GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Principals union president Ernest Logan with Diane Ravitch after Ravitch's speech to union members on Tuesday

City principals should overcome their fear and join with more than a thousand of their colleagues from across the state who oppose New York’s teacher evaluation rules, Diane Ravitch urged during a speech to the principals union Tuesday.

A group of Long Island principals launched a petition in November arguing that the state’s evaluation regulations — which require a portion of teachers’ ratings to be based on their students’ test scores — are unsupported by research, prone to errors, and too expensive at a time of budget cuts.

The petition has attracted nearly 1,300 principals from across the state, but relatively few — just over 100 — work in New York City, in a trend that has persisted since the petition’s earliest days. Sean Feeney, a Nassau County principal who drafted the petition, said in November that city principals seemed to be more afraid of jeopardizing their jobs by speaking out.

Ravitch, a frequent and outspoken critic of the Bloomberg administration’s education policies, took aim at those concerns during the kickoff event in the union’s 50th anniversary celebration. She concluded her speech by exhorting city principals to sign on to the evaluations petition.

“There is strength in numbers,” she said to the roughly 150 current and retired principals in the audience. ”The DOE can’t fire you all.” (more…)

Since the first protesters arrived at Zuccotti park nearly five weeks ago, the Occupy Wall Street movement has ignited protests from California to the United Kingdom. The city Department of Education could be next.

Calling Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott a member of the maligned “1 percent,” city education activists say they are planning to bring hundreds of protesters to next week’s school board meeting for an “Occupy the DOE” action.

The idea to form ODOE came to organizers, many of whom are city public school teachers, during a Sunday afternoon “grade-in” for educators at Occupy Wall Street, according to Leia Petty, an organizer who works as a guidance counselor in a Bushwick high school and is a long-time activist.

As the teachers discussed how the OWS movement intersected with public education, she said, they united around a shared concern that educators and families have been shut out of DOE decision-making process. So they decided to protest the entity that does ratify DOE decisions: the Panel for Educational Policy, which is holding a special meeting next week about new academic standards.

Petty said ODOE protesters will fill the 350-seat auditorium and draw attention to the PEP’s track record of ignoring public testimony before approving the DOE’s proposed policies. Most of the panel’s members were appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (more…)

A week after hundreds of its members who worked in schools were laid off, the DC-37 union is hosting a trial of the Department of Education.

The Coalition for Public Education, a local activist group, organized the trial, to be held Saturday at DC 37′s downtown headquarters, to air concerns about public education under mayoral control. Already more than 100 parents, teachers, students, and community members have signed up to testify, according to Akinlabi Mackall.

The event is meant to resemble Panel for Educational Policy meetings’ public comments segment, which frequently attract many people but rarely influence the panel’s decisions, said Mackall, the father of a public school graduate.

“The PEP and the mayor have pretty much turned a deaf ear to the voices of teachers and students,” he said. “We’ve seen people be very eloquent and very passionate, but then there’s just a rubber-stamp response.”

He said CPE would record the testimonies and present them to state lawmakers. The group will also use the complaints as a blueprint for organizing future meetings around issues that trial participants raise, he said.

Some of the same criticisms are likely to arise at a second education event being held Saturday 12 miles north, at Lehman College, where Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. is convening a borough-wide education summit. (more…)

Pedro Noguera and Karen Sprowal talk after the "Miseducation Nation" panel ended.

Panel members at an event critiquing current school reform policies last night criticized  testing, large classes, and charter schools — and also a university professor sharing the stage with them.

More than 100 people filled a school auditorium in Manhattan to attend the four-member “Miseducation Nation” panel, which was convened in response to – and got its mocking namesake from – NBC’s “Education Nation” summit, a two-day event that wrapped up earlier that day at Rockefeller Center.

Pedro Noguera, an NYU professor who studies urban education, was invited to speak on the panel and for most of the evening, he was on the same page as his fellow panelists, historian Diane Ravitch, Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, and teacher Brian Jones of the Grassroots Education Movement. They all criticized policymakers for adopting reform ideas that they said were not working – and ignoring alternative ones, such as smaller class sizes and culturally-relevant curriculum, that they said would improve schools.

The panel also criticized the media coverage, which they characterized as biased toward current reform policies. The event was hosted by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, a national media advocacy group. ”We feel beleaguered and we feel there is only one story told repeatedly in the mainstream media,” Haimson said.

More than 100 people, many of which were teachers and parents, packed into the auditorium at P.S. 66 School of the Future.

When moderator Laura Flanders opened up questioning to the audience, criticism quickly turned on Noguera, a board member of the SUNY Charter School Institute, which oversees many of New York City’s most prominent charter schools.

Veteran teacher Michael Fiorillo first brought up the subject when he asked Noguera to explain how he could support opening charter schools, while at the same time being such a vocal opponent of closing the ones that they replace. (more…)

Diane Ravitch, speaking at a GothamSchools event two years ago.

Is Diane Ravitch a “paid union spokesperson,” her famous change of heart inspired by fees from the teachers union?

The accusation, levied by the philanthropist and hedge-fund manager Whitney Tilson recently, draws from a new book about the education reform movement by Steven Brill. But the suggestion that she was bought is simply not accurate, Ravitch told GothamSchools.

Brill, in an interview, also insisted it’s not the conclusion that his new book, “Class Warfare,” aims to draw.

In a short passage about Ravitch, one of the leading critics of the reform movement, Brill writes that she frequently spoke to teachers unions but did not disclose her speaking fees from them. He estimates that her take from groups that have resisted the movement, including teachers unions, might have exceeded $200,000 in just over a year.

In an interview this week, Ravitch told GothamSchools that she received “less than a third” of the amount of money Brill calculated from teachers unions. (That is, she has received under $67,000.) She said that the majority of her speaking engagements are done for free. (more…)

Education historian Diane Ravitch is appearing on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart tonight — and her supporters want to make sure she has company.

We just received an email from the New York City point person for the Save Our Schools March, meant to draw parents and teachers to Washington, D.C., this summer to assert their voices in education policy. She is asking Ravitch’s supporters to greet the outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s education agenda when Ravitch arrives at Stewart’s 11th Avenue studio at 4 p.m. today.

Ravitch will spend an hour and a half in online conversation with Save Our Schools supporters next week, according to the email.

If Stewart’s lampooning of those who criticize teachers for their job perks earlier this week is any indication, he could go easy on Ravitch tonight. The pair also found common ground when Ravitch appeared on “The Daily Show” in 2003 to discuss the strange taboos shaping standardized tests.

If you go to Ravitch’s taping (or to the late-night, ticketed viewing party that Parents Across America is organizing), please send pictures. Here’s the entire email message we received: (more…)

Education historian Diane Ravitch spoke to the Parents Across America audience last night.

One of New York City’s most vocal parent activists is launching a national organization, enlisting parents in cities across the country in a fight against the Obama administration’s proposed changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Called Parents Across America, the group was developed jointly by Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters in New York, and Julie Woestehoff, of Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) in Chicago. Its formal launch was at a forum last night in a public school in Tribeca, where parents from as far as San Francisco and Seattle traveled to share their unfortunate experiences with local education laws and policies.

Parents Across America’s platform is against much of what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has done, such as his competitive grant program Race to the Top, and the federal School Improvement Grants he’s given to states to turn around their lowest-performing schools. The organization also opposes Duncan’s blueprint for what he wants out of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act’s eventual reauthorization. (more…)

Though they are at times each others’ harshest critics, Chancellor Joel Klein and noted education historian Diane Ravitch proved last week that they can occasionally share a laugh.

Last week, Klein e-mailed Ravitch asking for the “latest draft op-ed.” The message was an accident — presumably Klein meant to send it to the Department of Education’s press secretary, whose name is quite similar. “That’s what they get for getting a PR person named R-a-v-i-t-z,” Ravitch said when she forwarded us the e-mail.

A humorous exchange followed. Read from the bottom up:

—–Original Message—–
From: Diane Ravitch
Sent: Friday, November 12, 2010 6:11 PM
To: Klein Joel I.

May God be with you

I was afraid for a second that I mistyped “luck”

Whew (more…)

Put the Department of Education’s Deputy Chancellor for Accountability Shael Polakow-Suransky in a room with Diane Ravitch, one of the city’s most outspoken critics, and you might reasonably expect sparks to fly.

But when NYU’s Wagner Education Policy Studies Association put them together on a panel earlier this week, where they agreed turned out to be notable.

The topic of the panel was how federal involvement shapes local education policy. (I moderated the panel; Evan Stone, the founder of Educators 4 Excellence, also spoke.)

Ravitch opened by sharply criticizing the move to hold teachers and schools accountable for their students’ scores on standardized tests. But when talk turned to how future standardized tests should be built, Ravitch and Suransky agreed with each other. Ravitch said:

I’m very supportive of the idea of developing new assessments, and I think it’s a very important thing. But it will take years.

Just as these common core standards were written in a little over a year — it took me three years working on the California history standards. I worked on history standards in other states, and it was never done in only a year. So I would like to think that it’s going to take a lot of time to do this well because anything that’s done hurriedly is not going to survive…. (more…)

Diane Ravitch, the education historian and best-selling author, borrowed her title from Jane Jacobs, the chronicler of urban planning.

And it looks like Ravitch’s publisher borrowed the cover art for her latest book from a novel published not too long ago — about a one-room schoolhouse. The two books side by side: