Meanwhile, OPD keeps kicking special ed students out of buildings to make way for more charter schools.

As the NYCDOE’s internal information infrastructure has been drastically upgraded in the past few years, you should expect the pace of major reorganizations to increase exponentially. However, since these deal with process, and not with content, of educational programs and services – in other words, they’re just a reshuffling of the same old-same old folks with the same very old-same old knowledge base and skills sets – it is entirely predictable that the serial reorganizations will not do what they are intended to do.

But since the real underlying data is kept a closely-held secret, one can never tell what the reorganizations are really supposed to accomplish in the first place.

Take TWO years to say you INTEND to do something EIGHT years overdue. In sports, don’t they call this, “Running out the clock?” Mainstreaming kids with disabilities is soooooo, well, 1970′s. It’s about time Klein and DOE caught up.

Then again, DOE is accelerating the closing of schools as per EdSec Duncan in his Chicago daze, BEFORE that policy was course-corrected by Chicago’s elders to (my phrase): “Fix Em, Don’t Close Em.” Why? Collateral damage to those students during the transitions for whose benefit the closings were nominally undertaken in the children-first place!

When Klein says, “for too long,” somehow he forgets the last eight years. We don’t:
Districts… Regions… ISC’s…. CFN’s…. DRAMAMINE!

When’s someone going to take the hit for the previous reorgs? No need to?
Then I would suggest chaos was the overarching strategic plan all along.
Shock Doctrine? Meet SHLOCK Doctrine.

Didn’t Bloomberg say something about how important it was to reinvigorate a third term with some changes at the top?

P.S. Given DOE’s track record gobbling up class size reduction funds only to see class sizes increase (while first arguing that the increases woulda been still higher; later Orwellifying over the earmarking itself), I’d be curious to see an audit of Fair Student Funding dollars that were incremental for Special Ed and IEP students, and on what those monies were spent.

P.P.S. Re “In the first phase of the plan this fall, about 200 schools will get specialized special education teacher training through 10 Children First Networks…” those CFN’s wouldn’t happen to be private or privatize-able for-profit entities that put DOE employees’ jobs on the lines, now would they?

Then, before using these Children First networks, it should be required to release the full – and I mean full – dataset on the objective progress kids with disabilities have made over the past five years under the tutelege of the people in these networks.

Insofar as toolkits are concerned, why … the NYCDOE should be required to release all data and research upon which it relies in putting each “tool”‘ into the toolkit as well as information regarding which children each tool was, allegedly, sucessful for. Otherwise we’ll wind up with the usual compendium of feel-good best practices, which typically lack objective documentation as to efficacy and do most of the kids no good whatsoever.

This plan looks to me to be a compendium of what the law required well over a decade ago plus p.r. spin about what NYCDOE spedfolk will be doing. If they’re going to – finally – create appropriate, effective IEPs, for example, they’d better do an awful lot of training first, because right now the NYCDOE knowledge base for adequate IEP creation is virtually nil. As is its staff’s actual, thorough, in-depth knowledge of any research-validated programs for remediation or initial instruction of kids with any cognizable kind of disabilities.

It’s time for the NYCDOE to stop changing organizational and management processes and flow charts – and mantras – and get real about drastically upgrading the knowledge and skills bases of its officials, administrators and staff. This does not mean more 3-day “training” programs. It means real, professional-level courses taught by people with real doctorates. Expensive in the short term? Definitely. But over the mid- to long range, highly effective, both in terms of dollars and real students’ lives.

Isn’t it suspect that he is advocating this in public now, after years of neglect? What is he planning to do now?

In my experience, the first thing that gets axed in a to be phased out public school is special education services. The principals for life that are sent to some buildings to fix up what is wrong, really do a wonderful job at paring down and ignoring Special Ed kids and their departments.

The only thing that some administrators love about Spec Ed is the funding.