Wednesday, February 26, 2020

LEONIE HAIMSON DESTROYS BLOOMBERG'S NYC EDUCATION RECORD WHILE CANDIDATES IN DEBATE LET HIM MOSTLY GET AWAY WITH SAYING HE DID GREAT

I almost fell off my chair watching last night's Democratic presidential debate as I started screaming at the TV when Michael Bloomberg had the audacity to state, "We treated our teachers the right way and the unions will tell you that."  What? As a UFT Executive Board member for part of Bloomberg's term and a teacher and chapter leader for all of it, I can tell you that his statement is just plain false. The audience reaction at the debate to Bloomberg was just a little too positive. It looked like a rigged audience (donate big bucks to the Democratic National Committee to get in) as this story shows but I want to concentrate here on Bloomberg's education record which Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden did not even respond to.

For the clearest evidence of how Bloomberg was wrong when he claimed he treated teachers well, go to a 2008 article in the NY Daily News. The title is Teachers Flunk Joel Klein. Klein was the lawyer who was Bloomberg's handpicked Chancellor who ruled the schools or rather misruled them for eight long years. 80% of us gave him a failing rating in a 2008 survey. His successor was Cathie Black who was a magazine publisher with no education experience. I could go on about how Bloomberg, Klein and Black closed 150 schools, including Jamaica High School, where the public came out and strongly backed the school which was doing alright but that is just me talking personally. 

Parent activist Leonie Haimson, who is the leader of Class Size Matters, has done a detailed takedown of Bloomberg's education record for the Indypendent that should be read by everybody for a full trip down memory lane. 

Leonie has not given up the fight for lower class sizes. She will have a strong presence at the Friday, February 28 City Council hearings on the issue at City Hall at 10:00 A.M.

Leonie's Indypendent piece shatters any myths anyone might have on Bloomberg's education record.

It's all there. Some highlights:

For voters who do not live in New York City or never sent their children to public school here,  you might not be aware that Bloomberg embodied an aggressive free-market ideology with policies that were contrary to research and hugely disruptive — in the worst sense of the word. Far from the benevolent, pragmatic centrist his campaign likes to portray,  Bloomberg and his chancellors reigned over NYC public schools for 12 years with an iron fist, autocratically imposing destructive reforms with little concern for how they upended the lives of communities, students and teachers.

You want specifics?

On class size:
In many respects, his policies contradicted his campaign promises. When he first ran for Mayor in 2002, he didn’t mention the wrecking-ball he later deployed on the school system, but instead pledged to implement a proven reform: to lower class sizes in all schools to 20 students or less in grades K-3. Class-size reduction has been shown to benefit all kids but especially students of color, who make up the majority of kids in New York City schools.

Instead of following through on this promise, subsequent audits from the state and city comptrollers showed, his administration misused hundreds of millions of state dollars meant for class-size reduction. As a result, class sizes stagnated and then rose sharply in his second term.  

 In 2011, at a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bloomberg announced that if he had his way, he would double class sizes by firing half the teachers. He would “weed out all the bad ones” and pay the rest more. It would be “good deal for the students,” he insisted. What he didn’t mention, of course, is that his own daughters attended a private school where class sizes averaged 14-18 student per class, while over 300,000 NYC public school students were enrolled in classes of 30 or more. By 2013, his last year in office, class sizes in the early grades in public schools had risen to the highest levels in 15 years. 

Testing Mania
Instead of focusing his efforts on improving learning conditions in the schools, Bloomberg and his hand-picked chancellors ratcheted up pressure on students, teachers and schools by basing their fates on standardized tests. 

One of the first indications of Bloomberg’s ruthlessness occurred in 2004, when he precipitously fired two of his own appointees to the mayoral-controlled school board, called the Panel on Educational Policy, after they expressed opposition to his plan to hold back third-graders on the basis of their test scores alone. This event was soon known as the Monday night massacre.

Grade retention based on test scores has no backing in research, which instead shows that holding back kids leads to lower achievement and higher drop-out rates, as he was warned in a letter — signed by 107 educators, advocates and academics, including four past presidents of the American Education Research Association, the chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Appropriate Use of Educational Testing, and several members of the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council. 

Yet Bloomberg went on to expand this regressive policy to students in all grades through 8. He was also careful from then on to appoint individuals whose jobs were reliant on city funding or donations from his personal fortune to the school board.

By 2012, his administration finally ended the grade retention policy when, just as experts had predicted, the city’s Department of Education (DOE) found that it had indeed led to higher drop-out rates. Their own analysis revealed that 46 percent of children who were held back more than once had left high school before graduating, compared to 29 percent who were held back once and 11 percent who were not held back at all.

In 2007, Bloomberg also implemented merit pay for teachers based on student test score data. After the city spent $52 million on the merit pay scheme, it was abandoned four years later, when it was found to be ineffective in raising achievement, according to several independent studies.

Intensified School Segregation

Bloomberg’s over-emphasis on high-stakes testing exacerbated stratification and segregation across the school system. Studies show that while he was mayor, he closed many zoned, comprehensive high schools and increased the number of selective or “screened” schools. The percentage of high schools designed to admit a balanced number of high, low and average-achieving students dropped from 55.4 percent to only 27.7 percent by 2009.

He also closed or phased out more than 100 schools that enrolled a disproportionate share of black and low-income students, causing displacement and uncertainty for tens of thousands of students, as well as the loss of permanent positions for many of their teachers. At the same time, hundreds of small schools opened, many of them funded by the Gates Foundation. They refused to enroll any students with special needs or English language learners. Their openly exclusionary admission policies prompted parents to file a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights of the US Department of Education in 2006.  

Though this official exclusion policy eventually ceased, many of the new small schools adopted either “screened admissions,” which are dependent on student grades and test scores, or required students’ families to attend information sessions as part of the application process.  The demand that parents attend these sessions at schools sometimes miles away from where they lived or worked was a serious barrier for many of those with little available time or disposable income.

As more and more small schools opened, many of the larger, unselective high schools that remained in place were further destabilized, as they became even more overcrowded with the high-needs students, many of them recent immigrants still learning English, whom the new schools failed to enroll.

Under Bloomberg, the number of specialized science high schools that base admissions solely on one high-stakes test — an exam that has never been evaluated for racial or gender bias — grew from three to eight schools. At Stuyvesant, the city’s most selective high school, the number of black students admitted fell precipitously from 109 in the year 2000  to only seven in 2010, out of a yearly class of approximately 1,000 students.

Charter School Champion

But perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Bloomberg years is how he encouraged the growth of privately-run charter schools by spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to build them separate facilities or even more frequently, give them space inside public school buildings for free. This too-often forced public schools, which already inhabited those buildings, to lose their libraries, art or music rooms and sufficient access to their dining halls and gyms.

As was frequently noted, NYC charter schools tend to enroll far fewer of the neediest students, including English language learners, students with severe disabilities and homeless kids. Many had “no excuses” disciplinary policies, leading to high rates of suspension and teacher attrition.

There's so much more including likening our union to the NRA and the Cathie Black debacle. 

22 comments:

  1. OH yes and there is the infamous ATR pool created by liar fake winey bloomberg. Bloomberg destroyed the livelihoods of so many great experienced teachers who even still today remain in the ATR pool reduced to substitutes or less as Bloomy and Klein destroyed their reputations in the press saying somehow they were inferior teachers...LMAO he is such a fool..
    I must say Bloomberg confirmed my conviction seeing him in the debates that really he is a meager, weak man who has no sense of fight in him rather he pits others against each other while he sits behind the curtain pulling the evil strings....wow has he been exposed for the fool he really is

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  2. "There is no doubt that it’s better for Israel if both major parties support the U.S.-Israel relationship. At the same time, it’s dangerous to pretend one’s adversaries are allies. Sanders has made it clear that he is no friend of Israel.” ⁦Bloomberd didnt do that.

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  3. Bloomberg has been exposed for the wimp he actually is. Other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and even Biden have a sense of fight in them whether defending themselves or trying to make a point. Bloomberg on the other hand has no fight in him but rather a weak meager man who seems to not have any passion of any sort and this was displayed in the debates. Quite simply Bloomberg is not the wizard of oz we all thought we were dealing with but rather he is the weak man behind the curtain who pulls the evil strings.

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  4. To me, out of the 7 dems, I think I would trust Bloomberg the most.

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  5. 1:24, You clearly aren't a NYC teacher. Bloomberg was terrible for education.

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  6. I am a teacher, and how he was for education is completely irrelevant to me.

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  7. Is there something called a self hating teacher? That may describe any teacher who says anything positive about Bloomturd

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  8. 1:24 and 1:50
    Are you freaking kidding me? If you aren't just playing a joke to get a reaction then I would have to say that you need some serious therapy and you are the type of educator and the reason why our profession isn't taken seriously. So either you are delusional or an illegal, a jokester and a fool no one would ever take you all seriously

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  9. Bloomberg was all smoke and mirrors. The reason the graduation rate rose so much over his tenure was due to fear of school closures. Schools knew they had to bring up their graduation rates so they did anything they could to get kids to graduate including free credits, credit recovery programs like APEX, passing kids based on a Regents exam, threatening teachers failure to get tenure if they didn't pass kids, etc. Also for the last question the biggest misconception he said people have about his is he is 6 feet tall. He had the most time to think about the question, and that was the best he could think of. When they ask each candidate the same question, they should do what they do during Miss USA pageants and have the others listen to music so they can't think of their answer.

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  10. Ok, so

    -Bloomberg was much more cut-throat than de blasio
    -bloomberg gave us the 2005 retro and raises immediately
    -de blasio is our friend and a friend of the uft
    -every contract had to be agreed upon by uft leadership
    -every contract had to be agreed upon by membership
    -de blasio raises have been smaller
    -de blasio made us wait for the retro with no interest
    -de blasio has given us an average of 1.4% a year over 11 years
    -we have nothing but ramapant grade fraud and teachers getting beaten to a pulp now with absolutely no discipline code

    Who do you blame for all that?

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  11. 2009-14 we had no contract so are you going to put zeros in those years for our raises because that is what we got from Bloomberg for 2009,2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 when he tried to break the union and fire the ATRs?

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  12. 2007 was a fair deal. 2005, financially, got larger raises than de blasio ever gave us and got retro and raises immediately upon agreement. If uft hated bloomberg so much, how is de blasio our friend? Why so much love? So blame the uft for being a complete fraud. It is the job of the mayor to do the bidding for the city. Dont bullshit me and tell me how wonderful we have it now, when i can argue it is even worse. Even bob linn said it is commonplace to get raises in first check after agreement, and retro in the 2nd check. This is 11 years. With no interest. Under a teacher friendly mayor. And besides the fact that we have 11 years of 1.4% annual increases. pathetic.

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  13. BLOOMBERG is a disgusting liar! working longer days does NOT EQUAL A 43% RAISE. He hired useless chancellors who knew nothing about education. I pray he does not get the democratic nomination.

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  14. Bloomberg only gave us the raises and retro to get elected. He didn't care about teachers and he created this mess that Deblasio is just continuing especially this ATR pool. We even lost Seniority transfer rights under Bloomberg.

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  15. And how was farina, our friend. And carranza? completely anti white.

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  16. Ok, so then why does the uft lie to us? Why say so good when situation is just as bad.

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  17. Bigger question - why isn’t the UFT publicly denouncing Bloomberg, in the strongest possible terms, over his last debate claim that he ‘treated teachers very well in NYC, just ask the teachers union’ ? Randi is why. Weingarten’s biggest betrayal is yet to come, but I hope Bloomy will be finished before she gets that opportunity.

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  18. I almost have an anxiety attack every time I hear Bloomberg's voice. Didn't he propose raising class size to 50, constantly attack teachers in the ATR pool, empower principals to run a business rather than a school, put unqualified people in administrative positions and changed districts to regions and back to districts just to tear the system apart. And where was the UFT?

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  19. The most important thing here...uft failure. Mayor they want, chancellor they want, bloomberg was so bad, we cant negotiate with him. And nothing has changed. Actually made worse...

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  20. After all if these failures, I'll keep my dues.

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  21. Remember, uft has helped students get away with everything. They cheer as we are abused.
    The number of arrests at city schools plummeted during the first months of the school year in the wake of recent reforms that discouraged arrests for more minor offenses, new data shows.

    NYPD officers made fewer than 150 arrests in city schools between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, 2019 — about half the number of arrests cops made during the same months the previous year. The number of court summonses for schoolkids fell even more dramatically — from 124 in the last quarter of 2018 to 51 in 2019, a drop of 59%.

    Advocates cheered the changes, attributing them in part to an agreement struck between the city Education Department and the NYPD last summer that discourages criminal charges for lower-level violations like marijuana possession and disorderly conduct. The number of summonses for each of those categories dropped by about half, the data shows.

    “The reduction in the number of arrests and summonses in schools is a welcome change, driven by the work and vision of black and brown young people,” said Kate Terenzi, a lawyer at the Center for Popular Democracy.

    Education Department officials said the dramatic drops “are a sign that our new agreement with the NYPD is beginning to take root in our school communities.”

    [More Education] NYC students enjoy free performance of ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ at Madison Square Garden »
    Officials added that “major crimes," a category that includes seven serious offenses, also dropped 19% compared to last year.

    “In an effort to not criminalize students, arrests declined due to an increase in mitigated incidents,” said police spokeswoman Det. Sophia Mason.

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  22. more doe scam, arrests and violations down, just like suspensions...Because students are behaving? No. Because we let them get away with everything. When are all of you going to wake up and take action?

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