emphasized one goal above the others: Making school spending more equitable in the nation’s largest system.

They also included a provision that critics say is doing just the opposite: an annual bonus of almost $1,000 per student at 13 of the city’s elite high schools, where students are wealthier than the city average and alumni foundations can raise millions of dollars for extras.

That means that students at these schools — where only 15 percent of students are black or Hispanic, compared to almost 70 percent citywide — are getting almost $18 million more this year than they would have without the bonus, according to Department of Education data. Since 2012, when the department began publishing complete information on how schools are funded, the group of 13 schools has received more than $100 million from the bonus.

That group includes the city’s eight exam-based specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School, where admission is based on a single, three-hour multiple-choice test known as the SHSAT.

It also includes two highly competitive early college high schools, Bard Manhattan and Bard Queens, and two newer schools, Millennium Brooklyn and the NYC iSchool, both of which screen students based on middle school grades and test scores. Townsend Harris in Queens, which has its own competitive screening process, also gets the targeted bonus.

Critics worry that the bonus exacerbates inequality by giving the city’s most exclusive high schools a financial boost unavailable to most schools in the city.

“Students that have made their way into the specialized high schools have largely done so as a result of advantages their families have been able to give to them already,” said Lazar Treschan, director of youth policy at the Community Service Society of New York, a nonprofit advocacy group that joined a legal complaint filed by the NAACP in 2012 challenging the SHSAT as discriminatory (the complaint is still pending with the U.S.Department of Education).

“They don’t need even more additional resources from the DOE at this point,” he said.

But many educators and parents defended the additional money for the schools, saying they are vastly underfunded and have trouble meeting higher academic demands.

“Too often in this country, we’re sticking to the middle and mediocrity,” said Elissa Stein, a former PTA co-president at Brooklyn Tech. “But I also believe there are kids who are high achievers who deserve the opportunity to achieve. And sometimes they need extra funds to go above and beyond.”

The Department of Education defends allocating the funds to the 13 schools, saying that they incur more costs by exceeding the academic requirements of traditional high schools. But department spokesman Will Mantell could not explain specific criteria for which schools receive the bonus.

The bonus, like the bulk of funds for school budgets, is distributed through a formula that former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein rolled out in 2007, called “Fair Student Funding.” The funding guide stipulates only that the money go to “academically challenging high schools.” But Mantell could not say why, for example, Millennium Brooklyn receives the bonus, but its sister school, Millennium Manhattan, which has a similar curriculum and admissions criteria, does not, or why the iSchool was added to the list. 

Before the formula was instituted, the department’s central office gave most schools a fixed number of teachers per student, rather than dollars. But schools with more veteran teachers, who earn more, ended up getting more money to cover those larger salaries.

The net effect, according to Klein, was that schools with similar populations of students ended up with vastly different amounts of city money. The new formula gave all schools a fixed number of dollars per student, allowing principals the freedom to spend the money as they chose.

Currently, city schools are supposed to get about $4,000 of city money for every student on their register. They get additional dollars based on the number of students who need extra academic support. Students who are learning English, for example, bring an extra 12 to 55 cents on the dollar. Special education students and students who are struggling academically bring extra money as well.

Separately, schools get state and federal funds, and money for special city initiatives, such as the drive to offer Advanced Placement classes in all high schools.

But critics of the formula say it has never achieved the equity it promised. And they point to the bonus for specialized academic schools as one reason why.

“The idea behind Fair Student Funding was that the driver for school budgets was student characteristics, rather than the type of school,” said David Bloomfield, a professor of Education Leadership at Brooklyn College. “By creating, or re-creating, a system based on favored school labels, the DOE is somehow saying that all schools are equal but some are more equal than others.”

The specialized schools are part of a larger group of schools that get extra money from the formula because they offer alternative models of education that cost more to operate, according to the Fair Student Funding guide. These include performing arts high schools that require auditions for admission, career and technical schools and transfer schools for students who have dropped out of traditional public schools.

Critics say that extra funding for certain schools, and especially already-thriving ones, undermines the logic of Fair Student Funding.

“What needs to be ‘specialized’ about academics?” said Jill Bloomberg, principal of Park Slope Collegiate High School in Brooklyn, which shares a building with Millennium, but does not get the bonus. “What does an English class at Millennium need that one at Park Slope Collegiate doesn’t?”

Even with the bonus, the specialized high schools often get far less money per pupil than most schools. That’s because they serve few students learning English, special education students or low achievers. And like almost all city schools, they don’t receive 100 percent of the funding the formula calls for. That is a legacy of years of state budget shortfalls that routinely leave the city with less from the state than promised.

For example, Brooklyn Tech gets about 88 percent of the amount it is supposed to based on the Fair Student Funding formula (or $5,328 per pupil this year). Adam Stevens, a history teacher there, has seen both sides, having taught in schools that receive the academic bonus as well as those that do not. When Stevens compares Brooklyn Tech with Paul Robeson High School, the almost entirely black and Hispanic high school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he taught before it was closed in 2014 for poor performance, he comes to this conclusion: “The kids at the regular, segregated schools need [the additional money] more.” 

At Brooklyn Tech, there’s both a genetics lab and a robotics program that are rewarding for students and teachers; Robeson High had neither. “The entire city should have these courses,” Stevens said.

Principals whose schools don’t get the bonus money say they have less ability to provide the kind of intellectual enrichment offered at the specialized academic schools – and that makes it harder to attract students at the annual open houses and high school fairs.

Each fall, some 80,000 New York City eighth-graders select from a dizzying array of more than 400 high schools, and rank their top choices. Choices can include schools required to accept anyone in their geographic zone and those that screen applicants based on grades, attendance and standardized test scores.

In such a competitive high school choice system, less established and less selective schools face constant pressure to attract more students, and say that even a little bit of extra money could help.

Harvest Collegiate, a small high school near Union Square that doesn’t screen applicants, gets $7,644 per student from the formula. Kate Burch, the principal and founder of Harvest Collegiate, points out that almost a third of the school’s students are in special education, and another third have serious academic needs. The money, she said, pays for bilingual teachers for English-language learners, case managers for special education students and extra tutoring for struggling students. 

That leaves little for after-school clubs, additional teacher training, advanced electives or the full-time guidance counselor Burch would love to hire. “To do all those things just takes extra money, period,” she said.

The differential funding has perhaps the biggest effect on schools that aren’t considered elite enough to qualify for the bonus, but don’t have the deficits that bring in extra money.

They are places like Forest Hills High School in Queens which does not get federal Title I funding, provided to schools with concentrated amounts of poverty. The Title I cutoff is around 60 percent; at Forest Hills, 53 percent are eligible, according to the principal, Ben Sherman. 

“We are in deep financial pain right now,” said Sherman. The school received $5,446 per student through the formula this year.

Townsend Harris High School, gets the specialized academic bonus – and gets almost $600 more per student from the formula than Forest Hills does, even though it had only four students below grade level and two students learning English this school year, according to the department’s data.

Critics say the specialized academic schools have a financial advantage even without the city bonus: well-resourced and well-connected parents and alumni. In addition, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant maintain endowments of $13 million, $6 million and $2.4 million, respectively, to help fund extracurricular activities.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.