GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A  truly  sad  day  in  the  history  of  public  education  in  NYC.  A  very  bad  two  weeks  for  public  education  in  NY  state.

With reported 75% MOA in math, 87% in ELA, it’s kind of amazing that these stats are given any consideration at all. The best use for them, actually, is to expose the sort of nonsense that the governor is pushing.

It also kind of behooves Gotham Schools to mention this student group, SFER, sounds suspiciously like DFER. Is it also funded by Gates? Gotham didn’t even bother giving the groups name.

Same math teacher rated 7 and 76 in same 2010 year-?-Give him a bonus then fire him????

The Post is posting pictures, names, salaries and schools of teachers online and I assume in their papers.  I hope someone sues.

There is “talk” of the UFT negotiating what the 20% local assessment will consist of for teacher evaluation. Some folks are mentioning portfolios, surveys, peer evaluations, and task bundles. (I have no idea what a task bundle is) The point is that folks are hoping that the UFT can negotiate a more subjective approach to the local 20% evaluation. However, the state has the final say in what is used. I have a strong feeling that it will be another test, so don’t get your hopes up too high on this local 20% being anything else.

Here Larry,

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/us/politics/perrys-on-the-job-retirement-lifts-pension-perk-from-shadows.html?hp

Maybe you should look into Politicians in NYS and NYC instead of teachers.  (If it can happen in Texas, it can happen here.)  How much does Klein get? Black?  

reason’s sorry

i’ve followed this web site for about a year, and i have never seen one substantive rebuttal of larry littlefield’s arguments about the pension giveaways and the resulting effect on city services (in this case, schools).  not one.  it’s just personal attacks and mockery (e.g. larry has OCD, or larry is bitter, or larry hates teachers).  it all reinforces that he’s dead right. nobody can show he’s wrong, even the haters probably believe he’s right, and to them his continued presence is just an annoying reminder of that.

Sherman Dorn gave a very comprehensive, detailed rubric for judging the media regarding the TDRs.  It seems that all the news outlets with the exception of GS got Ds and Fs, mostly Fs.  Does that mean that some of the news outlets are “ineffective” in their performance?  If they get another F, does it mean that they must close their outlet? 

i believe a society should take care of its sick, poor, and elderly.  i believe we should have national healthcare and that social security shouldn’t just be saved, but should be expanded.  i don’t want to bore you with my own sob story but i’ve worked like a dog, when i could, my whole life.  my original dream was to save enough to retire, which i now understand was just a dream that i would one day be able to blow through hundreds of thousands of dollars on a prison called assisted living. then my dream was to be able to work until i dropped dead.  now my dream is just to die, assuming i keep making my life insurance payments.  this is the society that most people actually live in, you don’t need to make it hypothetical.  it’s wrong, and i hate it and what it’s done to me.  but a school system is not a jobs program or a welfare plan.  and the amounts are ridiculous.  60, 70, 80, 90k a year and higher? with free healthcare, no contributions? you need that much to live on?  i never had that in my best years.  am i bitter?  it’s hard not to be when there’s no money for school supplies, no safety net for regular hard working people, and teachers are hoping obama loses to a republican in 2012.   yeah i’m bitter.

“most teachers who are retired started working for $6000 per year they were promised pensions and most of us never were involved in union matters. Yes pots were sweetened but most of us were busy working and never realized what was happening.”

I don’t blame the teachers.  I blame the unions, the Mayor, the state legislature, and previous NY governors, all of whom realized what was happening.  

I would suggest this is, to some degree, a product of a “meeting standards” philosophy (vs. pursuing potential, or seeking excellence) as embodied in the state tests, even after they’ve been de-inflated both by reducing the number of 4′s allocated (a recalibration stunt two years ago) as well as by toughening up the questions (last year).

Give kids the tests for the next grade or two higher if you really want to see if teachers in “good” schools, in economically advantaged communities, with students growing up in stable and educationally enriched environments, to better reveal the contributions of their teachers.  Oh my, did I really suggest more testing?  No.  Different testing, with a different agenda.

Flerplunk

Tell the unions
Tell the mayor
Tell the state legislature
Tell the governor
Tell the people responsible, not us we have our own problems

  I 
ask  all  teachers  with  TDRs  with  wide  margin of  errors,  or 
with  wide  percentile  differences for   teaching  the  same  subject 
to  different  grades,  to  print  them  out.  Take  them  to  work 
tomorrow.  Be  ready  to  calmly  defend  yourselves  from  angry,  and 
worried  parents.  Explain  to  the  parents  how  the  wide 
discrepancies  in scores  from  year  to  year  or  grade  to  grade, 
demonstrate  the  unreliability  of  VAM  assessment  for  teachers.
Most  parents  are  reasonable  if  you  remain  calm,  and  explain 
to,  and  show  them   just  how  bogus  this  form  of  assessment 
is.  The  defense  against  VAM  assessment  is  going  to  have  to 
be  done ” face  to  face.”  The  politicians,  UFT,  and  the  media 
are  NOT  going  to  help  us.

Plunk 
You tell them you always do so it really doesn’t matter what I think or truthfully what anyone thinks.

“The IBO said, pretty clearly, that the drain on future budgets was not caused by fixed pension for teachers but was caused by Medicare costs and other benefits (not pensions) for ALL retired city employees.”

1.  Do you have a document, a report, or some other source for this statement? 

2.  This is an education web site.  Hence the interest in pensions for DOE employees.  There is no question that the other large sets of retirees (uniformed, corrections) create massive pension drags on the citywide budget.  It’s something that comes up in every discussion of why the city is once again cutting spending on uniformed agencies.  (Maybe the agency interests should respond by saying that it’s not just uniformed pensions, but all city employee pensions that are cutting into the budget.)

3. I don’t know what your endgame is on the point that the city’s enormous pension obligations are outstripped by even more enormous healthcare obligations (assuming it’s even true).  To me, that just means we should talk about the crushing weight of “employee and retiree benefits” broadly, rather than “pensions” narrowly.  I don’t see how that helps teachers, since it draws attention away from just retirees and puts it squarely on the current employees.  Larry would probably say (in fact he has said it on this thread or another one recently) that there is a key difference between healthcare and pension benefits:  pension benefits cannot be rolled back, unlike healthcare benefits.  But I’m not at all hostile to the notion that all these costs should be viewed in the same bucket, and if the non-pension costs can be rolled back some, it would be a very productive way of framing the discussion.

“I understand Larry makes a compelling case whenever he comments here, but you have to understand that he cardstacks in order to make that case. Specifically, he falsely portrays what was, in truth, an irresponsible fiscal deal (25/55), as some sort of “the sky is falling” scenario. It wasn’t the greatest thing for the general public, but the sky isn’t falling either.”

What is the evidence for your assertion that Larry “cardstacks”?  I don’t see any.  I just see you backing up that assertion with a conclusory statement that “the sky isn’t falling.”  I suppose that’s true in a meteorlogical sense.  But I think the escalation of class sizes and annual school-level budget are cuts pretty awful.

“Larry’s current profession would benefit greatly if we all switched to 401k style retirement packages”
 
Did I miss the news release about what Larry’s profession is?  It’s my understanding that Larry writes a blog.  What do you think his job is?  (Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d like to know if you’re just making stuff up a la Jot/MAB/tiredofyou/etc.)

Plunk are you and Larry educators?
I know your not so why are you on an educators web site?
Oh i get it stir the old pot huh
Did you know that Larry ran for political office and lost?
Do you know what he does?
What was made up?
I quess as smart as you think you are your missing some of the pieces. 
What a surprise you are wrong.

He’s a city planner and I never made anything up.

He said he was a city planner and it was mentioned many times that he was in banking. I’m so sorry you are depressed and that you think he is better then me. Are you accusing me of lying? Not a smart thing for a lawyer to do. I thought you were smarter then that.
He choses to use his real name and you chose to use something else. What does that prove?
I’ll prove something 450 comments by a lawyer on a teachers web site. If that’s not trolling then what do you call it?

1. I have no evidence that I can present about IBOs claim. The day I heard it on WNYC, I challenged him about it on this site and didn’t respond. I should have, but did not, bookmark the URL from the WNYC story. I will look for it again to drop it here.
2. That’s the whole point with cardstacking! It takes so long to DISprove that it becomes a question of economics (‘should I waste my time with this or not?’). Surely, the fact that even the Mayor has never blamed only teacher pensions on budget troubles would be one example of a fact that is out there, which LL hasn’t acknowledged. Another (which I still cannot yet prove but hope to soon) would be that the city’s IBO doesn’t point to teacher pensions or to 25/55 as the budget “game over” “it’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)” scenario that Larry always asserts. Yet another is the PEW study, which marks all of the pensions in the state (which covers city pensions) as being just fine (one of three out of fifty by the way). He never acknowledges these things, sol I think he’s cardstacking.
3. You really read my blog? Thanks for the kind words (seriously)! There may be a full retraction, depending on how the chips fall during negotiations. Stay tuned.
4. My only endgame is to get people to stop pointing at teachers for societal troubles. Thanks for blaming my union instead (that’s why they get paid the big bucks and they could care less)
5. Ok, I accept credit for generating the current thinking: That LL is in fact a banker. Here’s what I do know based on his many comments: He is a former actuary who now works in Midtown. If I were an actuary, and changed jobs and worked in Midtown, I wouldn’t be going there to work in the fashion district. It wouldn’t be on Broadway and it wouldn’t be to work at Red Lobster. Several Banks -The Mellon Bank being one of them- are located in Midtown. I’m guessing a Midtown banker. I have no proof of it. I’ll take responsibility for spreading the rumor but I’m sticking with it -because I believe that he is.

Donuts:  kudos for admitting you’re spreading that  . . . I guess?  Anyway, that’s certainly more than Mab/Tiredofyou/Abc’s capable of doing.  If I were going to take a guess on midtown jobs for actuaries, it wouldn’t be banking, it would be insurance.

I’d like to make a comment and a suggestion.

First, it’s a mistake – one that I have made but do not intend to repeat – to engage Ferwhatever and Littlefield in debate. Their purpose here is distraction and misdirection, tossing out red herrings in an attempt to shift the focus onto inter-generational conflict and away from where it belongs: the fight to defend the public schools, teachers and the children they serve. Everything they write is just the banging of pots and pans to distract attention from that.

My suggestion is that those of us who actually teach and have children in the schools make a conscious effort to deprive them of the attention they crave.

Don’t feed them, and eventually they’ll go away.

Tim,

How is Mr. Littlefield’s tunnel vision focus on teacher pensions not a distraction from the issues parents, students and teachers face in the schools? His endless restating that teacher – and presumably all public employees – pensions are the cause of school budget cutbacks does not make it so (www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2011/02/25/the-wisconsin-lie-exposed-taxpayers-actually-contribute-nothing-to-public-employee-pensions/), and his incidental comments on the subject reveal his desire to establish inter-generational conflict as the frame through which to discuss the topic. His main point can be distilled down to the “Greedy Geezers/Social Security’s Going Broke” meme that would-be privatizers constantly repeat, in an effort to weaken its political support.

As for Ferwhatever, he does what lawyers with weak cases often do: make a lot of noise and distraction, in the hopes of turning attention away from its rightful place. I’ve personally witnessed it in the courtroom, and while it can be entertaining and occasionally effective, it has little or nothing to do with justice or the facts.

There are many problems with the public employee pension system in this country. First, they have been underfunded – which is to say, their assets appropriated – by the same political and economic interests that now claim they are unaffordable and need to be cut back. The unions had the political power to get improved benefits – which all working people, not just public employees, deserve – but lacked the political will or juice to keep the funds from being diverted into general state expenditures that have been undermined over decades by tax cuts for the rich and incentives for speculation over investment.

Second, the pension funds are themselves captives of the same financial interests that have hollowed out the economy. Finance gets its skim on the front end by charging exorbitant investment and management fees to the funds, and the funds increasingly invest in hedge funds and private equity firms that strip and flip companies, reducing the tax base upon which schools and other public services depend. It’s a malignant circle that Littlefield would have you believe is the fault of public employees and their unions.

Mr. Littlefield and Ferwhatever may have children in the schools, and have the right to say what they please, but Gotham Schools’ readers have the right to ignore them and not allow them to hijack the Comments section for their own obsessions or agendas.

Unless I’m missing some powerful arguments and/or evidence, it looks like Fiorillo’s entire response on this topic is:  (1) an acknowledgment that public employee pensions have “problems”; and (2) a link to a ridiculous little squib of an article from the heady early days of the Wisconsin brouhaha, which asserts simply that taxpayers make no “contributions” to pension funds.  This was drafted by Rick Unger as a response to the argument that pension funds cost taxpayers a lot of money, which they (and the state, by extension) can’t afford anymore.  The notion is that taxpayers “contribute” nothing to pension funds because pensions  consist entirely of “money that already belongs to state workers.”  How is it that it already belongs to state workers?  Because it’s no different from wages, i.e., it is “the direct result of deferred compensation- money that employees would have been paid as cash salary but choose, instead, to have placed in the state operated pension fund where the money can be professionally invested (at a lower cost of management) for the future.”

Leave aside for the moment that Donuts and I argued that premise into the ground here a while back, with me taking the position that pension rights were deferred compensation (and thus part of the overall compensation that attracts employees), and Donuts taking the position that this was not so, because pension rights were . . . well, not salary.  Suffice it to say it wasn’t a very satisfying debate. 

More important, Unger’s argument leads nowhere.  Taxpayers contribute nothing to pensions because pensions are compensation earned by public employees.  But where does the money for public employees’ compensation come from?  Don’t taxes pay for that?  Not to Unger, apparently.  Where does the money come from?  No one knows!

Right, and *I’m* the one relying on legalisms and sophistry.  

Michael, maybe you should just keep ignoring this issue.

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