Lessons from Katrina

The Shock Doctrine Comes to New Jersey Schools

Just waiting for Arne Duncan to say Hurricane Sandy was the "best thing that happened to the education system" in New Jersey. While the power is out, entire school districts have literally crumbled the poorest are again being left behind, many homeless now and in already underfunded public schools. Christie and Cerf have a plan to use theirr "power sparingly." They will come to save the day because too many schools are failing. No mention of the actual architects of this failure, the government and corporate driven education reformers.

Will New Jersey's parents and teachers stand by as they are sold another jar of snake oil or will they stand up with teachers in Chicago who have finally drawn the line in the sand.

Lagging Districts Under Pressure to Boost Performance 

State posts new rules as 250 failing schools work on improvement plans

By John Mooney, November 27, 2012 in Education
NJ SPOTLIGHT

(my bolds)

Three months into the school year, more than 250 schools in nearly 90 districts are going through the first phases of the Christie administration’s expanded oversight for schools that show low performance or wide achievement gaps.

Each of the schools designated as Priority Schools or Focus Schools under the administration’s new accountability rules has gone through a state evaluation of its programs called a quality school review (QSR), state officials said yesterday.

The schools are now completing improvement plans for addressing their weaknesses, ranging from new principals to adjusted schedules for more teacher planning to new data specialists in virtually every one of the targeted schools.

The consequences could be significant, based on new regulations released this week that lay out new details on the interventions and the process leading up to them.

Among them -- and sure to generate some controversy – will be requirements that schools that fail to improve enter into agreements with outside organizations to provide direct support.

Other provisions include the state stepping in on staffing, budget and curriculum decisions.

There’s even an appeal process for districts that don’t go along with the state’s demands, although the requirements would be in effect in the meantime.

Not included in the regulations is the possibility that persistently failing schools could be shut down by the state or handed over to charter school organizations to operate.

State Education Commissioner Chris Cerf yesterday did not rule out the possibility of closures, but said that step and even the use of outside organizations are last resorts after all other remedies are exhausted.

He said such consequences would likely be, at the earliest, two or three years away, unless a district defied the state outright.

“It’s a power we would use sparingly, if at all,” Cerf said of the outside partnerships. Of possible school closures, he said that’s “neither the plan nor reflected in the regulations.” Still, Cerf sounded ready for the likely debate over the extent of the state’s powers, saying any criticism that the administration is seeking to dismantle or privatize public schools is ill-founded.

“We have invested more money than ever into our public schools,” he said. “This is about strengthening public schools, and sometimes that gets lost.”

Some of those critics were withholding judgment last night until they could review the new regulations.

The Education Law Center in Newark, the advocacy organization that has led the Abbott v. Burke litigation, had Education Law Center Letter on Regulations threatened a legal challenge] asserting that the accountability measures were being put in place without required regulations. Its director said last night that the state Attorney General’s office responded a month ago that the regulations would be forthcoming.

“We were prepared to file legal action if the Commissioner failed to issue rules governing all elements of new State accountability system,” read a statement from David Sciarra, the ELC’s executive director. “We will carefully review to determine if these rules are legally sufficient.”

The outlines of the state’s plans have been in the public domain for close to a year, as they were included in its successful application for a waiver from the federal No Child Left behind Act, approved last February.

The plans focuses on schools ranked among the very lowest performers on state tests, now called Priority Schools, or those with the widest gaps in achievement between different racial groups and other groups of children, labeled as Focus Schools.

Much of the intervention would come by way of seven new Regional Achievement Centers (RACs) created by Cerf as the centerpiece of his reorganization of the state Department of Education.

But the new regulations add new and greater detail to those plans, as well as the basis for the state enforcement of those rules.

The regulations, issued by the commissioner unilaterally, do not need additional approval from the state Board of Education. There will be a 60-day public comment period before they go into effect.

Among the newest details is the use of outside organizations – termed “qualified turnaround partners” (QTPs) -- for schools that don’t improve. The organizations would be chosen by the education department based on their track records in other districts, Cerf said, and could be private, for-profit or nonprofit.

He said they would be more focused on specific deficiencies in a school, as opposed to overall operations.

“These are schools that by any measure are failing, and the fact is, even today, many such schools are already partnering with these kinds of organizations,” he said, referring to private organizations involved with districts on everything from professional development to preschool to special education.

The organizations’ services would be paid for by the districts, according to the regulations.

Other specific interventions outlined in the regulations include the power to reassign staff, require specific training or curriculum changes, or redirect spending and make other budget decisions.

Cerf said most schools targeted as the lowest achieving have one-third or fewer of their students at grade level in reading or math, and all remedies must be explored.

“We are prepared to do everything and anything to repair that,” he said. 

Schools As Ecosystems Lessons from Sandy

Teachers, who are the first responders when it comes to children, are doing their job here in New York. Despite no help from the Department of Education and the aftermath of the most devastating storm since Katrina, teachers are now free to bring the joy, caring and love to learning essential for success in nurturing the "whole child". Education reform is happening where it matters, on the ground in real classrooms, with or without lights, electricity, heat or buildings. The material needs are great, but the spiritual needs which have been neglected for so long because of the emphasis of high stakes standardized testing, can now return. These teachers might not have text books and databases, but they are free to teach.

Two NYC special Education Teachers  and bloggers at Schools as Ecosystems, are paying close attention to public policy, are changing the conversation and shifting the focus to "real reform" the kind that benefits children, not corporations, shareholders and know nothing politicians. The rage and anger over privatized electric utility companies in NY and NJ with no accountability have debunked the myth of letting the market place take care of things. 

Here's what's happening on the ground, yes, right here on the ground where it matters most.

To my knowledge, all of this work was organized by school staff, students, and families at the local level. We received no support from the Department of Education and, to be fair, should have expected none. Our schools chancellor, after all, has prioritized giving schools "the power to punish" teachers accused of wrongdoing overrenovating toxic school environments. Our mayor has reveled in the wholesale destruction of swaths of our city school system and taken every possible opportunity to attack city teachers. Just last week, his administration channeled massive amounts of resources into restoring the New York Stock Exchange while children in the Rockaways wandered dark streets, looking for a place to sleep. 

Despite their negligence, our school is resilient. Students who hadn't bathed in a week showed up to read Julius Caesar with their classmates. Teachers whose supplies were lost in the flood created new lessons by candlelight. Parents whose cars were swept out to sea rode the bus with their children to make sure they got to school safely. Resilience is a remarkable thing, but we need to make sure we see things clearly. 

Time for Moratorium on High Stakes Testing

My ed professor in graduate school used to say, "let the text speak for itself."

Sometimes, that is all you need in a moment like this.

However, I do have one "lingering" question.

Can we finally demand a moratorium on all high stakes testing?
 Or will we see NJ and NY go the way of NOLA
as we sit by why the profiteers continue to call the shots in education.

From the NYT

November 4, 2012

Back to School, Bundled Up, but With Lingering Questions

By CARA BUCKLEY

Cots lined the hallways, and toilets were limited or clogged, so some evacuees went to the bathroom on the floor. Volunteers, gagging at air made more fetid by unwashed bodies, took to wearing masks. “We gave them wipes,” a volunteer said, “but there’s only so much you can do with wipes.”

Custodians spent Sunday scrubbing and mopping, preparing this makeshift storm shelter in Hell’s Kitchen, which at one point housed some 1,000 displaced men, women and children, for the return to its day job — as the High School of Graphic Communication Arts.

The rush to sanitize the school was just one piece of the sprawling, shifting logistical puzzle, some would say nightmare, as the city’s 1.1 million public school students faced an educational landscape drastically altered by Hurricane Sandy. The city said that 57 schools were too damaged to reopen, which meant the city had to find new places for their 34,000 students. Eight buildings that normally house 24,000 students currently serve as shelters, and are set to reopen on Wednesday, a target several educators believed unfeasible. It was still unclear on Sunday whether students and teachers would be sharing their buildings with people now using them for shelter. (Graphic Communication Arts housed people evacuated from Bellevue Hospital Center.)

As of Sunday afternoon, 29 schools remained without power, with parents, teachers and students — many of them storm victims themselves — unsure when classes might resume, though the Department of Education said they were hoping to open Wednesday. Some of those that will reopen Monday might not have heat; the mayor advised that students wear extra sweaters.

The city Education Department was updating its schools Web site Sunday with the latest information and placing full-page advertisements in some newspapers. The mayor said the city made 1.1 million robocalls to parents over the weekend, telling them the status of their schools, though many families received follow-up calls with different information as situations changed by the hour.

“It is complex and people are going to make mistakes, and people are going to get misinformed,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at a news conference Sunday. Noting that schools would be closed, as planned, for Election Day, he added: “We know that, but it’s better to have another day of school, get most kids to school, find out where we need more resources, and then we’ll have Tuesday to try to adjust.”

Around 300 of New Jersey’s 589 school districts were to remain closed on Monday, said Barbara Morgan, a spokeswoman for the state Education Department. In a message Friday, John Bulina, president of the New Jersey School Boards Association, said it was possible some schools would “be unusable as educational facilities for quite some time.”

Some officials said they hoped to open schools by Wednesday, but cautioned against too much optimism. “Not all roads are safe for travel, student walkers, pickups and buses,” said an online note from Anthony Cacciola, the superintendent of the West Babylon school district, one of several on Long Island that were to be closed Monday. “The gas crisis,” he said, “has added another layer of great concern for staff travel and bus fuel.”

Students at the 57 New York City schools that cannot reopen will not relocate to their new schools until Wednesday. Sixteen schools in the eight buildings that have doubled as shelters were supposed to reopen Monday, but that date got bumped back two days after Department of Education officials toured the sites.

At Susan E. Wagner High School on Staten Island on Sunday, row upon row of cots made the gym look more like a Civil War field hospital than a high school. Piles of clothes and canned goods competed for space in the cafeteria with evacuees eating and milling about. Several dozen dogs, cats and birds — evacuees themselves — had taken up residence in the basement.

Because Staten Island was so brutally hit by Hurricane Sandy, it was not clear where all of the people housed in Wagner High School, which has 3,400 students, would go: many no longer had homes to return to.

Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, said the city was working with the Department of Homeless Services to ensure safe reopenings on Wednesday. But some staff members at schools being used as shelters were skeptical.

“Everyone was kind of shocked to think they’d go through with this,” said Serge Avery, a social science teacher at Brooklyn Technical High School, one of the eight buildings. “It just did not seem feasible logistically.”

Ahmed Abdelqader, Brooklyn Tech’s senior class president, said many students were eager to return to class, especially seniors preparing for college admission, but, he said, “A lot of people were questioning whether they’d be safe at school.”

One teacher visiting Graphic Communications Arts, on West 49th Street, said it would be impossible for the site to be cleaned up in time. Evacuees and homeless men filled six floors, the teacher said and, unlike students, entered the building without being searched. “It had become a homeless shelter,” the teacher said. “The custodial staff would need an entire week.”

Some schools too damaged to open to students continued to serve multiple purposes. On Sunday, donations of clothes, shoes, nonperishable food, blankets and toys piled up at George L. Egbert Intermediate School, in Midland Beach on Staten Island. Adrienne Stallone, the principal, said floodwaters had bent the school’s doors, eaten away some walls and pushed others into different rooms. On Sunday, the school’s boiler was still under five feet of salt water in the basement.

The school has 1,000 students in grades six through eight who, starting Wednesday, will be taken to New Dorp High School for at least a week. Meanwhile, in Egbert’s gymnasium, gray voting machines lined one wall, draped with clear plastic tarps — the school was still scheduled to serve as a voting site on Tuesday, with the help of a generator, lights and heating tents.

“The transformer across the street is still underwater, and Con Ed says they can’t think of turning the power on until that’s dry,” Ms. Stallone said.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, estimated that 40 to 45 schools were most likely too damaged to reopen by the end of the school year, most of them in the hardest hit neighborhoods — Coney Island, the Rockaways and Midland Beach. “It’s going to be somewhat chaotic in these hard hit areas,” he said, “There are families and children who haven’t had heat or hot food for days. There are going to be problems.”

Chiara Coletti, a spokeswoman for the principals’ union, said principals were “very sympathetic” and committed to streamlining the integration of dislocated schools. And Marina Vinitskaya, the principal of the It Takes a Village Academy, which shares the old Samuel J. Tilden High School building in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, with two other schools, is expecting some 750 middle school students on Wednesday. The four principals would meet Monday, she said, to discuss the details. “We will be using every space that will be available and put our schools on a different schedule to make this happen.”

Guidance staff members at many schools were preparing counseling centers to tend to the psychological needs of students who might have been living without power or heat, or who had lost their homes.

The last time the city’s school system was so broadly disrupted was after the Sept. 11 attack. But Harold O. Levy, who led the Education Department then, said the terrorist attack left a broader psychological wound on students, with the logistics of finding classrooms for dislocated students being a secondary concern. “It’s unfortunate, it’s disruptive, and it’s particularly a concern within the context of our really awful truancy problems in this country,” Mr. Levy said, of the effects of school days lost to Hurricane Sandy, “But seen in this perspective it’s manageable.”

M. Carole Schafenberg, the principal at Public School 76 in Queens, is expecting up to 200 students from Public School 78, which cannot reopen because of water damage. Ms. Schafenberg said her school was underutilized anyway, and that now every empty classroom would be filled. She was most concerned however with busing problems — she heard that much of the bus company’s fleet that served her school was ruined, and worried about the lack of gas. She also wondered how to reach displaced children who might have moved in with other family members — should they instead enroll in the nearest school? “I don’t think anybody has found that out,” she said.