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Well according to this clip from 2008, she has an honorary doctorate from Loyola and she is for corporate responsibility, college students with ethics, building greener buildings, Teach for America and Catholic Education. Listen to the new chancellor when she spoke at the commencement two years ago as she states she doesn’t expect to be remembered by the graduates. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Loyola

There have been a lot of tongue and cheek remarks about applying for waivers after Black’s approval, but I think that Stiener has opened the door for a number of legitimate waiver requests.

I am a content area teacher but I have experience coaching, and playing NCAA sports. I also have course work in exercise physiology. Do I really need a certificate to teach physical education or can I just apply for a waiver for a physical education teaching certificate?

How do I apply for the waiver? Do I just write a letter to Steiner?

If he doesn’t approve the waiver do I have grounds to sue?

There are a number of current teachers that are a course or two shy of an additional teaching certificate or school building leader certificate. If they have exceptional experience and a track record of success, can they apply for a waiver?

And one more thing, WHERE IS THE UFT AND WHY ARE THEY NOT REPRESENTING THE INTERESTS OF THEIR MEMBERS?

Well if I were in charge of the UFT, my first goal would be to make sure that whoever replaces Klein doesn’t have as much power as he did -power that was used to hurt the membership and (as of late) to undermine the union’s credibility. I’d say that this chancellor -with a forced ‘partner’ and questionable credibility out of the box- accomplishes that. I think the UFT is right there on this one.

Up front, I’m not bashing Bronx P.S. 109. But I am about to use it to bash yet again the School Progress Reports by our new CAO (“A” for “Academic,” not “accountability”).

If I were Shael, I might skip this visit too. His School Progress Reports for this school bear scrutiny and are symptomatic of why I call his system a Random Letter Generator.

Quick examples (admittedly without the full picture which you are welcome to look up by Googling NYC DOE X109):

2008 — 40% of students are proficient at ELA (median = 3.00). Yet the school gets an “A” in Performance.

2009 — ELECTION YEAR. Straight A’s. 60% of students are proficient at ELA (median = 3.14) — a laudable leap, even in a year when NYSA grade inflation is widely reported and analyzed. But that “A” is in part due to the “Peer Group” weight, three times the weight of the city-wide scale, and that the school maxes out both types of scales’ “Horizons” which are based on the three PRIOR (less inflated) years.

But the “bubble” (kids barely over the 3.0 line) in 2009 is a story with a boomerang in 2010….

2010 — 24% of students are proficient at ELA (median 2.84), the year the state moved the “proficiency line.” Yet that’s STILL worth a “B” in performance, and an overall “A” on the back of the new “Median Growth Percentile” way of calculating “Progress” (60th percentile rates an “A”?) and a nice chunk of extra credit worth 6.8 points (compare to 10.9 points for pure Performance).

By comparison, P.S. 11 in Manhattan (Chelsea) has a diverse demographic range, and it too has a G&T component (which similarly helps with the school’s stats, but is NOT considered in DOE’s “peer grouping”):
2010 — 58% of students are proficient at ELA (median 3.22). This despite the moved “proficiency line.”

Same overall “A.” But OVER TWICE the proportion of kids are proficient, even under tougher scoring.

Go figger. Give this system an “A” for Artful — not Accurate.

So, you guys bash everyone, right? Even the actual school? This is a school with teachers and students, but you don’t want it to receive recognition, just because Bloomberg and Black walked in it? I realize that everyone hates Bloomberg and everything, but my goodness, it really sounds like the people who comment on Gotham Schools do nothing but complain…about everything. We want to teach our students to look for the good, to give people a chance, and yet, as adults, we are not modeling it. I know this is going to be met with quite a lot of sarcastic comments, but I feel someone needs to make this point.

Chris – yes there are quite a few sarcastic comments here, but sometimes there’s nothing quite like “black” humor (pardon the pun) to get us through very difficult and trying news. The School Progress Reports, Quality Review, School Report Cards, and Teacher Data Reports are purportedly objective measures of the quality of what’s being measured, but they are bogus. Do you work in the school system? If yes, then you should know better. If no, then maybe you don’t know what truly goes on. The dreaded Modern Educational Industrial Complex that John G jokes about is already here – they are the result of the parsing of large high schools into smaller boutique schools. If you work in one of those schools, regardless of the company line, then you’d know that teachers are indeed inflating grades and improperly changing mandates on IEPs, under the implicit or explicit directives of their principals. In the age of “accountability,” if test scores truly reflect what the students know, there would be more failures on the Regents. However, teachers grade the Regents ‘generously’ so as to make their principal “look good,” thereby protecting their own jobs. I worked in a boutique school until recently. Their QR was about to be neutral or negative when suddenly there was some glowing crowing from the reviewer and the school received a “proficient.” It was apparently due to a single presentation by a lone English teacher who was widely reputed to be one of the principal’s “pets.” Why? It didn’t change the fundamental nature of the school, just how it was presented to the reviewer. Have you ever examined the “grades” that various schools get? Schools who get B’s one year can make little or insignificant gains the next year and receive an F, even if 80% of their students are reaching “standards.” What most of us want is for the tables to be turned and for the administration to be graded as harshly as they grade us. There is clearly no empathy within the BloomBlack administration for the common working folk in NYC. I myself am truly outraged that the top official in the DOE has many, many, many fewer relevant credentials than I do.

There they are, as expected. My point was about criticizing the school itself. I get the Bloomberg thing, but that wasn’t my point. Gotham schools comments are no longer a discussion, just a complaint line with no answers, only problems. Can you explain the quotations around Chris, Clark Kent? I don’t get it.

So true, Clark Kent.  Also, let’s not forget the graduation rate scam.  The mayor and newspaper reporters continue to say graduation rates have risen.  Yesterday, a bunch of teachers were talking about a 9th grader who is a very big behavior problem.  Of course, his behavior goes hand in hand with weak skills; he wastes a lot of instructional time and has arrived in 9th grade way behind his peers.  We were joking that we should just graduate him now, since of course he will graduate — they all graduate whether they should or not, thus savings ourselves and him a lot of wasted time and anguish.  So much for the rise in graduation rates.

Don’t forget that you have to someone squeeze out all the ELLs and the kids with IEPs that require self-contained classes, CTT, or SETSS by claiming “we just don’t have that program here.” Well, that’s one of the big problems with phasing out the larger schools. Kids with IEPs end up in these smaller boutique schools and their IEPs are changed, illegally, to reflect what the school has available, and not what the kid needs. Larger schools have enough staff to address the needs of a more diverse special ed population. No Child Left Behind, right? Well, we’re “including” them out of a future.

Well, Cathie Black has been to parties where people say, “Thank God those graduation rates went up 3 percentage points. That’s big deal that means a lot.” So….