View Blog entry...
Last night I attended what was billed as "Community Listening Sessions Regarding Future Plans for the Ridgewood Reservoirs". It was hosted by the Department of Parks and Recreation. Heidi and I signed up for the meeting assuming that it would be a group of people listening to the parks department describe what they had in store for the reservoir and its surroundings. What transpired was, well, different. The response by the public to the meeting was a pleasant surprise.
(continued at blog site...)
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Newsday: The Lizard King by Bryn Nelson and A Study by Prof Russell Burke.. "Italian Immigrants" Flourish on Long Island......
View video...
A Study by Prof Russell Burke.. "Italian Immigrants" Flourish on Long Island...(pdf)
Two years before astronauts walked on the moon, a few dozen colonists took their first small steps onto another foreign landscape. The exact details are lost to legend, but the settlers soon discovered that Garden City wasn't such a bad place to land.
For a lizard.
Various tales have sprung up to explain the emigration of a small group of wall lizards from the north of Italy to the suburbs of Long Island. The most likely story involves a 1967 shipment destined for a now-defunct pet supply store that was waylaid by a minor accident, a broken crate and some very swift escapees.
No one knows for sure how many of the cold-blooded reptiles are now basking in the sunshine of suburbia. But they have adapted remarkably well to their adopted homeland, and they've extended far beyond Garden City.
As in their native precincts of Italy and southern Europe, the lizards are thriving in landscapes shaped by humans, in pockets of Nassau County as well as in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. A diet of spiders and crickets and other small invertebrates, a sunny spot to provide warmth and aid metabolism, a haven in the cracks and crevices of walls and gardens - all are abundant here.
The lizards have proliferated along the grassy corridors of railroad tracks, drainage ditches, and power lines. Others have likely hitched rides to new homes in the pockets of admirers, or even in piles of mulch.
"I'm sure there are tens of thousands, and they're spreading fast," says Hofstra University herpetologist Russell Burke.
Despite the advance, the tale of New York's Italian wall lizard population has not followed the familiar plot line of an invasive species wreaking havoc on the natives. Long Island has no lizards of its own, and the wall lizards seem to have filled an environmental niche that was previously vacant. As far as anyone can tell, they have yet to cause any harm.
Instead, their impact is perhaps most apparent in the childlike wonder that follows in their wake. A biologist laughs at their antics in a nursery school garden. A father eagerly maps their spread. Children clamor to glimpse them on a playground.
Sometimes nature's lessons come in unexpected ways.
Burke has picked a warm September day for fishing, though his black fishing pole seems strangely out of place among impatiens and ornamental shrubs. The small noose dangling from the pole offers another suggestion that this will be no ordinary fishing expedition.
Burke is after the wall lizards, a source of both academic research and personal fascination. He has conducted many of his field studies here, in the three-tiered side garden and spacious backyard of the Garden City Nursery School.
At first, the garden appears deserted. Then a single lizard scurries across a railroad tie retainer and behind a small evergreen shrub. Within seconds, the creatures known as Podarcis sicula are everywhere. Grass-green backs. Mottled black and brown patterns with turquoise spots on either side. Basking on ornamental rocks, guarding bits of territory, surveying the scene from the safety of cracks in the garden's lower echelons.
With a fisherman's patience, Burke moves the noose ever closer to the head of a wary lizard. A quick jerking motion and he's made his first catch of the day, a 5-inch-long juvenile male with a dull green back, caught harmlessly around its head.
Burke paints the lizard on each side with a red marker, just as he's marked others with identifiable combinations of blue or black or green. His next catch - a 7-inch-long adult female with a typically narrow head - receives two red blotches on each side.
After another few minutes, he's caught the one he's been after all day, an elusive adult male that measures about 8 inches in length and has his own territory near the far end of the garden. The lizard promptly rewards Burke's efforts by biting him.
"Oh, that's enough of a pinch to hurt." He laughs as the lizard glares at him.
The herpetologist points to a row of scales where the lizard's hind legs intersect its abdomen, a region identifiable on males by a brown spot. It's from the femoral glands here that the male secretes its distinctive pheromone, a chemical calling card of sorts.
"It's probably like, 'I'm a big tough guy and this is my territory,'" Burke says of the scented message. A male lizard basking in the sunshine to regulate his body temperature and synthesize Vitamin D also may be marking his territory as he lays flat against the railroad ties, but Burke can only speculate.
The big male gets two blue marks on each side.
This temporary labeling system will help Burke study how the lizards feed and mate, and how they defend their territories. Some have done so for seven years or more - a ripe old age for a lizard.
He has already determined that they are almost genetically identical to one another, a hallmark of a population founded by a few individuals. Yet the New York settlers are, surprisingly, free of common parasites such as lizard malaria, and are reproducing even faster than their closest genetic kin in Italy.
The Italian group remains active year-round, but their New World cousins stop virtually all activity in the winter. Since Burke has discovered that the lizards cannot tolerate freezing temperatures, he would like to answer the question that's been nagging him for years: How do they survive the winters?
In Topeka, Kan., Larry Miller wonders the same thing. Related lizard species have ventured into Cincinnati and Victoria, British Columbia, and observers recorded a colony of Italian wall lizards in Philadelphia that petered out several decades ago. But active populations of the creatures also known as ruin lizards now inhabit only two known regions of North America: Long Island and Topeka.
Miller, a biology teacher at Topeka's Northern Hills Junior High School, also is mystified as to how they behave during the coldest weather. He hopes to answer some of the lingering questions by establishing a lizard study area near his school.
"I've been teaching science for about 30 years," he says, "and they're one of my best teaching tools."
Again, the details of the Topeka introduction are somewhat hazy, but a pet supply store and an absent-minded owner figure prominently. Miller estimates the lizards have expanded at least a quarter of a mile in all directions from their suspected release site in the late 1950s.
"They've moved in well and they're an animal that has managed to fill a niche that was created by humans," he says. Their urban success story is perhaps best documented by Topeka's prime lizard vantages: outside an auto parts store, a KFC restaurant and a Dimple Doughnuts shop.
It's about three-tenths of a mile from Long Island's Hempstead Turnpike to the generally agreed-upon point where the store-bound lizards made their escape - a site known to a few enthusiasts as Ground L. This stretch of Cherry Valley Avenue runs past ball fields, a bus depot and the municipal yard of Garden City.
The village's composting program at the municipal yard delivers rich black mulch to golf courses, recharge basins and residents, all of it free of charge. The "black gold" is full of nutrients, and lizards, who may be getting a free ride across the county.
Just down the road, the village's community park includes three landscaped pools, a miniature golf course, and other favorite spots for lizard-catching. A wall lizard has escaped on more than one occasion by relinquishing its twitching tail to the sweaty grasp of a young pursuer, a defense mechanism that also helps it evade cats and birds. The loss is only temporary, however. The lizard will soon grow another tail.
Nestled between the community park and the mulch piles lies lizard paradise - the 1-acre site of the Garden City Nursery School, which has harbored the creatures for more than two decades.
"They became such a fascination to the children and parents and teachers that the curiosity just increased tremendously," says school director Ann Amengual.
The lizards have since become the school's unofficial mascots. A green lizard thermometer commands a prominent position on a pillar by the entrance, the parents have produced several versions of lizard T-shirts for the children, and even the school's board has gotten into the spirit.
"We have a tradition now where the outgoing president gets a gold lizard pin," Amengual says.
Springtime at the school arrives with the wall lizards. "Science for young children is not about learning facts, but it's about stirring curiosity and learning about their life and their world," Amengual says. "That's what happens here. It's contagious - everyone loves these lizards."
Rob Alvey's love affair with the lizards began in 1985. As a teenager in the summer of '68, he had mowed the school's lawn, but it wasn't until he returned as a parent that he first saw them. Lots of them.
The collector of more than 10,000 frog-related items soon found room in his life for yet another small green creature. Alvey, a geologist, even got his daughter involved in an early tracking project using color-coded beads sewn onto the back of each lizard.
When he was appointed to the Garden City Environmental Advisory Board in 1992, Alvey promptly launched a project to trace the background of the lizards. In 1993 he appealed to residents to help him track the reptiles by reporting sightings. Thanks to the Garden City Lizard Watch, he was able to map their expanding range and estimated that they were advancing by a block to 1 1/2 blocks every year.
"I was concerned whether this was a good thing, a dangerous thing," he recalls. "And the more I learned, the more I discovered that this is not something that we need to worry about."
At his home in Garden City, Alvey unfolds a rumpled map of the New York City metropolitan area on his dining room table. With a green highlighter, he marks some of the other known colonies that have radiated from Garden City: Planting Fields Arboretum. The Carle Place Water District. Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing.
In 1994 Alvey introduced four lizards to another one of his projects, the Garden City Bird Sanctuary near his home. Now, they abound throughout the 9-acre site. "They're prolific," he says. "They have a natural Viagra in them somewhere along the line."
Another lizard aficionado, Queens College associate biology professor Jon Sperling, remembers collecting lizards of his own at the Garden City municipal yard 12 or 13 years ago.
Perhaps not coincidentally, separate colonies have thrived at his home in Floral Park and at Queens College for the past 12 years. Unlike many of the students, the campus lizards prefer to hang out by Rosenthal Library, where they dart among the prostrate red cedar planted on an incline near the entrance.
"You can see them sunning themselves either on the plants themselves, or on the decor on the incline and on the stairway," Sperling says.
He has integrated the lizards into some of his lessons, asking students whether they've noticed them. Many haven't.
"It's a matter of observation," he says. "People could live next to them all their lives and not see them. Some people are blind to things like that."
In the winter months, few New Yorkers have seen the lizards. One of the few exceptions was when a Long Island homeowner spotted several huddled together beneath a lifted slab of sidewalk.
Last fall, Burke designed a project for high school student Allison Goodman to find out where Italian wall lizards go when the temperature falls below freezing. But neither electrician's tape nor glue held his tiny radio transmitters in place, and the mystery remains - at least for another year.
Despite an unseasonably warm afternoon that bathes the nursery school's garden in light, the wall lizards refuse to stir from their seclusion on St. Patrick's Day. But the following afternoon, a few emboldened members of a colony residing in the Hofstra University greenhouse venture into the adjacent yard to enjoy the sunshine. By the next week, a few more make brief appearances near the biology building at Queens College. They begin showing up in scattered yards around Garden City, and then at the nursery school itself.
At the far end of the school's garden, a midsized lizard ventures out on a railway tie before its courage falters and it scurries between the cracks of the wooden tier. Then a tiny lizard with only a hint of green on its back makes its afternoon debut - a summer hatchling with spring fever. But its day in the sun is quickly curtailed by an aggressor twice its size that is in no mood to share its garden fiefdom.
Amid the patchy afternoon sunshine and chatter of small children arriving for school, the wall lizards of spring have returned.
"I didn't see one, but I thought I heard one," says a little girl with a blond bob. Her two friends quickly join her, shushing one another as they tiptoe toward the near end of the garden. Three pairs of feet shuffle around a bush and curious hands pry through the greenery, but no lizards turn up.
"I think we scared it away," the little girl says as they head back inside. Moments later, the lizard reappears just where she said it should be, with a nearby cascade of ivy providing a hideout.
Later that afternoon, Burke and a pair of lizards join a group of schoolchildren for a session of show and tell.
Who's seen a lizard?
Hands shoot up and several kids have stories.
What eats them? Burke asks. Snakes? Cats?
"Lions," offers a boy.
"Cheetahs," says a girl.
For the afternoon lizard hunt, 18 young assistants peer into the garden, around the plastic border of the playground, between the cracks in the back fence. But the wall lizards, perhaps sensing the commotion, have apparently called it a day.
It doesn't matter. The lizards will be out again next week, and for many more weeks after that. Until cold weather forces a temporary retreat, they will be playing hide and seek, scampering across the fence ties and delighting a few dozen young naturalists eager to see, to touch, to learn the simple lessons that nature - and fate - have brought to their own backyard.
LIZARDS ON THE LOOSE. Follow the story of the Italian wall lizard on Long Island with an interactive timeline, learn how to report sightings, and see video of them at www.linature.com.
A Study by Prof Russell Burke.. "Italian Immigrants" Flourish on Long Island...(pdf)
Two years before astronauts walked on the moon, a few dozen colonists took their first small steps onto another foreign landscape. The exact details are lost to legend, but the settlers soon discovered that Garden City wasn't such a bad place to land.For a lizard.
Various tales have sprung up to explain the emigration of a small group of wall lizards from the north of Italy to the suburbs of Long Island. The most likely story involves a 1967 shipment destined for a now-defunct pet supply store that was waylaid by a minor accident, a broken crate and some very swift escapees.
No one knows for sure how many of the cold-blooded reptiles are now basking in the sunshine of suburbia. But they have adapted remarkably well to their adopted homeland, and they've extended far beyond Garden City.
As in their native precincts of Italy and southern Europe, the lizards are thriving in landscapes shaped by humans, in pockets of Nassau County as well as in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. A diet of spiders and crickets and other small invertebrates, a sunny spot to provide warmth and aid metabolism, a haven in the cracks and crevices of walls and gardens - all are abundant here.
The lizards have proliferated along the grassy corridors of railroad tracks, drainage ditches, and power lines. Others have likely hitched rides to new homes in the pockets of admirers, or even in piles of mulch.
"I'm sure there are tens of thousands, and they're spreading fast," says Hofstra University herpetologist Russell Burke.
Despite the advance, the tale of New York's Italian wall lizard population has not followed the familiar plot line of an invasive species wreaking havoc on the natives. Long Island has no lizards of its own, and the wall lizards seem to have filled an environmental niche that was previously vacant. As far as anyone can tell, they have yet to cause any harm.
Instead, their impact is perhaps most apparent in the childlike wonder that follows in their wake. A biologist laughs at their antics in a nursery school garden. A father eagerly maps their spread. Children clamor to glimpse them on a playground.
Sometimes nature's lessons come in unexpected ways.
Burke has picked a warm September day for fishing, though his black fishing pole seems strangely out of place among impatiens and ornamental shrubs. The small noose dangling from the pole offers another suggestion that this will be no ordinary fishing expedition.
Burke is after the wall lizards, a source of both academic research and personal fascination. He has conducted many of his field studies here, in the three-tiered side garden and spacious backyard of the Garden City Nursery School.
At first, the garden appears deserted. Then a single lizard scurries across a railroad tie retainer and behind a small evergreen shrub. Within seconds, the creatures known as Podarcis sicula are everywhere. Grass-green backs. Mottled black and brown patterns with turquoise spots on either side. Basking on ornamental rocks, guarding bits of territory, surveying the scene from the safety of cracks in the garden's lower echelons.
With a fisherman's patience, Burke moves the noose ever closer to the head of a wary lizard. A quick jerking motion and he's made his first catch of the day, a 5-inch-long juvenile male with a dull green back, caught harmlessly around its head.
Burke paints the lizard on each side with a red marker, just as he's marked others with identifiable combinations of blue or black or green. His next catch - a 7-inch-long adult female with a typically narrow head - receives two red blotches on each side.
After another few minutes, he's caught the one he's been after all day, an elusive adult male that measures about 8 inches in length and has his own territory near the far end of the garden. The lizard promptly rewards Burke's efforts by biting him.
"Oh, that's enough of a pinch to hurt." He laughs as the lizard glares at him.
The herpetologist points to a row of scales where the lizard's hind legs intersect its abdomen, a region identifiable on males by a brown spot. It's from the femoral glands here that the male secretes its distinctive pheromone, a chemical calling card of sorts.
"It's probably like, 'I'm a big tough guy and this is my territory,'" Burke says of the scented message. A male lizard basking in the sunshine to regulate his body temperature and synthesize Vitamin D also may be marking his territory as he lays flat against the railroad ties, but Burke can only speculate.
The big male gets two blue marks on each side.
This temporary labeling system will help Burke study how the lizards feed and mate, and how they defend their territories. Some have done so for seven years or more - a ripe old age for a lizard.
He has already determined that they are almost genetically identical to one another, a hallmark of a population founded by a few individuals. Yet the New York settlers are, surprisingly, free of common parasites such as lizard malaria, and are reproducing even faster than their closest genetic kin in Italy.
The Italian group remains active year-round, but their New World cousins stop virtually all activity in the winter. Since Burke has discovered that the lizards cannot tolerate freezing temperatures, he would like to answer the question that's been nagging him for years: How do they survive the winters?
In Topeka, Kan., Larry Miller wonders the same thing. Related lizard species have ventured into Cincinnati and Victoria, British Columbia, and observers recorded a colony of Italian wall lizards in Philadelphia that petered out several decades ago. But active populations of the creatures also known as ruin lizards now inhabit only two known regions of North America: Long Island and Topeka.
Miller, a biology teacher at Topeka's Northern Hills Junior High School, also is mystified as to how they behave during the coldest weather. He hopes to answer some of the lingering questions by establishing a lizard study area near his school.
"I've been teaching science for about 30 years," he says, "and they're one of my best teaching tools."
Again, the details of the Topeka introduction are somewhat hazy, but a pet supply store and an absent-minded owner figure prominently. Miller estimates the lizards have expanded at least a quarter of a mile in all directions from their suspected release site in the late 1950s.
"They've moved in well and they're an animal that has managed to fill a niche that was created by humans," he says. Their urban success story is perhaps best documented by Topeka's prime lizard vantages: outside an auto parts store, a KFC restaurant and a Dimple Doughnuts shop.
It's about three-tenths of a mile from Long Island's Hempstead Turnpike to the generally agreed-upon point where the store-bound lizards made their escape - a site known to a few enthusiasts as Ground L. This stretch of Cherry Valley Avenue runs past ball fields, a bus depot and the municipal yard of Garden City.
The village's composting program at the municipal yard delivers rich black mulch to golf courses, recharge basins and residents, all of it free of charge. The "black gold" is full of nutrients, and lizards, who may be getting a free ride across the county.
Just down the road, the village's community park includes three landscaped pools, a miniature golf course, and other favorite spots for lizard-catching. A wall lizard has escaped on more than one occasion by relinquishing its twitching tail to the sweaty grasp of a young pursuer, a defense mechanism that also helps it evade cats and birds. The loss is only temporary, however. The lizard will soon grow another tail.
Nestled between the community park and the mulch piles lies lizard paradise - the 1-acre site of the Garden City Nursery School, which has harbored the creatures for more than two decades.
"They became such a fascination to the children and parents and teachers that the curiosity just increased tremendously," says school director Ann Amengual.
The lizards have since become the school's unofficial mascots. A green lizard thermometer commands a prominent position on a pillar by the entrance, the parents have produced several versions of lizard T-shirts for the children, and even the school's board has gotten into the spirit.
"We have a tradition now where the outgoing president gets a gold lizard pin," Amengual says.
Springtime at the school arrives with the wall lizards. "Science for young children is not about learning facts, but it's about stirring curiosity and learning about their life and their world," Amengual says. "That's what happens here. It's contagious - everyone loves these lizards."
Rob Alvey's love affair with the lizards began in 1985. As a teenager in the summer of '68, he had mowed the school's lawn, but it wasn't until he returned as a parent that he first saw them. Lots of them.
The collector of more than 10,000 frog-related items soon found room in his life for yet another small green creature. Alvey, a geologist, even got his daughter involved in an early tracking project using color-coded beads sewn onto the back of each lizard.
When he was appointed to the Garden City Environmental Advisory Board in 1992, Alvey promptly launched a project to trace the background of the lizards. In 1993 he appealed to residents to help him track the reptiles by reporting sightings. Thanks to the Garden City Lizard Watch, he was able to map their expanding range and estimated that they were advancing by a block to 1 1/2 blocks every year.
"I was concerned whether this was a good thing, a dangerous thing," he recalls. "And the more I learned, the more I discovered that this is not something that we need to worry about."
At his home in Garden City, Alvey unfolds a rumpled map of the New York City metropolitan area on his dining room table. With a green highlighter, he marks some of the other known colonies that have radiated from Garden City: Planting Fields Arboretum. The Carle Place Water District. Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing.
In 1994 Alvey introduced four lizards to another one of his projects, the Garden City Bird Sanctuary near his home. Now, they abound throughout the 9-acre site. "They're prolific," he says. "They have a natural Viagra in them somewhere along the line."
Another lizard aficionado, Queens College associate biology professor Jon Sperling, remembers collecting lizards of his own at the Garden City municipal yard 12 or 13 years ago.
Perhaps not coincidentally, separate colonies have thrived at his home in Floral Park and at Queens College for the past 12 years. Unlike many of the students, the campus lizards prefer to hang out by Rosenthal Library, where they dart among the prostrate red cedar planted on an incline near the entrance.
"You can see them sunning themselves either on the plants themselves, or on the decor on the incline and on the stairway," Sperling says.
He has integrated the lizards into some of his lessons, asking students whether they've noticed them. Many haven't.
"It's a matter of observation," he says. "People could live next to them all their lives and not see them. Some people are blind to things like that."
In the winter months, few New Yorkers have seen the lizards. One of the few exceptions was when a Long Island homeowner spotted several huddled together beneath a lifted slab of sidewalk.
Last fall, Burke designed a project for high school student Allison Goodman to find out where Italian wall lizards go when the temperature falls below freezing. But neither electrician's tape nor glue held his tiny radio transmitters in place, and the mystery remains - at least for another year.
Despite an unseasonably warm afternoon that bathes the nursery school's garden in light, the wall lizards refuse to stir from their seclusion on St. Patrick's Day. But the following afternoon, a few emboldened members of a colony residing in the Hofstra University greenhouse venture into the adjacent yard to enjoy the sunshine. By the next week, a few more make brief appearances near the biology building at Queens College. They begin showing up in scattered yards around Garden City, and then at the nursery school itself.
At the far end of the school's garden, a midsized lizard ventures out on a railway tie before its courage falters and it scurries between the cracks of the wooden tier. Then a tiny lizard with only a hint of green on its back makes its afternoon debut - a summer hatchling with spring fever. But its day in the sun is quickly curtailed by an aggressor twice its size that is in no mood to share its garden fiefdom.
Amid the patchy afternoon sunshine and chatter of small children arriving for school, the wall lizards of spring have returned.
"I didn't see one, but I thought I heard one," says a little girl with a blond bob. Her two friends quickly join her, shushing one another as they tiptoe toward the near end of the garden. Three pairs of feet shuffle around a bush and curious hands pry through the greenery, but no lizards turn up.
"I think we scared it away," the little girl says as they head back inside. Moments later, the lizard reappears just where she said it should be, with a nearby cascade of ivy providing a hideout.
Later that afternoon, Burke and a pair of lizards join a group of schoolchildren for a session of show and tell.
Who's seen a lizard?
Hands shoot up and several kids have stories.
What eats them? Burke asks. Snakes? Cats?
"Lions," offers a boy.
"Cheetahs," says a girl.
For the afternoon lizard hunt, 18 young assistants peer into the garden, around the plastic border of the playground, between the cracks in the back fence. But the wall lizards, perhaps sensing the commotion, have apparently called it a day.
It doesn't matter. The lizards will be out again next week, and for many more weeks after that. Until cold weather forces a temporary retreat, they will be playing hide and seek, scampering across the fence ties and delighting a few dozen young naturalists eager to see, to touch, to learn the simple lessons that nature - and fate - have brought to their own backyard.
LIZARDS ON THE LOOSE. Follow the story of the Italian wall lizard on Long Island with an interactive timeline, learn how to report sightings, and see video of them at www.linature.com.
YouTube: GreeNYC Ad...
Mayor Mike Bloomberg unveiled GreeNYC - the consumer outreach portion of PlaNYC - at a press conference on June 25, 2007 at City Hall. This GreeNYC ad is one of three that will play on local TV stations starting this week, spreading the word about the 10 easy steps everyone can take to reduce energy usage and pollution. The 10 stops are: 1)Change your light bulbs to CFLs, 2) Buy ENERGY STAR appliances, 3) Don't air condition an empty room, 4) Unplug chargers and appliances when not in use, 5) Switch to green power through your energy provider, 6) Walk or take public transportation, 7) Recycle your glass, metal, paper and plastic, 8) Bring your own cloth bag to the grocery store, 9) Use green cleaning products, and 10) Switch to paperless bank statements and online bill paying.
The Gowanus Lounge: Meet the Gowanus Canal Black-Crowned Night Heron
The Gowanus Lounge: Meet the Gowanus Canal Black-Crowned Night Heron
Proof that wildlife is returning to Gowanus Canal...
Proof that wildlife is returning to Gowanus Canal...
Streetfilms on YouTube: Cars in Prospect Park...
What does 7 PM mean? What do car-free hours in NYC parks mean? I shot this video on Wednesday, 6/20/07 at the 3rd Street entrance on the west side of Brooklyn's Prospect Park.
In the fifteen minutes before a Parks Department van arrived, about 50 cars entered the park at 3rd Street. While that might not seem like a big number by traffic standards, many cars are also entering at busier locations, such as Grand Army Plaza and near the start of Ocean Parkway.
Most people can't enjoy the park during the day. Wouldn't it be nice if walkers, runners, bikers, kids, parents, and anyone else who wanted to enjoy the park on weekday evenings didn't have to chase daylight in a losing battle against cars?
PLEASE NOTE: This is not meant as a criticism of the well-meaning Parks Department employees responsible for closing the park. They are only doing their jobs with the resources - one van and two people - they have. What is needed is an institutional change, more resources to send out more teams, better barriers, and stricter enforcement.
YouTube: Brooklyn Water Works...
Before the 1898 consolidation of New York City, Brooklyn was the third most populous city in America. Historian Robert Miller tours the crumbling infrastructure of its water supply system.
This is a really interesting video on the Brooklyn Water works infrastructure and history...
Video running time: 28 minutes...
This is a really interesting video on the Brooklyn Water works infrastructure and history...
Video running time: 28 minutes...
Newsday.com: Mushrooms Become Source for Eco-Building by Jessica M. Pasko...
Combining his agricultural knowledge with colleague Gavin McIntyre's interest in sustainable technology, the two created their patented "Greensulate" formula, an organic, fire-retardant board made of water, flour, oyster mushroom spores and perlite, a mineral blend found in potting soil. They're hoping the invention will soon be part of the growing market for eco-friendly products.
Bringing the insulation to market is still at least a year away though, said McIntyre, and will require much more research and work, not to mention more sophisticated equipment and a better work space.
"We've been growing the material under our beds," said McIntyre, adding that they've applied for a grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.
The two young developers -- Bayer is 21, McIntyre 22 -- graduated in May from RPI with dual majors in mechanical engineering and product design and innovation.
"I think it has a lot of potential, and it could make a big difference in people's lives," said RPI Professor Burt Swersy, whose Inventor's Studio course inspired the product's creation. "It's sustainable, and enviro-friendly, it's not based on petrochemicals and doesn't require much energy or cost to make it."
The two say recent tests at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have shown it to be competitive with most insulation brands on the market. A 1-inch-thick sample of the perlite-mushroom composite had a 2.9 R-value, the measure of a substance's ability to resist heat flow. Commercially produced fiberglass insulation typically has an R-value between 2.7 and 3.7 per inch of thickness, according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
With a rapidly increasing global population, a limited supply of natural resources, and rising energy prices, eco-friendly housing products are selling fast. Numerous companies have carved out their niche selling "green" building supplies such as recycled fiber board and plant-based paints. The Environmental Home Center in Seattle sells an insulation made from denim scraps and another made from 100 percent recycled paper among their many green building products.
After looking through about 800 patents, though, Bayer and McIntyre realized they'd hit upon a relatively original idea. Unlike many green building products, Greensulate isn't made from pre-existing materials. It requires little energy or expense to produce because it's grown from organic material.
Here's how it works: A mixture of water, mineral particles, starch and hydrogen peroxide are poured into 7-by-7-inch molds and then injected with living mushroom cells. The hydrogen peroxide is used to prevent the growth of other specimens within the material.
Placed in a dark environment, the cells start to grow, digesting the starch as food and sprouting thousands of root-like cellular strands. A week to two weeks later, a 1-inch-thick panel of insulation is fully grown. It's then dried to prevent fungal growth, making it unlikely to trigger mold and fungus allergies, according to Bayer. The finished product resembles a giant cracker in texture.
"It really allows for a myriad of uses," said McIntyre. He said they've envisioned modifying the product to make structural panels that could be grown and assembled onsite to produce sustainable homes.
"Green building materials should be evaluated on the idea of cradle to cradle," said Evelyne Michaut of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In the cradle-to-cradle industrial model, goods should either be fully biodegradable or reusable, limiting waste and pollution, according to Michaut, a sustainable city advocate from Santa Monica, Calif.
"That's the ultimate environmental reference," she said, adding that it seems like Greensulate is on its way to fulfilling that criteria.
For Bayer and McIntyre, their next step will be creating larger pieces of Greensulate to use in building a wall. From there, they'll perform further testing to see how the product stands up to various elements, including saturation and humidity. McIntyre said they have one two-year-old sample that's been exposed to the elements and shown no sign of degradation.
As part of their development plan, they're entering a new business incubation program at RPI to get their company, Ecovative Design, off the ground. Eventually, they hope to land a partnership with another company.
"Our biggest challenge is that while we have this technology, we still have a lot of research to do," said Bayer. "The key is to really make sure we have a product that is mature and robust before we bring it to the market."
Yahoo! News: Bald Eagle Comes Off Endangered List by By H. Josef Hebert...
View video...WASHINGTON - The government took the American bald eagle off the endangered species list Thursday — an official act of name-dropping that President Bush hailed as "a wonderful way" to celebrate the Fourth of July.
Bush said the bald eagle's resurgence after a four-decade-old fight should be credited to cooperation between private landowners and federal and state governments. "This great conservation achievement means more and more Americans across the nation will enjoy the thrill of seeing bald eagles soar," he said.
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, making the formal announcement at the Jefferson Memorial, said: "Today I am proud to announce the eagle has returned."
His department made the recovery official by removing the eagle from the list of threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The bird had been reclassified from endangered to threatened in 1995.
Today, there are nearly 10,000 mating pairs of bald eagles in the contiguous 48 states, compared to a documented 417 in 1963 when the bird was on the verge of extinction everywhere except in Alaska and Canada where it has continued to thrive.
"After years of careful study, public comment and planning, the Department of Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are confident in the future security of the American bald eagle," said Kempthorne.
He promised that "from this point forward we will work to ensure that the eagle never again needs the protection of the Endangered Species Act."
The eagle, whose decline came during years in which the bird was often targeted by hunters and later became a victim of the pesticide DDT, will still be protected by state statutes and a federal law passed by Congress in 1940 that makes it illegal to kill a bald eagle.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is developing guidelines on how that law will be implemented. It also is developing a permitting system to allow landowners to develop their property and still protect the eagle population.
Newsday.com: Giant Penguins May Have Roamed Peru by Randolph E. Schmid...
WASHINGTON -- Giant penguins as tall as 5 feet roamed what is now Peru more than 40 million years ago, much earlier than scientists thought the flightless birds had spread to warmer climes. Known mostly for their presence in Antarctica, penguins today live in many islands in the Southern Hemisphere, some even near the equator.
But scientists thought they hadn't reached warm areas until about 10 million years ago
Now, researchers report in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have found remains of two types of penguin in Peru that date to 40 million years ago.
One of them was a 5-foot giant with a long sharp beak.
Paleontologist Julia Clarke, assistant professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University, said she was surprised at the new find.
"This is the same age as the earliest penguins from South America. The only other record from the continent of that age is from the southernmost tip of the continent," she said. "The new finds indicate they reached equatorial regions much earlier than anyone previously thought."
The big bird is larger than any penguin known today and the third largest known to have ever lived, she added.
It is particularly unusual for such a large penguin to have been living in a warm climate, she noted. "In most cases, the larger individuals of a species or among related species are correlated with colder climes and higher latitudes."
The beak of the large penguin -- Icadyptes salasi -- "looks remarkably spearlike," she said. But the researchers don't know its exact feeding style.
The second new species -- Perudyptes devriesi -- was approximately the same size as a living King Penguin -- 2 1/2 to 3 feet tall -- and represents a very early part of penguin evolutionary history, the researchers said.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation Office of International Science and Engineering and the National Geographic Society.
But scientists thought they hadn't reached warm areas until about 10 million years ago
Now, researchers report in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have found remains of two types of penguin in Peru that date to 40 million years ago.
One of them was a 5-foot giant with a long sharp beak.
Paleontologist Julia Clarke, assistant professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University, said she was surprised at the new find.
"This is the same age as the earliest penguins from South America. The only other record from the continent of that age is from the southernmost tip of the continent," she said. "The new finds indicate they reached equatorial regions much earlier than anyone previously thought."
The big bird is larger than any penguin known today and the third largest known to have ever lived, she added.
It is particularly unusual for such a large penguin to have been living in a warm climate, she noted. "In most cases, the larger individuals of a species or among related species are correlated with colder climes and higher latitudes."
The beak of the large penguin -- Icadyptes salasi -- "looks remarkably spearlike," she said. But the researchers don't know its exact feeding style.
The second new species -- Perudyptes devriesi -- was approximately the same size as a living King Penguin -- 2 1/2 to 3 feet tall -- and represents a very early part of penguin evolutionary history, the researchers said.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation Office of International Science and Engineering and the National Geographic Society.
Audubon Press Release: Common Birds In Decline Press Room...
The following are the 20 common North American birds with the greatest population declines since 1967. Click on the thumbnail to view and download a high resolution, printable image. Photos may be published in connection with coverage of Common Birds in Decline and must be accompanied by the photographer's name. Click on the species name to link to its profile, or click on the audio link to download its bird call. All sounds must be credited to Lang Elliot, Nature Sound Studios. Broadcast-quality b-roll of several species may also be downloaded from Mastervision.com/Audubon
Please Note:
Images may not load directly into your browser. If not, download by 'right-clicking' link and select 'save target as' or 'save image as', or 'save link as' (mac users) to save to your computer first. You may then view the image with whatever photo-viewing software you currently use on your computer.
| Bird | Photographer | Audio | |
 | #1 Northern Bobwhite | Ashok Khosla | Audio link |
 | #2 Evening Grosbeak | Dave Menke, FWS | Audio link |
 | #3 Northern Pintail | Howard B. Eskin | Audio link |
 | #4 Greater Scaup | Donna Dewhurst, FWS | Audio link |
 | #5 Boreal Chickadee | Jeremy Yancey | Audio link |
 | #6 Eastern Meadowlark | Laura Erickson | Audio link |
 | #7 Common Tern | Glen Tepke | Audio link |
 | #8 Loggerhead Shrike | Gary Stolz, FWS | Audio link |
 | #9 Field Sparrow | Howard B. Eskin | Audio link |
 | #10 Grasshopper Sparrow | Laura Erickson | Audio link |
 | #11 Snow Bunting | Donna Dewhurst, FWS | Audio link |
 | #12 Black-throated Sparrow | Brad Fiero | Audio link |
 | #13 Lark Sparrow | Glen Tepke | Audio link |
 | #14 Common Grackle | Howard B. Eskin | Audio link |
 | #15 American Bittern | Gary Zahm, FWS | Audio link |
 | #16 Rufous Hummingbird | Howard B. Eskin | Audio link |
 | #17 Whip-poor-will | John Cassady | Audio link |
 | #18 Horned Lark | George Jameson | Audio link |
 | #19 Little Blue Heron | Laura Erickson | Audio link |
 | #20 Ruffed Grouse | Laura Erickson | Audio link |
New York Times Blog: Following Urban Bees on Their Daily Rounds by Sewell Chan...
Honeybees (Photo: Richard Perry/The New York Times)
The mysterious and alarming collapse of honeybee populations throughout the United States has prompted a new local study of the phenomenon.
The Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History and the Greenbelt Native Plant Center at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation are joining forces to study bees native to the city, and the indigenous plants they pollinate. The pilot program will recruit volunteers to collect data and spread the word about the key role bees play in pollinating plants.
In case you forgot to mark it in your calendar, National Pollinator Week began on Sunday. The week is designed to promote the health of resident and migratory pollinating animals.
“Bees are a crucial part of our urban ecosystem,” said Eleanor Sterling, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. “We are very pleased to be collaborating with Parks to examine the relationship between the city’s native bees and plants.”
The project is modeled on a similar recent study carried out in San Francisco and has been modified to focus on East Coast bees and plants. About 800 species of bees are found east of the Mississippi River and a surprising number — more than 200 — have been documented in New York City.
Throughout the week, Liz Johnson, manager of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation’s metropolitan biodiversity program, and Ed Toth, director of the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, are giving volunteers a one-hour orientation and training session. The natural history museum said in a news release:
The G.N.P.C. will distribute six native, bee-pollinated flowering plants to volunteers, which they will be directed to plant in a sunny location in their own backyards. Twice per month over the summer and fall, the volunteers will observe how long it takes for bees to discover the plants and which bee species visit their flowers. Data from the pilot period will be analyzed by Johnson, Toth, and other project advisors, and the results will be released sometime during the winter.
Harper's Magazine: "The Environment" by Bill McKibben...
One of the best things about the departure of the Bush Administration will be the end of headache-creating cognitive dissonance. It has taken over institutions ostensibly devoted to defending the natural world—the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Council on Environmental Quality—and turned them into organizations devoted to environmental degradation. And it has passed a set of anti-environmental laws that sound like they were dreamed up by wild-eyed nature lovers—the Clear Skies Act turns out to gut the old Clean Air Act, for instance, and the Healthy Forests Initiative has initiated a great deal of unhealthy deforestation. (“No Tree Left Behind,” someone quickly dubbed it.) We’ll not be in some new green nirvana when Bush finally leaves, but at least we might start trying to solve real problems.
We already faced daunting environmental challenges in 2000, of course, challenges that would have taken decades of good-faith effort to overcome. But rather than attempt the difficult and slow reversal of our cheap-energy economy, Bush has eagerly raced forward into whole new worlds of environmental turmoil. You can see this reckless disregard most plainly, alas, when you look at the worst problem the country faces: climate change.
Bush came into office promising that he would require U.S. power plants to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, and if he’d stuck to the plan, our country would already look quite different. Solar panels would have begun to sprout in real numbers, cars would be smaller, we’d be building more passenger trains. Instead, Bush repudiated the promise within a few weeks of taking office. He said he didn’t want to do anything that would raise the price of energy. His energy task force, chaired by Dick Cheney, barely even mentioned the possibility of global warming. It concentrated on new places to find fossil fuel, new pipelines to carry it, new refineries to refine it—and indeed, just as Cheney suggested, there are about 159 new coal-fired power plants in some stage of planning or construction around the country. Meanwhile, carbon-dioxide output has increased an average of 1.6 percent every year—and the average price for a gallon of gas has nearly doubled.
But Bush’s folly at home isn’t the worst of it. As soon as he took office, he also repudiated America’s participation in the Kyoto treaty process, the one international attempt to begin reining in carbon emissions. And he did it at the critical moment when China and India were just beginning their rapid energy takeoffs. It’s possible that this is what history will judge Bush most sternly for, even more than the Iraq war. With real effort and real resources, we might have nudged the emerging economies onto a different energy trajectory in 2000, but by now their path appears set. Plans call for some 600 new coal-fired plants in China and India alone; the Chinese open a new plant every week.
Still, there is much that can be done. As the head of a vast regulatory body, the next president can exert significant influence on environmental rules. The Bush years began with the news that rules for allowable arsenic concentration in drinking water were being revised—and not in the direction of more protection. The trend continues. Earlier this winter a Senate hearing revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency was considering weakening lead standards and ceasing the testing for perchlorate—a potent endocrine disruptor—in the nation’s water supply. The EPA has also narrowed its “new source review” policy, which requires power companies to install modern pollution controls when they expand their plants. The result, according to a 2006 study, will be 2.7 million additional tons of nitrogen oxide, 13 million additional tons of sulfur dioxide, and 660 million additional tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the lifetime of the plants—unless the next president changes the rules once again.
Such changes, though, will require appointing people who care about the environment to positions of real responsibility. The Bush environmental team has come straight from the industries it now regulates. Mark Rey, the Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment, spent eighteen years as a timber lobbyist; Jeffrey Holmstead, the assistant EPA administrator for air and radiation, was a lawyer who represented the Alliance for Constructive Air Policy, an electric-utility trade group; and the list goes on. Do these insider links have consequences? Well, the New York Times reported in March that Philip A. Cooney, the onetime chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality—and a former “climate team leader” at the American Petroleum Institute—had “repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming.” It shouldn’t be too hard to find people to run regulatory agencies who don’t come from the organizations being regulated.
Even if these agencies wanted to enforce the law, though, they’d have trouble doing so on their sharply reduced budgets. This year, for instance, EPA funding for research and development is at its lowest level since 1987, and the agency’s own internal watchdog, the Office of Inspector General, faces deep cuts in personnel. And it’s not just enforcement money that’s disappearing. Take the National Park system, which Bush, running for president in 2000, declared needed $5 billion in additional funding. Instead, national parks over the course of his administration have been required to do more with less, and those budget shortfalls have all kinds of unintended consequences. A cash-poor Redwood National Park, for instance, was forced to reduce its park patrols, and now lumber peddlers are sneaking in at night and poaching fallen trees.
Most important, the next president will have to put the environment, and especially carbon policy, at the center of every diplomatic effort. That will be a novel experience for a war-oriented foreign policy elite—but the notion that “terror” represents our greatest threat is impossible to maintain once you’ve read the scientific predictions for rising seas, looming droughts, falling harvests. The Kyoto Protocol we didn’t sign will expire in 2012, and negotiations are beginning for whatever will succeed it. Unless there’s a U.S.-led effort to produce something truly dramatic, the world might as well not bother.
Friday, June 29, 2007
NY Times: Justices Limit the Use of Race in School Plans for Integration by Linda Greenhouse...
WASHINGTON, June 28 — With competing blocs of justices claiming the mantle of Brown v. Board of Education, a bitterly divided Supreme Court declared Thursday that public school systems cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race.
Left, Bradley C. Bower/Reuters; right, Nick Ut/Associated Press
Chief Justice John Roberts, right, wrote the majority’s decision. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the dissent.
Multimedia
Notable Cases of the 2006-7 Term: Affirmative Action
A look at notable cases of the term including the one that limits the ability of school districts to manage the racial makeup of the student bodies in their schools. With audio from some of the court’s arguments. Go »
Related
Opinion: Parents Involved v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1
Excerpts From Opinions on the Use of Race in Public School Admission Policies
News Analysis: The Same Words, but Differing Views
Across U.S., a New Look at School Integration Efforts
How the Programs Linked to Race Worked in 2 Cities
The New York Times
Voting 5 to 4, the court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., invalidated programs in Seattle and metropolitan Louisville, Ky., that sought to maintain school-by-school diversity by limiting transfers on the basis of race or using race as a “tiebreaker” for admission to particular schools.
Both programs had been upheld by lower federal courts and were similar to plans in place in hundreds of school districts around the country. Chief Justice Roberts said such programs were “directed only to racial balance, pure and simple,” a goal he said was forbidden by the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he said. His side of the debate, the chief justice said, was “more faithful to the heritage of Brown,” the landmark 1954 decision that declared school segregation unconstitutional. “When it comes to using race to assign children to schools, history will be heard,” he said.
The decision came on the final day of the court’s 2006-7 term, which showed an energized conservative majority in control across many areas of the court’s jurisprudence.
Chief Justice Roberts’s control was not quite complete, however. While Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined his opinion on the schools case in full, the fifth member of the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, did not. Justice Kennedy agreed that the two programs were unconstitutional. But he was highly critical of what he described as the chief justice’s “all-too-unyielding insistence that race cannot be a factor in instances when, in my view, it may be taken into account.”
In a separate opinion that could shape the practical implications of the decision and provide school districts with guidelines for how to create systems that can pass muster with the court, Justice Kennedy said achieving racial diversity, “avoiding racial isolation” and addressing “the problem of de facto resegregation in schooling” were “compelling interests” that a school district could constitutionally pursue as long as it did so through programs that were sufficiently “narrowly tailored.”
The four justices were “too dismissive” of the validity of these goals, Justice Kennedy said, adding that it was “profoundly mistaken” to read the Constitution as requiring “that state and local school authorities must accept the status quo of racial isolation in schools.”
As a matter of constitutional doctrine and practical impact, Justice Kennedy’s opinion thus placed a significant limitation on the full reach of the other four justices’ embrace of a “colorblind Constitution” under which all racially conscious government action, no matter how benign or invidious its goal, is equally suspect.
How important a limitation Justice Kennedy’s opinion proves to be may become clear only with time, as school districts devise and defend plans that appear to meet his test.
Among the measures that Justice Kennedy said would be acceptable were the drawing of school attendance zones, “strategic site selection of new schools,” and directing resources to special programs. These would be permissible even if adopted with a consciousness of racial demographics, Justice Kennedy said, because in avoiding the labeling and sorting of individual children by race they would satisfy the “narrow tailoring” required to meet the equal protection demands of the 14th Amendment.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who wrote the principal dissenting opinion, was dismissive of Justice Kennedy’s proposed alternatives and asserted that the court was taking a sharp and seriously mistaken turn.
Speaking from the bench for more than 20 minutes, Justice Breyer made his points to a courtroom audience that had never seen the coolly analytical justice express himself with such emotion. His most pointed words, in fact, appeared nowhere in his 77-page opinion.
“It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much,” Justice Breyer said.
In his written opinion, Justice Breyer said the decision was a “radical” step away from settled law and would strip local communities of the tools they need, and have used for many years, to prevent resegregation of their public schools. Predicting that the ruling would “substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation,” he said, “This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret.”
Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg signed Justice Breyer’s opinion. Justice Stevens wrote a dissenting opinion of his own, as pointed as it was brief.
He said the chief justice’s invocation of Brown v. Board of Education was “a cruel irony” when the opinion in fact “rewrites the history of one of this court’s most important decisions” by ignoring the context in which it was issued and the Supreme Court’s subsequent understanding of it to permit voluntary programs of the sort that were now invalidated.
“It is my firm conviction that no member of the court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision,” Justice Stevens said. He did not mention, nor did he need to, that one of the justices then was William H. Rehnquist, later the chief justice, for whom Chief Justice Roberts once worked as a law clerk.
Justice Clarence Thomas was equally pointed and equally personal in an opinion concurring with the majority.
“If our history has taught us anything,” Justice Thomas said, “it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories.” He added in a footnote, “Justice Breyer’s good intentions, which I do not doubt, have the shelf life of Justice Breyer’s tenure.”
The justices had been wrestling for over a year with the two cases. It was in January 2006 that parents who objected to the Louisville and Seattle programs filed their Supreme Court appeals from the lower court decisions that had upheld the programs.
The Louisville case was Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, No. 05-915, filed by the mother of a student who was denied a transfer to his chosen kindergarten class because the school he wanted to leave needed to keep its white students to stay within the program’s racial guidelines.
The Seattle case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, No. 05-908, was filed by a group of parents who had formed a nonprofit corporation to fight the city’s high school assignment plan.
Because a single Supreme Court opinion resolved both cases, the decision carries only the name of the Seattle case, which had the lower docket number.
The appeals provoked a long internal struggle over how the court should respond. Months earlier, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was still on the court, the justices had denied review in an appeal challenging a similar program in Massachusetts. With no disagreement among the federal appellate circuits on the validity of such programs, the new appeals did not meet the criterion the court ordinarily uses to decide which cases to hear. It was June of last year before the court, reconfigured by the additions of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, announced, over the unrecorded but vigorous objection of the liberal justices, that it would hear both appeals.
By the time the court ruled on Thursday, there was little suspense over what the outcome would be. Not only the act of accepting the appeals, but also the tenor of the argument on Dec. 4, gave clear indications that the justices were on course to strike down both plans.
The cases were by far the oldest on the docket by the time they were decided; the other decisions the court announced on Thursday were in cases that were argued in March and April. What consumed the court during the seven months the cases were under consideration, it appears likely, was an effort by each side to edge Justice Kennedy closer to its point of view.
While it is hardly uncommon to find Justice Kennedy in the middle of the court, his position there this time carried a special resonance. He holds the seat once occupied by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. who, 29 years ago to the day, announced his separate opinion in the Bakke case. That solitary opinion, rejecting quotas but accepting diversity as a rationale for affirmative action in university admissions, defined the law for the next 25 years, until the decision was refined and to some degree strengthened in the University of Michigan Law School decision.
Justice Kennedy was a dissenter from that 2003 decision. But, surprisingly, he cited it on Thursday, invoking it to rebut the argument that the Constitution must be always be, regardless of context or circumstance, colorblind.
YouTube: MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski Refuses to Talk About Paris Hilton...
MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski refuses to talk about Paris Hilton on the Morning Joe show. Perhaps more people in the media & news outlets should FOLLOW her example and STOP following up on worthless news about hardly news worthy people like the spoiled brat Paris Hilton is.
This isn't one long tirade, if you watch the clock, her producer tried to lead with this story during three different hourly news reports. You'll see that Mika first refused to do the story at 6am EST and was handed it anew at 7 -- when she tried to set it on fire -- and again at 8 when she finally shred it...
Isn't she so cute when she's angry...
This isn't one long tirade, if you watch the clock, her producer tried to lead with this story during three different hourly news reports. You'll see that Mika first refused to do the story at 6am EST and was handed it anew at 7 -- when she tried to set it on fire -- and again at 8 when she finally shred it...
Isn't she so cute when she's angry...
Parents Call for Styrofoam Ban in NYC School Lunchrooms...
Watch video...
Did you know that your children eat off of Styrofoam trays each day at school? Each day, NYC public schools serve meals on Styrofoam trays. It is estimated that 850,000 trays are used daily throughout the public schools. These trays are then thrown out, discarded, into our already overused landfills. These trays do not decompose. These trays, as they fall apart, prevent other trash from decomposing. These trays cannot be recycled. Additionally, studies suggest the possibility of chemical migration into the food our children eat each day. Demand that the NYC Department of Education find a healthier and more environmentally-friendly alternative!!!
Did you know that your children eat off of Styrofoam trays each day at school? Each day, NYC public schools serve meals on Styrofoam trays. It is estimated that 850,000 trays are used daily throughout the public schools. These trays are then thrown out, discarded, into our already overused landfills. These trays do not decompose. These trays, as they fall apart, prevent other trash from decomposing. These trays cannot be recycled. Additionally, studies suggest the possibility of chemical migration into the food our children eat each day. Demand that the NYC Department of Education find a healthier and more environmentally-friendly alternative!!!
Please take less than a minute to go to the following link and sign a petition:
www.ipetitions.com/petition/stopstyrofoam.
www.ipetitions.com/petition/stopstyrofoam.
Also, check us out on TV at http://wcbstv.com/video/?id=100935@wcbs.dayport.com
NY Post: Cheating-Expose Teacher Could Face 'Spanking' by Chuck Bennett...
A journalist-turned-teacher whose 3-year-old crusade to expose grade-fixing at his Brooklyn high school was debunked by authorities is under investigation over allegations of corporal punishment and vindictively flunking students, The Post had learned.
"I can see the forces are arrayed against me," said Philip Nobile, who teaches at the Cobble Hill School of American Studies. "The story here is the whistle-blower who failed."
Nobile, who has been reassigned to administrative duties, said the charges that he physically disciplined two students and failed others without cause are "retaliatory" and a "smear."
Nobile made his first allegation of grade-fixing after a Post exposé on the practice in January 2004. That led to a 14-month investigation that derailed the careers of three educators at the school.
On Tuesday, city Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon released a report calling the investigation that Nobile sparked "flawed from its inception."
The combative writer made waves in 2005 with his assertions that President Abraham Lincoln had a homosexual affair. As early as 2000, Nobile campaigned to boycott radio host Don Imus for racist language.
His book "Judgement at the Smithsonian" accused President Harry Truman of war crimes for dropping the A-bomb.
He's also written extensively about sex as an editor of Penthouse Forum and as co-author of "The Perfect Fit," about the female orgasm.
A former seminarian, Nobile says he is committed to staying a teacher because it's the "frontline" of civil rights.
Additional reporting by Ben Frumin
cbennett@nypost.com
CBS News: Bush On 'No Child Left Behind'...
CBS News RAW: President Bush spoke about the benefits of "No Child Left Behind" as the controversial education bill comes up before Congress for reauthorization.
NY Times: Union to Help Charter Firm Start School in the Bronx by Jennifer Medina...
Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school operator from Los Angeles, is seeking to expand into New York with the cooperation of the teachers’ union.
Under the proposal, Green Dot, which is heavily financed by the billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, would open a high school in the South Bronx. The school, which must be approved by the state, would become one of only a handful of charter schools in the city to use a union contract.
The cooperation of the union, the United Federation of Teachers, is unusual. It has been lukewarm toward charter schools, many of which actively oppose unions. The schools are publicly financed but are largely free from the control of local school districts.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers’ union, said yesterday that she approached Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot, to open the school because he favors working with unions.
“We have never been against increasing charters, but we were against the anti-union animus in some charter schools,” Ms. Weingarten said. The union already runs two charter schools in Brooklyn.
The plan calls for all teachers to be part of the union, but their contract would be simpler than the citywide contract. The union and Green Dot have already reached agreement on the general terms and structure of their contract.
Rather than dictating the number of hours and minutes teachers must spend at the schools, it would just call for a “professional workday,” they said. The contract could also eliminate tenure, but would set guidelines for when a teacher can be dismissed. Many charter schools can dismiss teachers at will.
Mr. Barr, who has sparred in recent months with school officials in Los Angeles over his aggressive plans for expansion of schools, said that he had turned down offers before to expand beyond California and that he had responded only because it was the union that had approached him.
“If it were the mayor or the chancellor, I probably would have said no,” he said in an interview yesterday. “But to say that we are doing reform with the largest union is something very different. We can prove the unions and reformers work together.”
NY Times: Patrons’ Sway Leads to Friction in Charter School by David M. Herszanhorn...
The Beginning With Children Charter School, housed in a former factory in Brooklyn, landed on the state’s list of high-performing schools this year, thanks to rising English and math test scores among black and Hispanic students.
But its founders and wealthy patrons, Joseph H. and Carol F. Reich, who have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the school, think it could be better. “It’s above average,” said Mr. Reich, 72, “but considering the effort and the capability and the resources, we don’t feel we’re getting the best we can.”
So last month, the couple — threatening to cut ties, including financial support — forced most of the school’s trustees to resign in a push for wide management changes, and better student achievement.
The move caused an uproar among parents and teachers who said they would be left with no formal say at the school. “My voice is going to be lost,” said Shakema Daise, the mother of a first grader.
The clash has exposed fault lines of wealth and class that are perhaps inevitable as philanthropists, in New York and nationwide, increasingly invest in public education, providing new schools to children in poor neighborhoods while making communities dependent on their generosity.
And for those lucky to have such benefactors, the situation raises core questions: Who ultimately controls charter schools, which are financed by taxpayers but often rely heavily on charitable donations? Do the schools, which operate outside the control of the local school district, answer to parents, or to their wealthy founders?
At Beginning With Children, many parents and teachers say that the Reichs’ main interest is to burnish their reputation as advocates for charter schools, and that the school’s original purpose, of catering to each child’s individual needs, is now secondary to drilling for exams in an effort to elevate scores and the Reichs’ credibility.
The Reichs support not just Beginning With Children, and a second school they founded in Brooklyn, but charter schools generally. They gave $10 million to help create the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, a nonprofit group dedicated to opening 50 more of the schools.
“Joe and Carol Reich started the school for whatever reasons initially,” said Gail Sims Bliss, a teacher and former trustee who resigned reluctantly. “But it has grown into their participation in the charter movement with a capital M.” She added, “They cannot allow the school to compromise their status and their progress in this particular movement.”
In an interview, Mr. and Mrs. Reich said they were committed to their original promise of providing children with an education that would lead to success in college and in life. “We promised to build them a model education program that would lay the groundwork for their future,” said Mr. Reich, a retired investment banker. “This didn’t come from nowhere. We were really worried that the school wasn’t delivering.”
The Reichs are not alone in directing their charity to schools. The Walton, Broad and Gates foundations, all founded by billionaires, support charter schools nationwide.
Andre Agassi, the retired tennis great, opened a charter school named after him in Las Vegas. The former N.B.A. star, Kevin Johnson, started two charter schools in Sacramento. The billionaire corporate raider, Carl C. Icahn, has a charter school named for him in the Bronx. And Courtney Sales Ross, the multimillionaire widow of a Time Warner executive, has the Ross Global Academy Charter School, housed in the basement of the city’s Education Department headquarters.
Nor are the Reichs the only ones facing difficulties. The Ross Global Academy is on its fourth principal in less than a year.
Frederick M. Hess, an expert on philanthropy in education, said there would be more disputes like the one in Brooklyn as high-profile donors invest their reputations in schools and face “the enormous kind of name-brand question.”
“When those schools disappoint them, when there are disputes or divergence regarding institutional mission,” asked Mr. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, “how are they going to negotiate this relationship?” He added, “What we are seeing is really just the front end of what is going to be a fascinating dynamic.”
In educational philanthropy, the Reichs were pioneers. They fought for years to get the city’s Board of Education to let them open the Beginning With Children school in 1992 in an impoverished section of Williamsburg, before charter schools became a national trend and at a time when private donors were generally reluctant to write checks to public school systems. The school converted to charter status in 2001.
They fought through bureaucratic tangles to get the system to accept a virtually free building, a former Pfizer pharmaceutical factory, which the school now occupies for $1 a year.
The school has done well, though far from stellar. This year, 69 percent of students in Grades 3 to 8 scored at or above grade level on the state English exam, compared with the 56 percent citywide average. And 77 percent of students scored at or above grade level on the math exam, compared with 65 percent citywide. The state reauthorized the school’s charter last year, giving it a full five-year renewal.
But the Reichs are not satisfied and said the school’s trustees were an obstacle. Charter schools get taxpayer funding, but are run independently from local school districts under terms set out in their state-approved charters.
The 14-member Beginning With Children board included appointees from the Reichs’ foundation, which helps finance the school; parents; teachers; the principal; and community representatives. The board chairman, John Day, is a former Pfizer executive.
The Reichs said the problem was that the board was “constituency-based” and that they wanted members with practical skills like fund-raising or public relations instead. To get the changes, they threatened in a strongly worded letter to cut off their support unless all but three of the board members resigned. Among those told to quit were five parent and faculty representatives.
At a board meeting last month, parents lashed out at the Reichs, angrily describing their relationship as that of master and servant or landlord and tenant.
One parent said the threat to cut ties was “a gun pointed at the head of every child in this facility.” In recent years, the school has faced annual budget gaps of up to $635,000 that were filled by the Reichs’ foundation, and parents said they feared that the school would close without the Reichs’ help.
Mrs. Reich, 71, said of the letter: “It was not a blunt threat. It was a choice. You can go the way you are going or you can restructure yourselves.”
Many parents and teachers said they agreed that the board did not function well. But they also said there were disagreements with the Reichs over issues like how much to focus on standardized testing. And they accused the Reichs of meddling in areas like teacher hiring and the choice of a reading program.
“The emphasis on testing means the school is moving away from its original mission,” said Karl Klingbeil, a parent. “They just got tired of listening to us talk about curriculum and pedagogy.”
The Reichs said they did not want to squabble over such points, noting that the principal runs the school and that they themselves are not voting trustees. They said they had proposed creating a faculty senate and parent council to give input to the new trustees.
The city school system has stood at the sidelines. Garth Harries, who oversees charter schools for the Education Department, said they were intended to operate with wide autonomy. “We’re confident in this case, with Joe and Carol,” he said, “You are dealing with folks who have the interests of the school and the kids in mind.”
The three remaining board members at Beginning With Children have enlisted a consultant to help identify new trustees, and the Reichs said they were moving aggressively to set things right. “This was our school, it’s our dream, it’s our vision,” Mr. Reich said. “We are going to fight to make this school the best school it can be for this community.”
NY Post: Imitate Our Class Act: Mike by Chuck Bennett...
Mayor Bloomberg says other cities should look to New York as a national model for fixing troubled schools - and vowed to fight to retain mayoral control over them.
"Other cities are looking to us for guidance in turning their schools around, because they see that we're no longer writing off generation after generation of students," Bloomberg said yesterday at a Crain's Business Breakfast Forum in Midtown.
To keep from backsliding, Bloomberg said mayoral control must extend beyond its scheduled expiration date in 2009.
"It would be very hard for the legislature to look [parents] in the eye and say, 'Let's go back to the old days of patronage and failure,' " he said.
The mayor cited numerous improvements since he took control in 2002, including: a rise in students between grades 3 and 8 meeting math standards to 65 percent this year, from 37 percent in 2002; half of the same students meeting reading standards, compared to 39 percent in 2002; and a hike in graduation rates to 60 percent, from 48 percent in 2002.
cbennett@nypost.com
NY Post: Queens High Highest On Students' Lists by Angela Montefinise...
Meet the city's hottest high school.
Academic powerhouse Townsend Harris HS in Queens is the most popular public high school, with more eighth-graders listing it as their first choice than any other school in the five boroughs.
An impressive 3,452 students heading to high school next fall picked Townsend Harris as their first choice, according to Department of Education stats.
Midwood HS ranked Second, with 2,705 students naming it as their first choice.
Rounding out the top five were Benjamin N. Cardozo HS in Queens, Herbert Lehman HS in The Bronx and Edward Murrow HS in Brooklyn.
The city's nine specialized schools, such as Stuyvesant, which require a test for admittance, are not included in the list. About 27,000 students took the test to get into those schools, with about 5,500 available seats.
All of the most popular schools are traditional, older and larger - a good sign, according to David Cohen, principal of 65-year-old Midwood HS, which offers two honors programs and focuses on science.
"It's nice to hear that larger schools are at the top, because recently, there's been a shift toward smaller, specialized schools," he said. "Comprehensive high schools are being phased out somewhat. But we're examples that when it's done right, it can work."
It has worked so well that all five top schools are way over capacity.
"I think that's just another potential pitfall that we have overcome," said Cohen, whose school is operating at 176 percent capacity.
On the other side of the popularity scale, most of the high schools with under 100 first-choice requests are small, newer schools without many seats or established reputations.
For example, Multicultural HS and Pan American International HS - both set to open in September to mostly immigrant populations - had the fewest first choice requests at five.
An exception is Jamaica HS in Queens, a larger, established school that had only 95 first-choice requests.
The Department of Education changed its high-school admissions process for the 2004 school year, eliminating traditional zoning and making all high schools open to the entire city. Now, high-school-bound students rank their top 12 schools.
The schools, in turn, rank the students, who are then matched with the highest-ranking school that ranked them.
For the 2007-08 school year, 88,320 students applied to enter public high school, and 83 percent were matched to one of their top five choices, according to the department. Almost half received their top choice.
SCHOOL APPLICANTS
Townsend Harris HS - 3452
Midwood HS - 2705
Benjamin Cardozo HS - 2548
Herbert H. Lehman HS - 2219
Deward R. Murrow HS - 1858
James Madison HS - 1752
Tottenville HS - 1686
Forest Hills High School - 1635
Dewitt Clinton HS - 1547
Francis Lewis HS - 1357
Thomas A. Edison HS - 1320
Leon M. Goldstein HS for the Sciences - 1295
Beacon High School - 1223
Fort Hamilton HS - 1176
Bayside High School - 1102
Susan E. Wagner HS - 1088
Manhattan Center for Science and Math Res. - 1029
Benjamin Banneker Academy - 989
M. Bergtraum HS Buisness Careers - 946
Baruch College Campus HS - 933
Bard High School - 891
HS of Telecommunication, Arts and Tech. - 870
HS of Art and Design - 867
A. Philip Randolph Campus H - 842
Aviation HS - 811
Fashion Industries HS - 801
Michael J. Petrides - 728
Clara Barton HS - 687
Curtis HS - 685
Bronx School for Law and Government - 618
Frank Sinatra HS - 611
Food and Finance - 570
Abraham Lincoln HS - 565
HS Healh Professions and Human Services - 554
HS for Enviornmental Studies - 535
Transit Tech HS - 529
New Utrecht HS - 529
Talent Unlimited HS - 511
Richmond Hill HS - 505
Professional Performing Arts School - 505
HS of Economics and Finance - 495
Millenium HS - 479
Hostos_Lincoln Academy - 450
Young Women's Leadership - 435
New Dorp HS - 435
Eleanor Roosevelt HS - 434
Frederick Douglass Academy - 429
Automotive HS - 428
John Adams HS - 423
Port Richmond HS - 413
Long Island City HS - 412
Queens Gateway - 402
HS of Teaching, Liberal Arts & Sciences - 398
Alfred E. Smith HS - 398
Queens Vocational and Technical - 387
Grace H. Dodge HS - 386
Brooklyn College Academy - 372
Bronx Leadership Academy - 369
HS for Information Tech. - 364
HS Construction Trades, Engineering - 364
Hillcrest HS - 362
Harry S. Truman HS - 359
Boys and Girls HS - 356
Franklin D. Roosevelt HS - 348
CSI HS for Interntational Studies - 335
EBC HS for Public Service (Bushwick) - 332
Brooklyn HS of the Arts - 329
Middle College HS - 328
Upper Lab - 326
Norman Thomas HS - 314
John Dewey HS - 313
HS for Health Career and Science - 310
Flushing HS - 306
Pace Academy HS - 304
Glover Cleveland HS - 304
Bronx Center for Science and Math - 302
Academy of American Studies - 302
Jane Adams HS - 292
Martin Van Buren HS - 278
HS of Intl. Buisness and Finance - 274
Beach Channel High School - 267
Bedford Academy HS - 266
Middle College HS @ Medgar Evers - 260
Thurgood Marshall - 245
HS Enterprise, Buisness and Tech. - 242
Christopher Columbus HS - 241
Brooklyn Studio Secondary School - 239
JFK HS - 234
Academy for Careers in Sports - 234
Marie Curie HS for Nursing - 231
HS of Law and Public Service - 231
HS of Legal Studies - 230
Graphic Communication Arts - 230
William H. Maxwell - 228
International HS - 216
Progress HS - 215
Man/Hunter College HS of Science - 213
Newtown HS - 210
Arts and Buisness HS - 210
Riverdale/Kingsbridge Academy - 209
William C. Bryant HS - 205
Eagle Academy for Young Men HS - 203
Washington Irving HS - 198
HS of Media Communications - 197
Raplh McKee HS - 194
Bronx HS for the Visual Arts - 193
Franklin K. Lane HS - 192
Academy of Finance and Enterprise - 192
HS for Law Enforcement - 191
Canarsie HS - 191
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis HS - 190
Health Opportuities HS - 188
Wings Academy - 186
Sheepshead Bay HS - 186
Manhattan Village Academy - 186
John Bowne HS - 186
Samuel Gompers HS - 182
US Law and Justice - 181
School of the Future - 177
Bronx Aerospace Academy - 170
William E. Grady HS - 166
Bronx HS of Letters - 165
Cypress Hills Collegiate Prep - 164
Bronx Academy of Health Careers - 162
Louis D. Brandeis HS - 157
Chelsea HS - 157
Celia Cruz HS of Music - 157
Life Sciences Secondary School - 155
RFK Community HS - 150
Baccalaureate School for Global - 147
Bread and Roses Integrated Arts - 141
HS of Computers/Tech - 136
Banana Kelly High School - 136
HS of Teaching - 135
George Westinghouse HS - 135
Pelham Prep Academy High - 134
Bronx Engineering and Tech Academy - 134
HS of Arts and Tech at MLK - 133
Acorn Community HS - 130
Landmark HS - 127
Foreign Language Academy - 127
The Heritage School - 123
August Martin Education Complex - 123
In-Tech HS - 121
HS for Medical Sciences - 121
South Bronx Prep - 120
East Bronx Academy for the Future - 120
Bayrad Rustin HS for Humanities - 120
Fannie Lou Hamer HS - 119
Collegiate Institute of Math and Science - 118
East Side Community School - 117
University Heights HS - 116
Secondary School for Law - 116
Brooklyn Int. HS - 115
Sports Professions HS - 113
Bronx HS for Law and Community Service - 113
Academy Enviornmental Science - 113
Williamsburg Prep - 112
Fordham Leadership Academy - 111
MLK Law, Advocacy and Comm Justice - 110
Marble Hill HS for Intl Studies - 109
Far Rockaway HS - 109
Channel View School for Research. - 109
Science Skills CTR - 108
Bronx Theatre HS - 105
World Journalism Prep - 104
Fordham HS for the Arts - 101
Theatre Arts Production Company - 100
Paul Robeson HS - 100
All City Leadership Secondary School - 100
Dr. Susan McKinney Secondary School - 99
Robert F. Wagner Sch of Arts and Tech - 97
BX HS for Perform and Stagecraft - 97
Brooklyn Collegiate - 97
Bronx HS of Business - 97
Nest+M - 96
Astor Collegiate - 96
Monroe Academy Buisness and Law - 95
Manhattan Bridges HS - 95
Jamaica HS - 95
Int. School of Liberal Arts - 95
Academy for Young Writers - 95
Urban Assembly Sch for Applied Math/Science - 94
Vanguard HS - 93
NY Harbor HS - 93
Bushwick HS for Social Justice - 93
Teachers Prep HS - 92
E. NY Family Academy - 91
Mott Hall HS - 90
Essex Street Academy - 89
Bronx Lab HS - 89
Renaissance HS of Music, Theater and Tech - 88
Bushwick Leaders HS Acad. Ex. - 88
Scholars Academy HS - 87
HS for Leadership and Public Service - 87
Humanities and the Arts Magnet - 86
Millenium Art Academy - 85
FDNY GHS for Fire and Life Safety - 85
Manhattan International HS - 83
Frederick Douglass Academy 7 - 83
HS for Public Service - 82
Buisness, Computer Applica. & Entre - .81
Institute for Collaborative Ed - 80
HS for Teaching and the Professional - 80
Urban Assembly Sch of Design - 79
The New York City Musum School - 77
Flushing International - 77
The Academy of Urban Planning - 76
Brooklyn Community HS - 76
Validus Prep Academy - 74
Wadleigh Sec. School for the Perf - 73
The Urban Assembly School of Music/Art - 72
Academy for Scholarship and Entr. - 72
New Design HS - 71
Discovery HS - 71
Monroe Acad Visual Arts and Design - 70
EBC HS for Public Safety and Law - 70
Bronx International Academy - 70
Bronx HS for Writing and Comm. - 70
Mott Hall Bronx HS - 69
Law, Govt and Community Service - 69
Knowedge an Power Prep. - 69
Int. Arts Buisness HS - 69
Freedom Academy HS - 69
Mott Haven Village Prep HS - 68
Frederick Douglass Academy III - 68
GW Carver HS for the Sciences - 67
Brooklyn HS for Music and Theater - 67
Performing Arts and Tech HS - 66
Humanitites Prep Academy - 66
Hospitality Management - 66
Marta Valle Secondary School - 65
Lower Manhattan Arts Academy - 64
Frederick Douglass Academy II - 64
Caolition School for Socail Change - 63
Belmont Prep HS - 63
Acorn HS for Social Justice - 62
US Academy of Gov and Law - 61
The Bronx Guild HS - 61
Bronx Health Sciences - 61
Bronx Coalition Community School - 60
Int. HS at Prospect Heights - 59
Juan Morel Campos - 58
Excelsior Prep HS - 57
Brooklyn HS for Science and the Enviorn. - 57
Secondary School for Journalism - 56
Bronx Leadership Academy II - 56
Frederick Douglass Academy 6 - 54
Bronx School of Law and Finance - 54
University Neighborhood HS - 53
UA School of Buisness for Young Women - 52
HS of Sports Management - 52
West Bronx Academy for the Future - 51
HS of Applied Communication - 51
HS for Violin and Dance - 51
Henry Street School for International - 51
FDA IV - 50
The Brooklyn School for Global Studies - 49
Park East HS - 49
BKLYN S. for Collab. Studies - 49
Morris Academy for Collab - 48
47 Amer Sign Lang - 48
Math, Science Research & Tech - 47
Science, Tech and Research HS - 46
Choir Academy of Harlem - 45
Bronx Latin HS - 45
Global Enterprise Academy - 43
Cobble Hill HS - 41
School for Excellence - 40
Academy of Social Action - 40
Foundations Academy - 39
HS of Arts Imagination and Inquiry - 38
HS for Civil Rights - 38
East-West School of International - 38
Brooklyn Prep. HS - 38
The School for International Studies - 37
Public School Repertory Company - 37
Metro Corporate Academy - 37
Jonathan Levin HS - 37
Eximus College Prep ACAD - 37
Dual Lang. & Asian Studies HS - 37
Urban Assembly School for the Pe - 36
The Facing History School - 36
Community HS Social Justice - 36
Academy/College Prep/Career EXPL - 36
Queens Prep Acad - 35
Urban Assembly for Media Studies - 34
HS for Contemporary Art - 34
Gateway Enviornmental Research - 34
Central Park East Secondary - 34
Secondary School for Research - 33
Dreamyard Prep. School - 33
New Day Academy - 32
James Baldwin HS of Expedition - 32
Explorations Academy - 32
El Puente Academy for Peace - 32
The Felisa Rincon de Gautier Institute - 31
BX Expeditionary Learning HS - 31
School for Community Development - 30
Metro HS - 30
HS for Human Rights - 30
HS Democracy and Leadership - 30
Manhattan Theater Lab - 29
Kingsbridge Int. HS - 29
New World HS - 28
HS for Global Citizenship - 28
Service and Learning - 26
Brooklyn Generation School+A28 - 26
New Explorers - 25
Legacy School for Integrated Studies - 25
Academy of Hospitality and Tourism - 25
Academy for Enviornmental Leadership - 25
World Advocacy for Total Comm - 24
Leadership Institute - 23
Academy for Language and Techno. - 22
Pathways College Prep - 21
Urban Assembly for History and Citiz - 20
Pablo Neruda Academy for Architecture - 20
Green SCH/Academy/Enviornmental - 20
School for Community Research - 18
Peace Diversity Acad HS - 18
Victory Collegiate HS - 17
Prep/Acad Writers - 17
Rachel Carson School of Coastal Studies - 16
Life Academy High School for Film - 16
Arts & Media Prep Academy - 16
Lyons Community School - 12
Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning - 12
Gotham Professional Art Academy - 12
Brooklyn Theatre Arts HS - 12
Int. Community HS - 11
Agnes Y. Humphrey School for Lead. - 9
It Takes a Village Academy - 8
Expeditionary Learning School - 8
Holcombe L. Rucker School - 7
Unity HS - 6
Pan American Int. HS - 5
Multicultural HS - 5
NY Post: School's Out for Summer - And 2 Bronx Kids Get Homework: Taking Care of Teacher's Pets by Carrie Melago...
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein meets with students on last day of school at Manhattan's PS 198, where kids say goodbye to teacher.
And at the Eagle School in the Bronx, Peanut Butter the guinea pig gets a hug.
Jairrod Hogan, 7, and his sister Tayari Hinton, 9, walked home from PS 140 in the Bronx yesterday carrying Henry and Peanut Butter, their new house guests.
"It's like sending your child away to summer camp," said science teacher Sharon West, who helped arrange accommodations for all of the school's animals.
Chancellor Joel Klein marked the final day of his fifth year on the job by signing report cards like a celebrity at PS 198 on the upper East Side.
"A lot of people told me I would never be here five years from when I started," Klein told the school's teachers. "But it has been the most exciting and rewarding year of the five."
Back in the Bronx, Jairrod and Tayari were reviewing a list of instructions about how to care for the classroom pets.
Peanut Butter eats spinach, lettuce and apricots but hates bananas and honeydew melon. And hermit crabs can't be trusted to stay in one place.
Henry's desire to crawl around wasn't a concern to Jairrod.
"I like to play with them," he said, promising to get Henry out for exercise "so he can get more bigger."
With Erin Einhorn
NY Times: Six of the Best and Brightest, Poised to Take the Next Step on the Long Road - Various Writers...
Ruby Washington/The New York Times
Marina Shuster is the top senior at Brooklyn Technical High School.
They are the children of immigrants, or the latest in a long line of siblings to graduate from public schools. These are the valedictorians of New York City. Some will enroll at the City University of New York, others are off to colleges in California and Texas and Maine. They are violin players, dancers, singers and student government leaders. They aspire to be engineers or writers or architects. Many are the first in their family to graduate from high school.
Whether they set out to maintain the best average or not, these are students who have spent high school bent over their textbooks, often commuting hours to get to class. In all, there are some 270 valedictorians — one for each graduating class. Some will graduate with a straight A average, while others are at the top of their classes with mostly B’s. All will be invited to a barbecue held by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion this week. And dozens attended a reception with Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, meant for students who beat the odds.
As they graduate this week, they will deliver the traditional valedictory speech. Here are portraits of a few of the city’s top students; in a system as vast as New York’s there are hundreds more like them.
A Chance to Start Over
When Fareed Mohammed arrived in Queens from Trinidad three years ago, he was told he did not have enough credits to enter the 10th grade with other students his age at John Adams High School in Ozone Park. “They said I was new to the country and I had to start over,” he said.
Fareed saw it as a challenge. “I love competition,” he said. So he attended classes whenever the school offered them, not just during the regular school day but in the evenings and on Saturdays, not quite earning credits so much as gobbling them up.
And three years later, he is not only graduating on time but as the John Adams valedictorian, with a 98 average. He narrowly edged out his main competitor, Kulwinder Kaur, thanks to three Advanced Placement courses, whose grades carry more weight.
Fareed’s father works for a moving company. His mother is a full-time baby sitter. They came to New York to give Fareed, now 18, and his sister, 16, a better life, and Fareed has every intention of getting one. He plans to study mechanical engineering at City College, then get a master’s degree in physics.
He is a shy, lanky, bright-eyed young man, whose soft voice, barely above a whisper, belies a fierce competitive streak. In his college-level Spanish course, he was the only nonnative Spanish speaker. He put his greatest effort this year into a world history course, but his strongest subject is math, and after graduation this week he is headed to Oklahoma City for the national high school mathematics championships.
On weekends, he works 12-hour days for a vendor of household goods at the Aqueduct Flea Market, saving money to pay his own tuition at City College next year. He said his parents had never pressured him about doing well in school and were not surprised to hear that he had finished first in his class.
“They were expecting it,” he said. “I was telling them all along, I wanted to be No. 1.” DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
One Last Time
Tianna Jeter calls her graduating class “the big bang” because the roughly 250 students will be the last seniors to earn their diplomas from the school — Thomas Jefferson High School in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Everything was big at Jefferson — the classes, the hallways, the lunch room. So big, in fact, that the Department of Education moved to shut the school and replace it with several smaller ones in the building. It is part of the Bloomberg administration’s overhaul of the school system.
Tianna understood the basic politics, she said, when she heard the news during her freshman year. She had heard horror stories about the school from other students — gangs running the school and threats from older students.
“It really did scare me,” she said, thinking back to her first day at Jefferson. “Nobody wants to go to school and not feel safe.”
By the end of her first week, Tianna’s fears had dissipated. Her honors classes in English, history and math had about a dozen students each. The teachers were encouraging. Nobody, she said, had even thrown a punch in the hallways.
“It was nothing like everyone said it would be,” she said.
Tianna stuck mostly to her friends in the honors classes, but met other students in the dance club and choir. By her senior year, she had friends at the smaller schools that have already opened in her building, but she maintained loyalty to Jefferson.
“The Big Bang Theory was a gigantic explosion of an atom, which is an accepted explanation to the creation of the universe,” she wrote in a letter to her fellow graduates published in the school yearbook. “Everything we have done this school year was done in a big way.”
Then Tianna signed off with this: “Just because we were not students who attended one of the specialized high schools does not mean that we were not as smart as them. We had the ability to do anything they could do or even better and guess what — WE DID!” JENNIFER MEDINA
It Pays to Start Early
Marina Shuster knew that to succeed at Brooklyn Technical High School, one of the city’s most elite public institutions, it would not hurt to be an early riser.
So Marina, 18, typically woke up at 4 a.m. to study each day, then squeezed in what she called “about three hours of normal studying into a half-hour” on her N train ride, from her home in Gravesend, Brooklyn, to the Brooklyn Tech campus in Fort Greene.
Marina named anatomy, genetics and organic chemistry among her favorite subjects in school, and plans to attend Princeton in the fall, major in molecular biology and eventually become an obstetrician. “I can’t imagine doing anything else,” she said of medicine. “I call it my high.”
She immigrated from Ukraine at 4 with her parents and grandparents, who had careers in engineering and education in their native country. In the United States, they are working their way up again, Marina said, with her mother taking jobs as a dental hygienist and her father working as a housepainter.
“We had a pretty decent life in Ukraine, but they knew that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to have a great future there,” Marina said. “My own motivation has been to show them that it was worth something.” JULIE BOSMAN
A Winner of Lotteries
When Charles Oduro was 8 and living in the New Koforidua village in Ghana, his mother told the family one day that they had won a lottery for a car. The fact that nobody in the family knew how to drive was irrelevant; the prize made Charles instantly popular with his classmates.
“It was a big status thing,” said Charles, now 17 and the valedictorian at Fordham Leadership Academy in the Bronx. “I went around telling everyone.”
But the car was only in his mother’s imagination. A few weeks later, Charles learned of the family’s real prize, won in an immigration lottery: a chance to come to the United States. His older brother and sister stayed behind, but Charles came with his mother and younger sister. They landed in New York, bouncing around in several different homes in the Bronx.
By the time Charles enrolled at the leadership academy, his older brother had become a priest in Ghana. Meanwhile, Charles, who excelled in math and science classes in middle and high school, tried to find a way to help his childhood friends back in his village. When he earned an internship at North Fork Bank last summer, he used the money to buy cows and land near the village that his friends could work on to earn more money.
“That way they could earn things on their own,” he said matter of factly.
This year, Charles focused his energies on the school’s Robotics Club, leading his team to build the winning model — in the form of a car — at the citywide competition in robotics.
“My mother was very proud of the car,” he said. “But she still can’t drive. I can’t, either, but I think I will learn after this summer.”
Charles plans to attend the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the fall. JENNIFER MEDINA
Coming Back for More
There is at least one valedictorian who is not graduating this year. To secure his diploma, Lucio Ramirez, 18, will return to Aviation High School in Queens next fall to take an economics and government class. But it is an honor, rather than a failure, to come back for a fifth year at his school.
Students who complete four years at the school receive a license from the Federal Aviation Administration to repair airplanes. Students in the top third of the class are invited for a fifth year to receive a second license, which qualifies them for working for major airlines. Many students — both after the fourth or fifth year — go on to college.
Lucio heard about the school from a few older friends in the neighborhood, who had attended and had jobs at Kennedy Airport. They told him he could do the same if he attended Aviation, he said.
In shop classes, Lucio sat at the front of his classes, often asking questions more often than anyone else, he said. At times, he felt like the only one who didn’t understand the mechanics of the planes. But the younger teachers, many of them Aviation alumni themselves, took time to explain it all and kept prodding him to work even harder.
“I was never rushing to leave this school,” he said, explaining that on most days he would not get home from classes until after dark. Lucio lives with his parents and two younger brothers in the Elmhurst section of Queens. Lucio decided to earn a second license rather than go right to college.
“Why not just do it now,” Lucio said. “There’s really no reason to wait.”
He plans to go to college after that, and eventually come back to the school as a teacher. He has already begun recruiting new students; his younger brother, Juan Carlos, will begin as a freshman there next fall. JENNIFER MEDINA
Not Telling Her Father
Victoria Chernow still won’t show her father the essay that got her into Harvard. “It’s too flowery,” she said, fingering her long blond braid. “He thinks I take after Jane Austen.”
Victoria, who maintained a 97.8 percent average at the Bronx High School of Science, often rolls her eyes when talking about her own achievements. She plans to spend her summer reading the classics and developing a firmer set of political opinions before moving to Cambridge.
“I need to figure out where I stand,” she said.
Raised in Jamaica, Queens, Victoria grew up speaking Russian with her parents, who immigrated to New York in the late 1970s. She thinks they secretly want her to go into medicine — for the summer, she is an intern at the American Museum of Natural History, studying jaguars — but she also finds herself drawn to history.
It troubles her that she hasn’t yet decided on her fall courses. A painter, salsa dancer and tennis player, she fights the impulse to “be in a continual state of preparing,” she says, shaking her head. But, she added, “I guess I’m one of those people who can never really be happy with what they’ve just achieved.” RACHEL AVIV
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Class Size Matters: Independent Parent Survey on NYC Public Schools and Their Leadership...
This is a survey written by New York City public school parents for other parents so they can express their opinions about a range of issues not covered by the official survey circulated by the Department of Education. This survey will be open to all New York City public school parents through July 15.
The survey is sponsored by Class Size Matters, a parent advocacy group, with assistance from the National Center for Schools and Communities at Fordham University. Only parents or guardians of a school age child who attended a NYC public school during the 2006-7 school year are eligible to take the survey. Please answer the questions below, based on the school your child attended during the school year that just ended in June 2007.
Your opinions are important to us. This will take only a few minutes of your time. Thanks!
NOTE TO MAC USERS: This survey works better with Firefox and the newest version of Safari.
Are you a parent or a legal guardian of at least one child who attended a New York City public school during the last school year (2006-7)? (Please click one of the answers below.)
YES, I am a parent or guardian of child currently attending a New York City public school.
NO, I am not a parent of a child attending a New York City public school.
My New Heroes - Presidential Scholars Confront the President (Various Sources)...
View video...KEITH OLBERMANN SAYS THESE GUYS ARE HIS HEROES!
View video...NBC-News...WASHINGTON -- President Bush was presented with a letter Monday signed by 50 high school seniors in the Presidential Scholars program urging a halt to "violations of the human rights" of terror suspects held by the United States.
View Video...CNN - An interview with some of the high school students who demanded the United States stop torturing.
View video...President Bush was accosted by a group of Presidential Scholars before a speech in the East Room of the White House. They presented him with a letter signed by 50 of the Scholars asking that the prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere be treated humanely.
WASHINGTON - President Bush was presented with a letter Monday signed by 50 high school seniors in the Presidential Scholars program urging a halt to "violations of the human rights" of terror suspects held by the United States.
The White House said Bush had not expected the letter but took a moment to read it and talk with a young woman who handed it to him.
"The president enjoyed a visit with the students, accepted the letter and upon reading it let the student know that the United States does not torture and that we value human rights," deputy press secretary Dana Perino said.
The students had been invited to the East Room to hear the president speak about his effort to win congressional reauthorization of his education law known as No Child Left Behind.
The handwritten letter said the students "believe we have a responsibility to voice our convictions."
"We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions, and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants," the letter said.
The designation as a Presidential Scholar is one of the nation's highest honors for graduating high school students. Each year the program selects one male and one female student from each state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Americans living abroad, 15 at-large students, and up to 20 students in the arts on the basis of outstanding scholarship, service, leadership and creativity.
"I know all of you worked hard to reach this day," Bush told the students in his education speech. "Your families are proud of your effort, and we welcome your family members here. Your teachers are proud of your effort, and we welcome your teachers. And our entire nation is proud to call you Presidential Scholar."
The scholars travel to Washington each June for seminars, lectures and workshops with government officials, elected representatives and others.
Queens Gazette: 2 District 30 Students Earn Awards BY Richard Gentilviso...
Joseph Derosa and Maria Nava, eighthgraders, at I.S. 141, and I.S. 204 respectively, were among the recipients of Scholastic Achievement Awards given to outstanding students of District 30 schools by the Community Education Council last week.
"These are students who either excelled in outstanding academic achievement or outstanding academic progress," CEC 30 member Shing Wong said at the June meeting, held at I.S. 230 in Jackson Heights.
District 30 Community Superintendent Dr. Philip Composto said the announcement by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein on May 30 that the city sill spend $80 million over five years on new battery of standardized tests beginning in September, would give the district a new periodic assessment tool that is both more advanced and will allow for what he described as "customized assessment" of student progress.
"There are no stakes attached," Composto said, in reference to the fact the new tests will not determine promotion. The new tests are however, geared to help predict how students will perform in the yearly state reading and math exams.
Produced by CTB/McGraw-Hill, which also provides the state with its standardized exams, the tests will be given to students in grades 3 through 8 in both reading and math five times during the school year, an increase from the three times per year as is currently administered.
Moreover, for the first time, high school students will be tested four times annually in reading and math as well. Plans are to expand the periodic assessment testing to include the subjects of science and social studies in a few years.
In addition to their not affecting student promotional status, the tests will not be used in decisions regarding teacher tenure or promotions, or in grading individual schools. Instead, the DOE has described the tests as a method to help identify pupils who are falling behind.
The tests are taken within a regular 45-minute class period, either online or using pencil and paper. Teachers can select from a number of questions to adapt the test to suit their own curriculum with both multiple choice or fill-in questions. Tests taken online give results that are available immediately. For traditional tests, results come back in five days.
Results from both the state ELA (English Language Arts) and math exams this year showed improvements for city students in grades 3 through 8, although Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has said too many students are still not at grade level in reading and math. Scores also do not keep up once students enter middle school.
Criticism of the new periodic testing comes from those who believe there is too much dependence on standardized tests.
"It's certainly more than any other city that I know of," Monty Neill of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing said of the five tests to be given in New York City. "We've reduced schooling to preparing for bubble tests," he said in a May 31 New York Times report.
Chancellor Klein disagrees. "I think it means more learning," he said in the same Times report.Village Voice: Schoolyard Bullies - A Policy of Cops Searching Students is in Need of a Mental Detector by Nat Hentoff...
In a recent Daily News op-ed, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly defended the NYPD's increasingly active presence in the city's public schools:
"Frustrated, perhaps, by an era of post-9/11 goodwill toward the police, some of the usual critics have come back with a vengeance recently to smear the NYPD with unfounded charges of racism and unconstitutional overreaching" (emphasis added).
"The New York Civil Liberties Union," Kelly continues, "is perhaps the worse offender, using uncorroborated student accounts to publish a specious March report, 'Criminalizing the Classroom,' about police in public schools."
I've reported on many of this city's schools and classrooms for more than 40 years, and I have never been more outraged at a systemic abuse of students and teachers than the one that the subtitle of this report understatedly describes as "The Over-Policing of New York City's Schools." I know that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has seen this report, and although we've had a number of long interviews since he took office, his refusal now to respond to my calls about this report is uncharacteristic. What is he afraid of?
One of the report's editors is NYU legal director Arthur Eisenberg, one of the country's leading constitutional litigators, known for his accuracy and tenacity. In his answer to Commissioner Kelly, Eisenberg notes that the initial research for this report shaming the city was "provoked by a number of incidents called to our attention in which police personnel engaged in abusive behavior directed at students, teachers, and school administrators."
In response, there was a nine-month survey of more than 1,000 students, along with "observation of police practices at the schools by NYCLU and ACLU staff and volunteers; as well as interviews with students, parents, teachers, school administrators. . . as well as with officials from the United Federation of Teachers."
Commissioner Kelly, in charging that the NYPD has been smeared, omits the plain fact that in the report's 35 large-size pages, there are three densely packed, single-spaced pages with scores of clearly documented sources, including citations of press stories. (There are also 144 footnotes, many with further information.)
You can judge who's smearing whom by reading the full "Criminalizing the Classroom" report on the NYCLU website at www.nyclu.org.
One of the many stories in the report concerns Wadleigh, a Manhattan public high school, where "every student, in order to enter the building [as at other schools], was required to walk through the metal detectors [and be searched]."
Over an eight-month period last year, police confiscated more than 17,000 items at numerous schools, but only a tiny number could be considered weapons, and none were firearms. The vast majority "were cell phones, iPods, food, school supplies." A young girl with a pacemaker at Wadleigh said that she needed her cell phone in case of a medical emergency, but the phone was seized nonetheless.
The NYCLU interviewed students and school staff members who said that when some of the cursing officers ("Get the fuck back in line!") were asked by a school counselor not to speak to students like that, an officer answered: "I can do and say whatever I want." Then the officer, along with her colleagues, continued screaming at the students.
Similar professional behavior by Ray Kelly's searchers reportedly took place at other schools and was committed not only by police, but also by a much larger contingent of School Safety Agents. These SSAs are employed and trained (using the term loosely) by the NYPD's School Safety Division. The swashbuckling SSAs are unarmed, but they have the power of arrest. Since they are not employees of the Department of Education, the SSAs often cannot be controlled by school administrators.
During a search at the Community School for Social Justice in the Bronx, "in a clear violation of the Chancellor's Regulations, female students were searched by male officers. . . . After forcing one child to squat, a male officer repeatedly traced his hand-held metal detector up her inner thigh until it beeped on the button of her jeans."
Leah Wiseman Fink, an English teacher at CSSJ, is quoted in the report as having been told by NYPD officers, as she was taking photographs at the metal-detectors scene, that she was banned from doing so and, she adds, a Department of Education official, Harmon Unger, also confiscated her film.
"If I were treating kids like criminals," said the teacher, "then I would do it in secret as well."
At Wadleigh High School, Carlos Rodriguez, an eleventh-grader and president of the School Government Association, was among several students hauled into the 28th Police Precinct. Carlos works 30 to 40 hours a week after school and needs a cell phone to tell his mother where he is. Seeing cell phones being confiscated, he stood outside the school to call his mother to come and take the cell phone, and she agreed.
While waiting, Carlos was asked for identification by a police officer, who was told by Carlos that his mother was just up the block, coming for his cell phone. The report describes the police response:
"Officers handcuffed Carlos, seized his cell phone, forced him into a police vehicle, and took him to the precinct without informing school officials or his mother. At the precinct, Carlos was ordered to remove his belt and shoelaces and was forced into a cell."
His mother, frantically searching for her child, finally arrived at the precinct. "Carlos was released only after his mother had finally left the precinct. Upon his release, officers issued him a summons, threatening that if he did not appear in court, a warrant would be issued for his arrest."
The charges were ultimately dropped.
"The burden [of this over-policing]," says the report, "falls primarily on schools with permanent metal detectors, which are. . . attended by disproportionately poor, Black and Latino students [who] are more often confronted by police personnel in school for 'non-criminal' incidents than their peers city-wide."
Says Carlos: "I've never had problems with the cops until they put me in handcuffs. Now I hate them."
To be continued, with instructions to Klein, Kelly and presidential aspirant Michael Bloomberg on how to combine school safety with elementary justice under the Bill of Rights, which these high-level corrections officers seem not to have read recently.WNYC - News - Policing the New York City Public Schools by Beth Fertig...
Audio report...
NEW YORK, NY June 27, 2007 —Whether entering an office building, or going to the airport, a brush with security guards and metal detectors is increasingly becoming inevitable. But heightened security is also a fact of life for New York City public school students. How that security is administered has come under scrutiny this year. WNYC’s Beth Fertig has more.
REPORTER: On October 13th of last Fall, 15 year old Sky Lopez arrived at Middle School 224 in the Bronx late from a doctor’s appointment. She headed upstairs and was surprised to find the hallway filled with students and safety agents.
SKY: Everybody was going crazy in the hallways like it was a riot, something like that.
REPORTER: Sky says she kept on walking to class, but a female security agent told her to move faster.
SKY: So she kept on telling me to go to class and I’m like ‘I’m going.’ So then that’s when she went to grab me and I was like ‘Don’t touch me’ so I kept on moving back. And so me and her were just saying stuff back and forth so that’s when she grabbed me but she grabbed my hair. Then that’s when I hit her back.
REPORTER: Sky admits to hitting the security agent in the face. They started to fight.
SKY: She was hitting me back. Like physically hitting me back, she was punching me, she had me by my hair, she didn’t want to let go of my hair.
Some other staffers broke up the fight. Sky was handcuffed and taken to a classroom. But that didn’t stop the confrontation.
MAR: This is basically about 10 minutes after the incident originally started
REPORTER: Nelson Mar is Sky’s lawyer. We’re watching a video tape he obtained from the school, showing the safety agent in the hallway right after the fight broke out.
MAR: She actually enters the room now where my client was being kept while they’re figuring out what’s going to happen at this point.
REPORTER: Mar says this violates procedures stating agents and perpetrators should be separated after an incident.
MAR: And so she’s in there for close to 10 seconds now. And the school safety agents are actually pushing the client back in, and the school safety agent that was involved in the incident with my client just stuck her head back in and obviously said some words.
REPORTER: This apparent misconduct by the safety agent led a hearing officer to overturn Sky Lopez’s suspension. Assault charges against her were also dropped in family court. Mar has been representing young people for about eight years at Bronx Legal Services. He says this case isn’t so unusual.
MAR: There’s been far more incidents involving school safety agents either getting physical or getting aggressive with students.
Mar isn’t the only one who’s come to that conclusion. Donna Lieberman is executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which released a report this year titled “Criminalizing the Classroom.” Teachers and principals were surveyed and so were a thousand students. Lieberman says more than half of the students reported feeling uncomfortable in their interactions with officers and safety agents.
LIEBERMAN: There’s an incredible over policing of the schools. And at the same time there’s no accountability. There’s no evaluation and review. And the public has no clue what’s going on.
REPORTER: It IS hard to quantify the nature of these complaints. The police department – which is in charge of school safety – has yet to respond to a request WNYC made in February asking for the number of complaints involving officers and safety agents assigned to the schools. The Police Department also wouldn’t respond to a request for an interview.
The policing of schools has changed over the past year. Teams of officers and safety agents with metal detectors are now sent to high schools and middle schools on a random basis.
SAFETY AGENT: Take your belts off ladies
REPORTER: Previously, metal detectors were only used at certain high schools, such as Thomas Jefferson in Brooklyn, where kids got used to the routine. But with the introduction of random metal detectors last year, Lieberman - of the civil liberties union - says students are often caught off guard.
LIEBERMAN: We heard about one case where the kid told us that he was arrested for insubordination, I think it turned out to be disorderly conduct. And what was he doing? He was waiting outside school for his mom to pick up his cell phone. We heard reports repeatedly of school safety agents deciding that you can’t bring food into school. You can’t bring your breakfast in, you can’t bring your lunch in, and what do they do? Well, they confiscate it.
REPORTER: Some students have protested these policies. At the Community School for Social Justice, in the Bronx, a few kids decided NOT to walk through the metal detectors that showed up one day in the middle of March. Senior Louis Zabala was among those who refused to be scanned.
LOUIS: I was told that I would be suspended, and I asked them how long the suspension would be and they said they don’t know that would be up to the administration.
REPORTER: Students who refuse to go through scanners CAN be suspended. Since the random metal detectors were introduced last spring, more than 19-thousand cell phones were confiscated through the end of April - as well as 67-hundred Ipods and other electronics. 253 weapons and dangerous instruments were also seized – less than 1 percent of the total. The civil liberties union says this shows random metal detectors are unwarranted. But Schools Chancellor Joel Klein disagrees.
KLEIN: Two hundred-fifty weapons is a lot of weapons. Knives, boxcutters, things that people are bringing to school for at least as far as I’m concerned, no possible good reason. And as far as the Ipods, you don’t want them confiscated leave them at home.
REPORTER: Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has said another 23 guns were seized this school year – though not at the metal detectors. Weapons are often hidden outside of schools to avoid the scanners.
The use of random metal detectors is part of a wider crackdown on school security that began in 2004, when the city flooded the most dangerous schools with police. Crime went down afterwards. But the number of serious incidents rose last fall. And the teachers union has verified more reports this year of assaults, robberies, injuries and physical harassment. That’s why safety agents say the dangers are real.
FLOYD: My members were being injured by the students, not harassed, injured. Physically assaulted.
REPORTER: Gregory Floyd is president of local 237 of the Teamsters union, which represents the 42-hundred safety agents. He says gang activity is up. He’s dubious about the complaints against his members.
FLOYD: Prior to the mayor implementing his program you didn’t hear a complaint from the ACLU. The reason you didn’t hear a complaint is because kids weren’t complaining because they were running the schools! They’re not running the schools anymore so now they complain.
REPORTER: Floyd claims the civil liberties union is encouraging students to complain to further its own agenda: the opposition of random metal detectors. HHe says they’re no different than what passengers expect at airports. And he says safety agents are professionals who are given 14 weeks of training by the police department. But he acknowledges there is some room for improvement. The top salary for safety agents is 30 thousand dollars a year.
FLOYD: It’s difficult for school safety to have continuity because you have – I have to tell you in 5 yrs you have a 50% turnover. So with that kind of turnover how can you have consistency in school safety?
REPORTER: With a revolving door of safety agents and the natural tensions involved in supervising adolescents, clashes may be inevitable. A group called the Urban Youth Collaborative has been calling for more conflict resolution training, as well as meetings between agents and students. Sixteen year old Shantel Peterkin is a sophomore at the Bronx Guild school. The school made headlines a few years ago when its former principal was arrested during a confrontation with school safety.
SHANTEL: They talk to us like we’re criminals, they be like “oh I’m going to take you down.” And it’s ridiculous. Talk to me like I’m a child, the child that my mother raised me to be. Don’t talk to me like I’m some thug off the street. So I think they need to learn how to be, like, kind of friendly but at the same time have the students know they have authority and we need to listen to them.
REPORTER: The Education Department says it’s listening. Last fall, it started a 15 hour training course on “crisis intervention strategies to promote positive student behavior.” But the class is only for school staffers. The safety agents are under the Police Department’s jurisdiction – and they get just half a day of training in conflict resolution by school officials. For WNYC I’m Beth Fertig.
The Brooklyn Paper: Pipeline Update By Gersh Kuntzman...
Related story:
Council-members Vince Gentile, Domenic Recchia and Joseph Addabbo (standing) looked over a map of the Buckeye Pipeline, which carries jet fuel from Linden, New Jersey to JFK. Lawmakers are concerned because the line — cited as a terror target — runs through residential neighborhoods. Seated at right is Buckeye’s “right-of-way” agent, Colleen Ford. Buckeye says its pipeline, built decades ago, has functioned without incident, and is safe.
©2007 The Brooklyn Paper
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
NY Times: Prepare for the SAT Test, or Play With Your iPod? Have It Both Ways by Maria Aspan...
High school students cramming for the SAT test have traditionally relied on thick books full of practice exams, sharpened No. 2 pencils and intensive tutoring sessions. But now a traditional test preparation company is offering some options for the iPod generation. 
Studying for the SAT test, with an iPod download that offers practice quizzes.
Three interactive programs from Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions are for sale at iTunes for downloading to iPods with video screens. The programs were released last week, giving vacationing students plenty of time for practice quizzes before the next test date in October.
The three programs, in critical reading, mathematics and writing, correspond to the three graded sections of the exam. The programs cost $4.99 each and are available in the iPod games section of the iTunes store alongside slightly more entertaining, if less educational, options like Tetris, Pac-Man and Lost: The Game.
“Learning styles have changed a lot since Stanley Kaplan founded Kaplan in 1938,” said Kristen Campbell, the national director of SAT and ACT programs for Kaplan. “Students take their iPods with them all the time, whether they’re in a car driving to baseball practice, or at home, or sitting at school waiting for their parents to come and pick them up.”
The programs include about 1,000 practice questions and hints and strategy sessions on subjects like “Top 10 Test-Taking Tips” and “SAT Math Basics.” They can be used only after being downloaded to an iPod, not in iTunes. The company also recently introduced a MySpace page (www.myspace.com/kaplan) and a series of vocabulary-building manga, or graphic novels.
But Ms. Campbell does not expect high school students to entirely forsake their books and tutors in favor of playing with their iPods on the beach or taking digital quizzes during coffee breaks on the summer job.
The iTunes downloads are “a great supplemental product,” she said, adding that Kaplan recommends that students continue to use traditional classroom and tutoring preparation. “Keep in mind that the SAT is a pencil-and-paper-based test,” she said.
washingtonpost.com: Ex-Aides Break With Bush on 'No Child' - Conservatives Giving Vent to Doubts; Support for Opt-Out Proposals Grows by Amit R. Pale
President Bush urged lawmakers yesterday to renew No Child Left Behind, his landmark education initiative, but one of his biggest political liabilities in achieving that goal comes from an unlikely source: his former aides.
Five years after they helped craft and implement the initiative, senior administration officials from Bush's first term are speaking out against the law with increasing boldness. The shift, combined with mounting criticism from both the political right and left in Congress, is causing supporters of the law to worry that it might not win renewal this year.
Speaking in the East Room of the White House yesterday, Bush repeated his plea for speedy passage of the law. "The No Child Left Behind Act is working, and Congress needs to reauthorize this good piece of legislation," he said.
Bush might have expected that Eugene W. Hickok, a relative of the legendary frontier lawman Wild Bill Hickok and the original sheriff of No Child Left Behind, would support his drive for renewal. As the No. 2 Education Department official in Bush's first term, Hickok wrangled states and schools into compliance with the law so forcefully that foes called him "Wild Gene."
But Hickok, who is now urging Congress to revamp the initiative, said in a recent interview that he always harbored serious doubts about the federal government's expanding reach into the classroom.
"I had these second thoughts in the back of my mind the whole time," said Hickok, a former deputy education secretary. "I believe it was a necessary step at the time, but now that it has been in place for a while, it's important to step back and see if there are other ways to solve the problem."
The rift among Bush's advisers mirrors a GOP intraparty struggle that erupted in March when 57 Republican lawmakers -- including Sen. Mel Martinez (Fla.), a former Bush housing secretary -- signed onto bills that would allow states to opt out of key No Child Left Behind mandates. The legislation, which the White House has criticized, draws on a proposal Bush himself made in early 2001 but quickly dropped.
Many Republicans contend that the administration's criticism of an idea it once proposed shows the White House has strayed too far from conservative principles. Conservatives, some of whom supported the law only out of fealty to Bush, feel freer to speak out against No Child Left Behind now that the president's popularity has sagged and many parents and educators have complained about what they call onerous federal mandates.
In his comments yesterday, Bush said the law has been a success, citing a recent study by the nonprofit Center on Education Policy, which found that the nation's students have performed significantly better on state reading and math tests since the measure went into effect. He also trumpeted some of the conservative education policies that his administration has pursued: creating a private school voucher program in the District; subsidizing private tutoring for public school students; and promoting public charter schools.
"When schools fail to make progress, No Child Left Behind needs to give parents different options," Bush said. "In other words, you cannot tolerate a system where a child is stuck in a school which will not teach and will not change."
Some conservatives were leery of the largest expansion of the federal role in education in a generation, but most wanted to support Bush in his first year, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"The president said, 'Jump!' and you said, 'How high?' " said a former senior education official who described the law as fundamentally flawed. Like most of the dozen former officials interviewed for this article, he spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve his relationship with the administration.
Many Republican lawmakers supported the Bush education plan because it proposed publicly funded vouchers for students to attend private schools. The original Bush plan also promised, "States and school districts will be granted unprecedented flexibility by this proposal."
But Bush dropped those ideas in negotiations with lawmakers, and the measure passed both houses of Congress in 2001 with overwhelming bipartisan support. Then-Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige and his lieutenants began to set the law in motion. Hickok and his colleagues said they supported the law at the time, despite misgivings, in part because it focused unprecedented attention on public education and achievement gaps between privileged and disadvantaged students.
But former officials said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, the top White House education adviser in Bush's first term, stymied efforts by top department officials to grant states more control over how they carried out the law. "Margaret wasn't very interested in flexibility," Hickok said.
Spellings and Paige declined to be interviewed.
Yesterday, Bush rejected the criticism that No Child Left Behind is an inflexible federal intrusion. "Quite the opposite," he said. "The federal government has said: 'We believe in local control of schools. You reform them. You fix them. We're just going to insist you measure in return for the billions we spend on your behalf.' "
Former officials say the Education Department is not fighting hard enough for private school vouchers. "It will literally determine whether some kids have a future or not," said Gerald A. Reynolds, assistant education secretary for civil rights from 2001 to 2003 and now chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Katherine McLane, a department spokeswoman, said Spellings is pushing for private school vouchers to be included in the renewal of No Child Left Behind.
Conservatives were also disappointed that a provision of the law allowing companies to receive federal funds to tutor disadvantaged students was not widely used. "We certainly had hoped for more opportunities that parents would have for choice," said Ronald Tomalis, a former assistant education secretary.
Some former senior department officials said they have a strained relationship with Spellings over first-term disputes and her second-term agenda. That friction might hinder her efforts to gain support from key education groups and lawmakers for renewal of No Child Left Behind, several senior officials said. Many of those groups and lawmakers have close ties to top officials from Bush's first term.
The legislation Republican critics introduced in March is drawing support from several former department officials, including Hickok and Brian W. Jones, the department's general counsel from 2001 to 2004, who said he endorses the concept.
"There has been disappointment among conservatives like me," Jones said. "Those of us who consider ourselves federalists believe that at some point, the federal government needs to step back and vest states and local authorities with the power to get to the original goals of No Child Left Behind."
Staff writer Michael A. Fletcher contributed to this report.
Chicago Tribune: Court Limits Student Free-Speech Rights by Pete Yost...
A high school student's "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner got slapped down by the Supreme Court in a decision Monday that restricts student speech rights when the message seems to advocate illegal drug use.
The court ruled 5-4 in the case of Joseph Frederick, who unfurled his handiwork at a school-sanctioned event in 2002, triggering his suspension and leading to a lengthy court battle.
The court ruled 5-4 in the case of Joseph Frederick, who unfurled his handiwork at a school-sanctioned event in 2002, triggering his suspension and leading to a lengthy court battle.
Video
In a concurrence, Justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy said the court's opinion "goes no further" than speech interpreted as dealing with illegal drug use.
"It provides no support" for any restriction that goes to political or social issues, they said.
In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said the ruling "does serious violence to the First Amendment."
Students in public schools don't have the same rights as adults, but neither do they leave their constitutional protections at the schoolhouse gate, the court said in a landmark speech-rights ruling from Vietnam era.
The court has limited what students can do in subsequent cases, saying they may not be disruptive or lewd or interfere with a school's basic educational mission.
Frederick said his banner was a nonsensical message that he first saw on a snowboard. He intended it to proclaim his right to say anything at all.
Frederick displayed his handiwork on a winter morning as the Olympic torch made its way through Juneau, Alaska, en route to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
School principal Deborah Morse said the phrase was a pro-drug message. Frederick denied that he was advocating for drug use and brought a federal civil rights lawsuit.
Former independent counsel Ken Starr, whose law firm represented the school principal, called it a narrow ruling that "should not be read more broadly."
Taking issue with that, Steven R. Shapiro, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "It is difficult to know what its impact will be in other cases involving unpopular speech."
The Students for Sensible Drug Policy said it was sad that the court thought there should be a drug exception to the First Amendment.
In their concurrence Alito and Kennedy said that the decision "goes no further than to hold that a public school may restrict speech that a reasonable observer would interpret as advocating illegal drug use."
Nor does it address political or social issues such as the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalizing marijuana for medicinal use, Alito and Kennedy said, embracing language from Stevens' strong dissent.
Stevens said the First Amendment protects student speech if the message itself neither violates a permissible rule nor expressly advocates conduct that is illegal and harmful to students.
"This nonsense banner does neither," Stevens said.
Justice Stephen Breyer said the court should not have decided the First Amendment issue, but should have simply held that Frederick's claim for monetary damages because school officials have qualified immunity in carrying out their duties.
Frederick, now 23, said he later had to drop out of college after his father lost his job. The elder Frederick, who worked for the company that insures the Juneau schools, was fired in connection with his son's legal fight, the son said. A jury recently awarded Frank Frederick $200,000 in a lawsuit he filed over his firing.
Joseph Frederick, who has been teaching and studying in China, pleaded guilty in 2004 to a misdemeanor charge of selling marijuana at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, according to court records.
The case is Morse v. Frederick, 06-278.
Courier-Life: Region 8 Superintendent to Exit - Marcia Lyles Accepts Post as New Deputy Chancellor for Teaching & Learning by Michèle De Meglia...
A top Brooklyn educrat is moving up. On July 1, Marcia Lyles will vacate her post as the regional superintendent of Region 8 to become the city Department of Education’s (DOE) new deputy chancellor for teaching and learning.
She will replace Andrés Alonso, who was appointed to the position after Carmen Fariña, also a Region 8 veteran, retired. Alonso will become chief executive officer of the Baltimore public school system.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg called Lyles “an outstanding choice” for deputy chancellor.
An educator with 30 years experience, Lyles started out as an English teacher at Curtis High School on Staten Island, later became an assistant principal at Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush and, eventually, principal at Paul Robeson High School in Crown Heights.
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As the head of Region 8, she supervises schools in Districts 13, 14, 15 and 16, which span Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Red Hook, Park Slope, Sunset Park, and Bedford-Stuyvesant.
“Marcia is an extraordinary leader and educator,” said schools Chancellor Joel Klein. “I have great confidence in her ability to serve our students, teachers and principals in her new capacity.”
“I am excited and honored to take on this new challenge,” Lyles said. “We have seen tremendous progress under the Children First reforms. I look forward to working with my colleagues to build on these gains as we seek to provide the education that every student needs and deserves.”
Lyles was in charge when a middle school fiasco rocked District 15 two years ago.
It was then that more than 500 students were left without schools after the DOE attempted to place fifth-graders by looking at their top three middle school choices.
The problem was that most students applied for the same seats in a handful of popular schools – Upper Carroll School, Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies, New Voices School for Academic and Creative Arts, Sunset Park Prep, and M.S. 51.
At the time, Klein blamed the DOE for the situation saying, “We screwed up.”
After a second application process placed the remaining students, District 15’s Community Education Council (CEC) and Lyles began an outreach campaign to introduce parents to less coveted and often overlooked area middle schools.
The CEC held events where middle school principals were allowed to promote their schools and Lyles addressed parents.
With parents now considering other middle schools in District 15, the application process has been running fairly smoothly.
NY Daily News: Young & Restless - Follow the 13-year Journey of 23 Harlem Kindergartners by Erin Einhorn and Carrie Melago...
They all started in the same kindergarten class at Harlem's P.S. 36 but have taken different paths in 13 years of navigating the New York City schools. Here's a look at where they've been and where they are now. (Five out of the 23 students declined to be interviewed or could not be located.)
Top Row (From l.): 1. Ronald Rodriguez * 2. Shomari Frett * 3. Donta Hawkins * 4. Phillip Alexis * 5. Khalif Sellers * 6. Jermaine Jackson * 7. Aaron Franklin
Middle Row (From l.): 8. Lance Patterson * 9. Kelvin Jones * 10. Danique Love-Billy * 11. Alexis Ann Smith * 12. Heather Miximina Ortiz * 13. Shamara Frederick * 14. Estella Ortiz * 15. Paul Lewis * 16. Kamal Ibrahim
Bottom Row (From l.): 17. Artavia Jarvis * 18. Nasheeka Spencer * 19. Morgan Hill * 20. Shenequa Kelly * 21. Unique Covington * 22. Letricia Linton * 23. Chenell Sturkes
- Day 1: Young & Restless
- Day 2: One class, many journeys
- - Day 2: Proud parents laud grads
- Day 2: Dropout finds tough going
- Day 3: Parents work the system
- Day 3: Tears, memories flow at reunion
- Day 3: '...you hope they will succeed'
The year is 1994, and the kids gazing out at the camera for their annual class photo have just entered the New York City public schools.
As the girls smile broadly and some of the boys try to look tough, they're captured at a time in their lives when the future seems so far away.
But in the 13 years that followed, the 23 kids who had the good fortune to test into the gifted kindergarten at Harlem's Public School 36 would see their class splintered by adversity and fate.
One of the girls would grieve the murders of both her parents. One of the boys would be arrested three times and spend a week on Rikers Island. One would get involved in a gang. Another would attend a city high school so violent she'd see four knifefights in four years.
Their very personal stories illuminate a sprawling public school system where some children find ways to flourish but many become lost.
Nearly 60% of black and Latino New York City public school students don't earn a diploma after four years of high school. But somehow, most of the youngsters who donned navy blue uniforms with little red ties to pose with teacher Rhonda Harris would beat the odds.
"It's a very big struggle, very big, trying to give them a good education, trying to have them stay out of trouble," said Denise Ortiz, a mother of six whose daughter Estrella was in that class.
The Daily News spent two months tracking down the children of Room 206, finding 21 of the 23.
Eleven report they're graduating this month from New York City public schools, two from city Catholic schools and three from public schools in other cities.
Two are still enrolled and working toward diplomas, and three have drifted away from the daily grind of education, unsure if they'll find their way back.
Kelvin Jones, who dropped out last year, is one of the lost.
"Once you leave, you're going to get too used to this outside life, sleeping all day, doing what you're doing," he said. "You ain't ready to go back to school."
Mrs. Harris' class
The children of Room 206 could be from any public school.
The News chose them by chance, starting with a top Harlem high school, Frederick Douglass Academy, and asking to meet with top seniors. That led us to Kamal Ibrahim, a standout who plans to major in physics at Carnegie Mellon University. He gave us the name of Mrs. Harris, his kindergarten teacher. She led us to her 1994 class.
We found Kamal's classmates by word of mouth, public records and the Internet. Most agreed to tell their stories. Three refused.
They made different choices along the way, but all of them started in the same place: a well-regarded school carved into a rocky bluff at 123rd St. and Amsterdam Ave., across from the Grant public houses.
The year the students of Room 206 started kindergarten, budget cuts meant students were crowded together in aging classrooms.
Schools in poor neighborhoods were staffed with high numbers of uncertified teachers, and a lawsuit filed the previous year alleged that the average guidance counselor had to work with 700 kids.
These youngsters were off to a good start at PS 36, a K-2 school, but there were problems ahead.
Some of their families left town in search of better schools and safer streets. Some scraped
together pennies for Catholic school tuition. Others used fake addresses or pulled strings to navigate a public school system that's as much a tale of inequality as the city itself.
Their choices
In third grade, Jermaine Jackson enrolled at Harlem's PS 144, which was so chaotic the Board of Ed shut it down in 2001. In a crowded class there in 1997, he became distracted — and lazy, he said. He fell behind and had to repeat the third grade.
"It's not really their fault because I didn't try, either," he said.
Artavia Jarvis says she was hit by a teacher in the fourth grade at Harlem's PS 125. Her parents promptly enrolled her in parochial school, saying they'd rather remain in public housing so they could afford her tuition.
Artavia doesn't think she would have graduated from public school. "I would have continued being bad," she said.
Other kids fell off track in middle school or high school, including Morgan Hill, whose mother moved her to New Jersey in ninth grade.
"I miss New York and that's where I want to go back to, but I think this was the time that I should have gone away," she said.
But Room 206 also produced public school success stories like Unique Covington, whose grades and writing skills got her into a small, creative sixth through 12th grade school in lower Manhattan called the Institute for Collaborative Education.
Her middle school classes had 17 students, enabling her to build close relationships with teachers. In high school, instead of exams, she wrote up to 20-page research papers and presented them to panels of teachers and students.
Bound for the University of Hartford in the fall, she credits her success to great schools, an involved mother and herself.
And then there's Letricia Linton, who was 3 when she witnessed her mother's murder and 10 when her father was shot in the head by a mugger.
She was raised by a powerhouse of a grandmother who pushed her to succeed and to draw on her past for strength.
Tragedy "made me want to do more with my life because I see how short life is," she said.
Graduating Thursday from Frederick Douglass, Letricia knew she'd be successful because she had the right ingredients.
"You have to have family support," she said. "You have to have a good relationship with teachers. You have to have motivation within yourself. ...
"And you have to have hope."
Busy times
Highlights of the tumultuous years since the children of Room 206 started kindergarten:
- First day of school, Sept. 10, 1994: Kindergartners arrive at Public School 36 amid systemwide budget cuts and overcrowded classes. Mayor Rudy Giuliani had been sworn in eight months earlier, vowing to lower crime and improve education. There were nearly 1,600 homicides that year, staggering when compared with the 596 murders in 2006.
- End of kindergarten, June 1995: Schools Chancellor Ramon Cortines, a life-long educator who had served in the Clinton administration, resigns.
- First grade, October 1995: Veteran educator Rudy Crew becomes chancellor, calling it the "crown jewel" of his career.
- Fourth grade, spring 1999: City students take statewide, standards-based tests for the first time, ushering in new era in assessments. Fourth-graders had passing rate of 49.6% on math exam and 32.7% on reading exam.
- Fifth grade, December 1999: Board of Ed votes not to renew Crew's contract after he lost Giuliani's support by opposing experimental voucher program.
- Fifth grade, May 2000: Corporate lawyer Harold Levy becomes schools chancellor.
- Seventh grade, Sept. 11, 2001: World Trade Center attacks.
- Seventh grade, January 2002: Michael Bloomberg sworn in as mayor, continues Giuliani's push for mayoral control over schools. In the months to come, he eliminates central Board of Ed and disbands the 32 community school boards.
- Summer before eighth grade, June 2002: Faced with city's dismal performance on state tests, Albany turns over control of schools to mayor. Joel Klein, a lawyer who had served in the Clinton administration and U.S. Justice Department, becomes chancellor amid massive reorganization.
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NY Daily News: Color-Barred Student by Dan Mangan...
A Brooklyn mother and father got the shock of their lives when school officials informed them their brilliant 11-year-old girl was denied admission to an elite public school - solely because she's of Indian descent. "I feel bad because I would have gotten in if I was white," Nikita Rau lamented over her failed bid to attend the Mark Twain School, IS 239, in Coney Island, a magnet school for gifted students.
It turns out Mark Twain - unlike all but one other city public school - admits students according to racial quotas established in 1974 by a federal judge who ordered the school's desegregation.
Under those quotas - which originally were intended to boost minority enrollment - 60 percent of Mark Twain's student body is set aside for white students, while 40 percent is set aside for minorities.
"This country believes in racial equality, and we should not face this in America," said Nikita's dad, Dr. Anjan Rau, a Bay Ridge resident who emigrated from India in 1982. "I think it's morally wrong!
"She's American born, and she's a U.S. citizen, and [her parents] are both U.S. citizens, but that doesn't count," said Rau, who has hired a lawyer to try to overturn the decision.
"It could hurt her chances of going to Harvard, Yale or Princeton."
When Nikita recently applied to Mark Twain, she took an admission test geared toward music students and scored a 79.
In May, the Education Department sent her parents a letter that said Nikita was not accepted - even though white students who scored lower on the same test were admitted.
Officials told the Raus that because Nikita is classified as a minority, she would need to score at least 84.4 to be accepted, while white students needed to score 77 or more.
Her mom, Dr. Kanchan Rau, said that when she discussed the disparate treatment with Schools Regional Enrollment Director Paul Helfman, "he said, 'I agree with you: It's not right; it's not fair - but there's nothing I can do.' "
Kanchan Rau said Nikita reacted with "surprise and shock" after being told her skin color was keeping her out of the school.
Education Department spokesman Andrew Jacob said, "Although we strive to make our enrollment process as equitable as possible, we must comply with the federal court order."
The school system has only one other school, IS 227 in Queens, that operates under a court-mandated desegregation order that takes an applicant's race into account for admissions.
The Raus' lawyer, Rosemarie Arnold, last week wrote school officials, urging them to reconsider their rejection of Nikita, calling Mark Twain's quota system "antiquated," and saying, "The unconstitutional rejection of my client constitutes discrimination."
She noted that the U.S. Supreme Court currently is considering a case that could end racial quotas in schools nationwide, including Mark Twain.
Shortly after The Post began inquiring, the Raus said, they were called by a school official who told them Nikita could attend IS 98, the Bay Academy, another Coney Island school for the gifted, albeit one less competitive than Mark Twain.
Truthout.org: Bush Flips Off Spotted Owls by Kelpie Wilson...
How important are owls in the scheme of things? How important are forests? What do most Americans know about forests?
Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor. Trained as a mechanical engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection activist, then returned to engineering as a technical writer for the solar power industry. She is the author of Primal Tears, an eco-thriller about a hybrid human-bonobo girl. Greg Bear, author of Darwin's Radio, says: "Primal Tears is primal storytelling, thoughtful and passionate. Kelpie Wilson wonderfully expands our definitions of human and family."
The answer to the last question is that most Americans think that the majority of forests are managed by the Forest Service or the Park Service. Most Americans also think that those forests are protected from logging.
Both answers are wrong. About 60 percent of the nation's forests are privately owned, and only a small percentage of forests on public land are protected from logging. In the Pacific Northwest, only about 15 percent of the original, native old-growth forest remains. Many people remember the battles over the last of big trees that took place in the 1980s and 90s, and assume that the treehuggers won and the old-growth forests are protected. They would be wrong about that too.
In 1993, a few months after Bill Clinton took office, he initiated the Northwest Forest Plan. That plan settled a lawsuit over the northern spotted owl by setting aside habitat for the owl. But it did not protect all of the remaining old-growth trees and it did not protect anything permanently. It was an administrative solution, vulnerable to the kind of underhanded, undermining tactics so typical of the Bush administration.
A few years ago, replicating a now widely used tactic, a group of timber companies sued the federal government over the spotted owl. Shedding crocodile tears of concern for the owl, whose numbers continue to decline, they claimed that the Northwest Forest Plan was at fault and that the US Fish and Wildlife Service needed to come up with a new species recovery plan. The result of that suit was a new critical habitat proposal, released on June 12, which actually reduces protected owl habitat by 23 percent - about 1.6 million acres.
The best owl habitat is forest with the biggest, oldest, most valuable trees. Could it be a coincidence that a Bush administration owl-recovery plan ends up making more trees available to timber companies?
I spoke with Dominick DellaSala, a scientist with the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy, who served on the Fish and Wildlife Service's owl-recovery plan committee. DellaSala testified to the House Natural Resources Committee at a May 9 hearing on "Endangered Species Implementation: Science or Politics?" about political interference in the recovery plan committee's work.
To start with, a committee that works on an endangered-species recovery plan is usually composed of scientific experts on that species, he said. In this case, only three out of the twelve committee members were biologists, and only one of those, a timber industry scientist, was a recognized owl expert.
Even so, the committee recommended a recovery strategy for the owl based on the Northwest Forest Plan, recognizing that the NWFP was itself based on the results of years of study showing that the owls' No. 1 need is for untouched old-growth forests. To make up for its deficiency in scientific expertise, the committee asked the US Fish and Wildlife Service to provide a structure for scientific peer review of their findings. Their request was denied. Instead of peer review, they got a political hack job.
Soon after submitting their recommendations, the owl-recovery committee was told that their plan would be scrutinized by a "Washington DC Oversight Committee," consisting of high-ranking officials from the departments of Agriculture and Interior. One of the members of this oversight committee was Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Julie McDonald.
McDonald quit under fire on April 30, just before the House Resources Committee oversight hearing. An Interior Department Inspector General report had accused her of manipulating data on endangered species to produce results that would be more convenient for developers, miners, ranchers and loggers.
Once the DC oversight committee got involved in the spotted owl plan, scientific principles became a lost cause. The first thing that happened, according to DellaSala, was an instruction to "flip and switch" the presentation of threats to the spotted owl. Instead of emphasizing the need to protect the owl's habitat, the recovery plan was to emphasize the threat of competition from an invasive species, the barred owl.
The barred owl is a recent transplant from the East Coast that is out-competing spotted owls in some areas. These interlopers are clearly a threat to spotted owls; the solution is not to reduce the protected habitat, but rather to increase it. Doug Heiken of the conservation group Oregon Wild put it this way: "If the in-laws move in with you, you don't make the house smaller; you make it bigger."
As DellaSala describes it, the process went from bad to worse with repeated memos coming down from DC, instructing the recovery committee to produce an alternative "less focused on habitat preservation," and above all, to sever all connections between the new recovery plan and the current recovery plan in place, which is the Northwest Forest Plan.
Ever since Bush took office, the timber industry has had its guns out for the Northwest Forest Plan. Their strategy is to take their new owl recovery plan and substitute it for the Northwest Forest Plan in major forest plan revisions coming up for both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. They are using the poor owl itself as the key to open the door to new old-growth timber sales.
It is time for Congress to step into this situation. Through the House Resources Committee hearings, Congress members have been made aware that the US Fish and Wildlife Service's new owl recovery plan is really an owl endangerment plan.
If the owl does survive, it will be because what little remains of its habitat has been preserved. Owls and forests are important for our well-being in many ways, but there is a new concern that Congress must consider now and that is global warming. Globally, deforestation accounts for around 25 percent of all carbon emissions. That's more than the entire transportation sector.
Keeping an old-growth forest intact is like keeping coal and oil in the ground. Protecting native, unlogged forests is an urgent but almost completely neglected solution to global warming.
The Democratic Congress has so far failed to either end the war in Iraq or come up with an effective legislative package to tackle the energy crisis and global warming. Maybe the Democrats should give protecting the last ancient forest of the Pacific Northwest a try.
The Democrats badly need a victory right now, and so do the owls.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is accepting your comments until August 24 at NSOplan@fws.gov.
Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor. Trained as a mechanical engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection activist, then returned to engineering as a technical writer for the solar power industry. She is the author of Primal Tears, an eco-thriller about a hybrid human-bonobo girl. Greg Bear, author of Darwin's Radio, says: "Primal Tears is primal storytelling, thoughtful and passionate. Kelpie Wilson wonderfully expands our definitions of human and family."
NY Post: New Yorkers Say Yes To 'Congestion' Question: Poll by Fredric U. Dicker...
A poll yesterday showed that an overwhelming number of New Yorkers familiar with the benefits of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion-pricing plan support it.
The survey, conducted for a pro-plan group by Penn, Schoen & Berland, found 41 percent of residents of the city and the suburbs backed the plan when first asked, compared to just 13 percent opposed. Forty-six percent said they didn't know enough to form an opinion.
When those polled were told of potential plan benefits, such as ending gridlock and reducing pollution-related health problems, support for the proposal jumped to 81 percent, according to the Campaign for New York's Future, which funded the survey.
Meanwhile, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) told WROW-AM in Albany that the Legislature probably wouldn't approve Bloomberg's proposal before the Legislature's scheduled summer recess next week.
"I think it is unlikely we can take action," said Silver, who has repeatedly questioned the effectiveness of the plan.
Campaign for New York's Future spokesman Michael O'Loughlin said the poll showed that the more New Yorkers learn of Bloomberg's plan, "the more they like it."
However, in a separate statement, the polling firm noted that after being told that the plan would impose an $8 "congestion fee" on cars entering Manhattan below 86th Street during working hours, New Yorkers split 46 percent in favor and 46 percent opposed.
Bloomberg told WROW that he would urge Gov. Spitzer to call a special legislative session if the Legislature doesn't act on its own to approve his plan.
He repeated his contention that some $500 million in special federal transportation funds would be lost if the plan isn't approved.
Queens Courier: Queens Benefits from City Budget by Pete Davis...
One week after Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn shook hands after agreeing on a $59 billion city budget, the specifics about how Queens is going to benefit from the budget are still emerging.
However, one important area where Queens residents will see a benefit is the influx of funding to cultural institutions allocated to meet the institutions’ new needs.
Six Queens institutions realized a total of $519,000 led by the Jamaica Arts and Learning Center receiving $125,000 and Queens Theatre in the Park $120,000 to go toward new initiatives and demands. In addition, Flushing Town Hall received $90,000; Queens Museum of Art received $74,000; P.S. 1/Contemporary Art Center $60,000 and the Queens Botanical Gardens $50,000.
City Councilmember Joseph Addabbo, who represents communities in south Queens, also believes that funding to help other cultural institutions - particularly Queens libraries - was one of the most important parts of the budget.
“I love the fact that we did great by the libraries opening them up six days per week,” Addabbo said.
In addition to cultural institutions, Queens residents will also benefit from a number of capital improvements.
City Councilmember James Gennaro, who represents areas of north and central Queens, mentioned $1.7 million he helped garner to bring state of the art digital mammography to Queens Hospital Center.
“For the second year in a row, I was able to secure a lot of money to make a major advancement at Queens Hospital Center,” said Gennaro, referring to $2.1 million the council secured last year to purchase a state-of-the-art PT scanner.
This year also marked the first time that legislators could remember when the council made public member items, often referred to as pork, funding for local organizations.
Council members handed out nearly 1,500 different member items totaling more than $36 million to various community organizations.
Addabbo disliked the pork characterization, but he believes the philosophy is a good one.
“I think it’s just the opportunity for elected officials to allocate money precisely where it’s needed,” he said. “Sometimes the elected official knows exactly where it’s needed in the district. I have seniors, families and children benefiting by the allocation of funding to my district.”
City Councilmember David Weprin, who is the Chair of the Council’s Finance Committee and near the top of the list of Queens politicians doling out discretionary items, said he was proud to help fund nearly $140,000 toward the Bayside Senior Center, Fresh Meadows Self Help facility and Services Now for Adult Persons (SNAP).
However, one important area where Queens residents will see a benefit is the influx of funding to cultural institutions allocated to meet the institutions’ new needs.
Six Queens institutions realized a total of $519,000 led by the Jamaica Arts and Learning Center receiving $125,000 and Queens Theatre in the Park $120,000 to go toward new initiatives and demands. In addition, Flushing Town Hall received $90,000; Queens Museum of Art received $74,000; P.S. 1/Contemporary Art Center $60,000 and the Queens Botanical Gardens $50,000.
City Councilmember Joseph Addabbo, who represents communities in south Queens, also believes that funding to help other cultural institutions - particularly Queens libraries - was one of the most important parts of the budget.
“I love the fact that we did great by the libraries opening them up six days per week,” Addabbo said.
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City Councilmember James Gennaro, who represents areas of north and central Queens, mentioned $1.7 million he helped garner to bring state of the art digital mammography to Queens Hospital Center.
“For the second year in a row, I was able to secure a lot of money to make a major advancement at Queens Hospital Center,” said Gennaro, referring to $2.1 million the council secured last year to purchase a state-of-the-art PT scanner.
This year also marked the first time that legislators could remember when the council made public member items, often referred to as pork, funding for local organizations.
Council members handed out nearly 1,500 different member items totaling more than $36 million to various community organizations.
Addabbo disliked the pork characterization, but he believes the philosophy is a good one.
“I think it’s just the opportunity for elected officials to allocate money precisely where it’s needed,” he said. “Sometimes the elected official knows exactly where it’s needed in the district. I have seniors, families and children benefiting by the allocation of funding to my district.”
City Councilmember David Weprin, who is the Chair of the Council’s Finance Committee and near the top of the list of Queens politicians doling out discretionary items, said he was proud to help fund nearly $140,000 toward the Bayside Senior Center, Fresh Meadows Self Help facility and Services Now for Adult Persons (SNAP).
New York Times Blog: Baby Hawks Distinguished Ancestry Is Now Acknowledged by Sewell Chan...
Ziggy (Photo: Malcolm Pinckney)So it turns out that Ziggy, the 7-week-old baby red-tailed hawk that fell from its Seventh Avenue nest and crashed near the Ziegfeld Theater on West 55th Street last week, might be related to Pale Male — one of New York City’s most famous avian residents — after all.
Bird-loving readers will recall that Ziggy was widely believed to be a relative of Pale Male, the famous red-tailed hawk of Central Park whose nest on an opulent Fifth Avenue co-op enthralled the city in 2004. The city said that Pale Male “and his various mates” had over the years been parents to several dozen chicks who had survived and dispersed. But parks officials said it would be difficult to prove a genetic connection — and DNA tests were out of the question.
Lincoln Karim, a video engineer for the Associated Press and an animal lover, insisted that the baby hawk was “Pale Male’s grandchild,” and now city officials said they agree.
The Parks Department said in a news release this afternoon:
On June 13, Ziggy was found on the concrete streets of New York alone, pre-flight, and only able to hop and flutter. New Yorkers, including former Parks Commissioner Gordon J. Davis who created the Urban Park Rangers in 1979, quickly alerted the Parks Department of the downed fledgling. The Urban Park Rangers, the Parks Department’s force of naturalists and wildlife experts, and Bobby Horvath, a renowned wildlife rehabilitator, took the hawk into custody where under six days of watchful supervision, the baby hawk emerged from shock and strengthened its wings and flying capabilities by practicing in a flight cage.
On June 19, amid a crowd of reporters and curious passers-by, Ziggy was released at the Heckscher Ballfields in the southwest corner of Central Park. After peering at his surroundings and hopping for several minutes, Ziggy flew up into a nearby maple tree and started calling for his parents, Pale Male Jr. and Charlotte. Within 24 hours, Urban Park Rangers stationed in the area reported the loud screeching sounds of an adult red tail hawk and the appearance of Charlotte, his mother. Over the next several hours, Charlotte brought a deceased pigeon to the hungry Ziggy and Pale Male Jr. appeared soaring overhead to complete the family reunion.
Red-tailed hawks are native to New York City. Only about 25-50% of young hawks make it through the first year of life. The Parks Department urges New Yorkers to follow three simple rules when encountering wildlife in New York City: 1) Do not feed wildlife. 2) Report it. 3) Educate yourself.
“The story of Ziggy the baby hawk got a happy ending, thanks to the Urban Park Rangers, wildlife rehabilitator Bobby Horvath, and the bonds between parents and offspring in the wild kingdom,” said Adrian Benepe, commissioner of the City Department of Parks and Recreation.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Congressional Quarterly: Criminal Element Utilized in Unraveling JFK Airport Plot...
Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies may be taking on more criminal partners to fight the global war on terror after a recent international sting operation bagged four alleged conspirators.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation-New York Police Department Joint Terrorism Task Force says it will continue employing cooperative witnesses to crack terrorism-related cases after the partnership recently exposed an alleged conspiracy to attack New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
“I think that we would be remiss if we didn’t continue to pursue that investigative tool,” said James Margolin, an FBI agent working in the New York branch. “We want to use whatever lawful means exist to investigate and prevent terrorist conspiracies.”
Recent charges brought against four Muslim men — one American, two Guyanese and one Trinidadian — stemmed from a relationship that formed in the Gertz Plaza Mall in Queens, N.Y., and extended more than 10 months to culminate in an arrest at the Lindenwood Diner in a Brooklyn neighborhood roughly three miles from their intended target.
If the charges filed against the men are accurate, the methods used to infiltrate the group, collect information and make arrests helped to prevent an attack that could have inflicted a massive number of casualties. The case also illustrates that task force methods can involve the cooperation of convicted criminals granted a green light to travel abroad and gather intelligence.
A cooperative witness — referred to as “the source” in a June 1 legal document embedded himself with the alleged conspirators, traveled to two foreign countries and was able to surreptitiously deliver tape recordings, e-mail, financial documents, surveillance reports and other records to agents working the case.
The source began working with the New York joint task force in 2004 in the hope of reducing a jail sentence and in exchange for financial assistance. However, the source did not make contact with a member of the alleged terrorist cell until mid-2006.
The source was convicted of federal drug trafficking and Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) charges in 1996 and of a separate set of drug trafficking charges in the New York Supreme Court in 2003.
The source first met Russell Defreitas, a 65-year-old naturalized American citizen from Trinidad and a retired cargo handler at JFK, on July 13, 2006, at the Gertz Plaza Mall, according to a complaint filed by the task force.
At that time Defreitas told the source he was sure they had met before at a Brooklyn mosque and roughly four days later confided to the source that he had a terrorist attack in mind that would be larger in scale than the Sept. 11 attacks.
By mid-September, the source flew to Guyana and stayed there for more than one month, learning that Defreitas’ plan involved detonating pipelines and reserve tanks that feed fuel to aircraft at JFK.
Upon returning to New York, the source and Defreitas spent Jan. 3, 4, 10, and 11 surveying and videotaping JFK to identify and document vulnerable fuel tanks and pipelines; entries and escape routes; and airport security patterns and methods. They returned to Guyana on Jan. 14 with the videotapes to show other conspirators.
During that trip to Guyana, Defreitas expressed a strong interest in colluding with a leader of the Jamaat al Muslimeen, a Trinidadian Muslin organization that has links to a 1990 coup d’état, murder, kidnapping, drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and extortion, according to the complaint.
The source and Defreitas also established first contact with Abdul Kadir, a former member of the Guyanese parliament and a former mayor of a Guyana city known as Linden who was connected to militant elements in the Middle East and South America.
Kadir expressed interest in the plan to attack JFK on Feb. 19 and termed the plot the “chicken hatchery” and the “chicken farm.” Kadir also advised the source and Defreitas to use Google Earth satellite imaging software to get more detailed pictures of the New York airport.
The sting operation nearly came unraveled nine days later.
When the two men returned to New York on Feb. 28, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at JFK engaged Defreitas in secondary questioning and photocopied his phone book, which contained contact numbers for Kadir and other alleged conspirators.
The following day Defreitas called Kadir, told him about the incident and expressed suspicion that the U.S. government was onto their plan. Almost a week later Kadir informed the source that “the folks don’t want to deal with that hatchery” because “right now it is too sensitive.”
But the plot picked up steam again in mid-April when Kadir agreed to introduce the source and Defreitas to the Jamaat al Muslimeen leader in Trinidad.
In the second week of May, the source and Defreitas returned to Guyana and presented Google Earth images of JFK as well as the surveillance video to Kadir. During the meeting Kadir asked a number of questions about the terrain. From there, the group’s logistical plans — including the type of explosives needed and techniques for detonating the pipelines and tanks — began to take shape.
On May 20, the source, Defreitas, and a third conspirator named Abdel Nur traveled to Trinidad and met Kareem Ibrahim, another of Kadir’s associate. However, only Nur was able to meet with the Jamaat al Muslimeen leader during the trip and a decision to exclude him from the plan was soon made.
Three days after landing in Trinidad, Defreitas briefed Ibrahim, Nur and the source on the plan of attack using the Google Earth images and the surveillance tape. When the presentation concluded, Ibrahim advised the others to give him the tape and the images so he could market the plan to contacts he had outside the country. The others agreed and the following day Kadir arranged to shelter funding collected from these contacts at his foundation in Linden.
The source and Defreitas returned to New York on May 26 and received a report the following day that Ibrahim had sent an emissary overseas to pitch the plan to his contacts.
On June 1, with the plan picking up momentum, the FBI and ® pounced to prevent it from going any further.
That day Defreitas was arrested in Brooklyn when he went to meet the source at the Lindenwood Diner and Kadir was arrested as he attempted to board an airplane in Trinidad bound for Venezuela. He was alleged to be heading to the neighboring country to acquire a visa for travel in Iran.
Ibrahim was arrested outside a mosque in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on June 2 and the following day Nur turned himself in to police outside the capital city.
Margolin said the next stop for the source will almost certainly be an appearance in court assuming the cases brought against the four men go forward as planned. “We can’t use the tapes unless they are authenticated, so that requires the person who made the tapes to get up on the stand,” he said. “We want to be able to use any of the recordings that he produced and even if not, some of the recordings that he has produced have already been referred to in the complaint. So even if the government did not want to put him on as a witness, the defense would likely want the opportunity and has the right to question him on the stand.”
NY Daily News: Gateway's Dirty Secret - National Park Hit by Untreated Sewage, Toxic Sediment, Trash by Karen Angel...
Alexander Brash, Northeast regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, points to floating trash in creek of Gateway National Recreation Area.
One of several sewage treatment plants drain off wastewater into the creek. A sewage treatment plant looms in background of Spring Creek.
A green heron flaps gracefully across a bright blue sky, but on the ground, the scene is far less idyllic.
Decaying car parts litter the banks of Spring Creek, while a neighboring sewage-treatment plant pumps waste into the water. Purple clots of oil float on the surface, above a long, dark strip of sludge being sucked out into Jamaica Bay.
The plant is one of four nearby that discharge about 260 million gallons of treated wastewater into the bay daily, according to the city's Department of Environmental Protection.
During heavy rains, overflow from the plants and from storm drains adds, respectively, untreated sewage and polluted runoff to the mix.
The result, according to a recent report by the National Parks Conservation Association - a nonprofit parks advocacy group - is that the waterways of the Gateway National Recreation Area "are still inundated with treated and untreated sewage, floating trash, industrial waste and toxic sediments."
Spring Creek is one of four city parks to the north of the Belt Parkway near Howard Beach, Queens. To the south is the 26,600-acre Gateway, a national park that spans Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and New Jersey's Sandy Hook Peninsula.
Gateway was designated a national park in 1972. That year, Congress authorized $92 million for the park, but the money was never appropriated. And on a tour of Gateway this month, it seemed that not enough has been done since to bring it up to the level of other national parks.
"For many regional residents who might not be able to afford to go to Yellowstone, but also for so many new citizens of our nation, Gateway may be their first national park experience," said Alexander Brash, an ecologist and the conservation association's Northeast regional director.
In 2005, Mayor Bloomberg signed a law requiring the Department of Environmental Protection to create a watershed protection plan for the bay; the plan is due in October.
The DEP has built two giant tanks to hold storm overflow; two more tanks are under construction. As for the 260 million gallons of treated sewage, "approximately 99% of all bacteria is removed before this wastewater is returned to the bay," said DEP Deputy Commissioner Anne Canty. "Only a very small fraction of that - less than 1 million gallons a day" is untreated overflow.
But the association says the tanks' capacity should be increased so there is no overflow, wastewater should be cleaned better to decrease harmful nitrogen, and rainwater should be diverted into the ground instead of the bay.
Other groups point to potential health consequences from the toxins that end up in the bay.
Dennis Suszkowski, science director of the Hudson River Foundation, which is wrapping up a nine-year study of New York Harbor, said while animal life isn't being destroyed, "the bigger concern is those contaminants can get into fish and crabs, and people will eat them" and get sick.
The association's study gave Gateway's "natural resources" - factors such as cleanliness of water and air - a 53 out of a possible 100, the lowest rating of 27 other national parks that the National Parks Conservation Association has measured. One effect of that is loss of salt marshes has accelerated to 44 acres a year from about 10 acres a year before the mid-1970s.
Scientists say the marshes - which act as filters, absorbing toxins, and provide food, protection and a breeding ground for wildlife - may disappear completely within 20 years.
To draw attention to conditions at Gateway, the association helped organize a competition to redesign the park.
Five winners were announced on June 4. The association hopes the National Park Service will incorporate their ideas into its management plan for Gateway.
NY Daily News: Devastated Kin Let Go of Heroic Dad Shot in Shop by Dorian Block, Alison Gendar and Robert F. Moore...
Five of Bolivar Cruz's seven daughters - (from l.) Madelin, Nancy, Karina, Angelina and Jallissa - spoke yesterday outside Jamaica Hospital.
Cruz (with family members) 'did right by everyone,' said Karina.
"He didn't deserve this at all," Karina Cruz, one of Bolivar Cruz's seven daughters, cried outside Jamaica Hospital after her father died. "He did right by everyone." Bolivar Cruz, 53, was working at his South Ozone Park store about 9:30 p.m. Monday when three men - one wearing a bandanna on his face and two with stockings over their heads - burst in and demanded cash.
Cruz, who moved to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic in the mid-1970s, tried to protect his daughters Jallissa, 16, and Angelina, 27, by pulling out an unlicensed .38-caliber handgun.
He didn't get off a shot.
"I see my father on the floor bleeding to death," Angelina Cruz recalled. "I heard one shot. That's it. I'm begging anyone who knows anything to come forward."
Police were sifting through several leads, but no arrests had been made as of late yesterday. One tip, a law enforcement source said, came from a chance meeting Tuesday afternoon between a teenage boy and a man he thought was a cop.
The teen said he knew the woman who drove the getaway car after Cruz was gunned down inside the Kennedy Mini Market, the source said.
Police have identified several suspects, including the potential getaway driver and shooter. The Daily News is not identifying them because neither has been arrested.
Authorities said the men who killed Cruz also had robbed 16 other Queens bodegas dating back to March 17, including one on the Van Wyck Expressway just 10 minutes before the shooting.
Another bodega on the Van Wyck, the Ozone Park Food Center at Linden Blvd., was held up at gunpoint by two young men last night, but cops said it was not part of the same pattern.
Bolivar Cruz, who has an adult son in the Dominican Republic, had been the focus of several recent family celebrations. His birthday was last week, and Father's Day plans were already in the works.
Cruz's loved ones said he had been looking forward to one day handing the store over to one of his four grandchildren.
But in the wake of his violent death, his daughters have vowed to shut the store down.
"After all we've seen?" said Madelin Cruz. "Right now, the store is our nightmare."
Times-Ledger: Rich Hill Teen Gets 24 Years in Shooting by Howard Koplowitz...
A Richmond Hill teenager who pleaded guilty to fatally shooting another teen at a South Ozone Park block party in 2005 will spend the next 24 years in a state prison after he was sentenced in Queens Supreme Court Monday, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said.
Vijai Dube, 18, of 116-10 Liberty Ave. in Richmond Hill, killed 15-year-old Harrichad Singh with a semi-automatic handgun during a summer block party on 109th Avenue in South Ozone Park back in August 2005. Singh was struck once in the head and once in the wrist.Shastra Sagar, a 14-year-old at the block party, was injured in the incident when Dube shot him in the chest. Sagar was taken to Jamaica Hospital after the shooting and was released a few hours later.
Dube was a high school sophomore at the time of the shootings. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter before Queens Supreme Court Justice Randall Eng on May 7. Eng sentenced the teen to 24 years in prison on Monday.
"While today's sentencing closes the book on the criminal prosecution, it doesn't eradicate the harm and suffering that the defendant's senseless actions inflicted on the victims and their families," Brown said in a statement. "I hope that they can take solace in knowing that justice has been done and that society will be protected from the defendant for a long time."
Brown called the shootings a "shocking example of mindless gun-related violence" when they first occurred, and charged Dube with murder and attempted murder charges before reaching a plea deal on the manslaughter charge.
Dube said at his arraignment that the two victims were looking at him and talking, which led him to believe they were planning to hurt him so he went to get a gun and went back to the party, according to The New York Times.
Dube would have faced between 25 years to life in prison if he was convicted of the murder and attempted murder charges.
Queens Local Newspapers Coverage of Bolivar Cruz Wake...
Queens Courier: Death of Bodega Owner Shocks Community by Nick Brown...
In the aftermath of tragedy, Bolivar Cruz will get his final wish. The storekeeper killed protecting his daughters when his South Ozone Park bodega was robbed last week was waked Monday, June 18 at James Romanelli-Stephen Funeral Home, but he will be buried in his native Dominican Republic. That, said his family, is exactly where Cruz would want to be.
Cruz, 53, a native of the Dominican Republic, was known throughout the community for his generosity.
"All I could say is that he was a good man," said one of Cruz's nieces, who did not want to give her name. She said her uncle would donate money to the poor and sick back in his home country, where he was to be buried Tuesday.
The James Romanelli-Stephen Funeral Home at 89-01 Rockaway Blvd. was standing-room only as family members, friends and community members paid their respects to Cruz. Scores of people stood outside the building and a Guardian Angel stood guard.
Two Hispanic men and one black man entered Cruz's store, Kennedy Mini Mart, at about 9:30 p.m. on June 11 and demanded money before one of the suspects shot Cruz twice in the face, according to police.
Cruz pulled out his own gun as he tried to protect his daughters, who were working at the store, but was not able to fire a shot. He was rushed to Jamaica Hospital, where his family took him off life support on June 13.
No suspects have yet to be charged in Cruz's murder, and thousands of dollars in reward money for anyone with information leading to convictions in the robbery have been pouring in. The Guardian Angels contributed a $5,000 reward and Hispanics Across America donated another $5,000. On top of that, the Police Department is offering $2,000.
Pictures of Cruz with his daughters and wife, Nelli Cruz, were attached to a display board near his body inside the funeral home. Loved ones wrote messages to the slain bodega owner.
"So many thoughts going through my head, wondering if I could have saved you," wrote Cruz's daughter Jalissa, who turned 16 on Monday.
A memorial outside the store was growing by the day as mourners contributed scores of candles, Father's Day balloons and messages. Fliers outlining reward money were pasted to the metal gate of the bodega, along with notes asking the community to show their support for Cruz by attending his wake.
Police said the bodega theft was part of a robbery pattern in the 103rd, 105th, 106th and 113th precincts from March 17 to May 10. Authorities released information about the pattern the day after Cruz was shot, causing nearby store owners and residents to question why the police did not tell the public about it sooner.
"When investigators determine that a series of crimes constitutes a pattern, and it is in the best interest of the investigation to make that public, they do so," said Paul Browne, the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, in a statement.
John Biordi, the owner of Biordi's Deli in South Ozone Park near Cruz's store, said the police have not done a good job in patrolling the neighborhood. He said he had rarely seen police cars since the bodega shooting. "They make you believe that they're helping you," Biordi said. "There should be more police."
He said his store was robbed two months ago in broad daylight, but the incident is not tied to the pattern, according to police.
"It's a shame what happened," he said about Cruz's murder. "You got to keep your eyes open."
Queens Chronicle: Perp Search Continues; Bodega Owner Mourned by Joseph Wendelken...
As investigators continue searching for the killers of Bolivar Cruz, the South Ozone Park bodega owner shot in the face last week, his family and friends said their final goodbyes.
On Monday, a wake was held for Cruz, the father of seven girls, just over three miles from Kennedy Mini Market on 135th Avenue, where the incident took place. Three gunmen entered the market at about 9:30 p.m. on June 11. One jumped over the counter and took $300 from the register. Cruz, who was loading the store’s refrigerators, rushed toward the commotion with his own gun but was shot before he could fire. His 24-year-old daughter, Angelina, was in the store at the time, but was not injured.
The 53-year-old died in Jamaica Hospital Medical Center two days after the shooting. Meanwhile, police posted signs around the market reminding anyone who had information about the incident that they could give anonymous tips.
Standing around a memorial in front of the store, Cruz’s friends remembered him fondly last week. “Tremendous person. Good friend. Good father. Excellent human being,” said Miguel Mercado. Mercado, who was in the market 15 minutes before the shooting, said that the store was popular because those in the neighborhood had to travel all the way to Rockaway Boulevard to get to another bodega.
Other friends and neighborhood residents recalled the 14-hour days Cruz worked to support his children. “All he did was work, work, Monday through Monday,” said Randy Placencio, who lived in the apartment above the bodega before moving to Brooklyn several months ago.
Kennedy Mini Market was one of 19 bodegas robbed in Southeast and South Queens since mid-March. On June 13, two armed men robbed the Ozone Park Food Center atthe corner of Linden Boulevard and the Van Wyck Expressway, the 18th incident. On Monday, Estevez Deli and Grocery in Springfield Gardens became the 19th location hit.
The family and friends of Cruz have asked why police officers didn’t alert bodega owners to the pattern. Others think that the police should have more of a presence in the neighborhood. “It’s too late now (to alert owners). They need some more patrol cars out here,” said a regular Kennedy Mini Mart shopper last week. The shopper added that Kennedy was such an attractive target because criminals could drive right onto the nearby Conduit to make their getaway.
Cruz, who opened the market roughly 20 years ago after emigrating from the Dominican Republic, was returned to his home country to be buried.
In the aftermath of tragedy, Bolivar Cruz will get his final wish. The storekeeper killed protecting his daughters when his South Ozone Park bodega was robbed last week was waked Monday, June 18 at James Romanelli-Stephen Funeral Home, but he will be buried in his native Dominican Republic. That, said his family, is exactly where Cruz would want to be.
“He always wanted to go home,” said daughter Jalissa, who celebrated her 17th birthday June 18 under solemn circumstances. “His mother is there, and his wish was to see her. So we’re giving him his last wish.”
Survived in the U.S. by seven daughters, common-law wife Nila Espinal, and a large extended family, Cruz’s mother and grown son, George, remained in the Dominican when Cruz emigrated in 1999. Ever since, said his daughters, he had wanted to return.
“I feel numb,” said Belkis Cruz-Seenath, 30, Bolivar’s oldest daughter. “I wish this wasn’t real.”
Most of Cruz’s family was dressed identically at the open-casket wake, in white tops and black pants. Such unity, said Cruz-Seenath, is the only way to survive the pain.
“We’re just trying to stick together as a family,” she said. “Just trying to hold up.”
“What I feel, my whole family feels,” said daughter Angelina, 24, who was in the store when the shooting occurred. “We go through it together.”
Angelina said she remembers little about the incident, other than three men running in and ordering her to get down on the floor, then hearing a shot.
“These men are not human,” she said of her father’s killers.
Cruz, along with his bodega, Kennedy Mini Market, located at 133-45 131st Street, had come to personify the sense of community in the neighborhood.
“If somebody was hungry and didn’t have money, they wouldn’t leave hungry,” said Jose Diaz, 47, a friend of the Cruz family. “Bolivar always did favors.”
“I’d go in every Sunday before church, after church, sometimes even during church,” said friend and neighbor Mike Jones, 47. “If these greedy, selfish individuals had known what kind of guy Bolivar was, they wouldn’t even have bothered robbing him.”
But the fate of the store now appears grim, as a community and family tries to pick up the pieces of a shattered life.
“As far as I know, we’re going to give up on the business,” said Cruz-Seenath, who worked in the store for four years. “After what happened, I know I, personally, don’t want any part of that.”
The wake, which ran from 1 to 9 p.m., saw friends and family file in and out all day. Some called for the men who killed Cruz to turn themselves in, while others simply mourned the loss of their loved one. Many family members, however, donned smiles, embraced each other, and laughed. The joy, said Angelina, was for the memories.
“You have to remember the good times to get through the bad times,” she said. “My father always had something to say to make someone smile. He never wanted to see someone looking too serious.”
“He did everything to protect us,” said daughter Adrianna, 9. “And the way he laughed made you want to have fun with him.”
The happy memories help, said Angelina, but they cannot erase the reality.
“It eases the pain a little,” she said, “but then you come back to the moment and realize he’s gone. I wish I could do the impossible to bring him back, but he’s gone forever.”
Cruz’s body was flown to the Dominican Tuesday, June 19, for a memorial and burial service.
Times-Ledger: Slain Bodega Owner Mourned by Hundreds by Howard Koplowitz...
Hundreds of mourners packed into an Ozone Park funeral home Monday for the wake of Bolivar Cruz, the bodega owner and father of seven girls who died last week after he was shot during a robbery at his store.
"It's very sad," said one of Cruz's daughters, Belkis Cruz Seenath. "We all came together and we prayed for him. It was our first Father's Day without him, so it was just crazy."Cruz, 53, a native of the Dominican Republic, was known throughout the community for his generosity.
"All I could say is that he was a good man," said one of Cruz's nieces, who did not want to give her name. She said her uncle would donate money to the poor and sick back in his home country, where he was to be buried Tuesday.
The James Romanelli-Stephen Funeral Home at 89-01 Rockaway Blvd. was standing-room only as family members, friends and community members paid their respects to Cruz. Scores of people stood outside the building and a Guardian Angel stood guard.
Two Hispanic men and one black man entered Cruz's store, Kennedy Mini Mart, at about 9:30 p.m. on June 11 and demanded money before one of the suspects shot Cruz twice in the face, according to police.
Cruz pulled out his own gun as he tried to protect his daughters, who were working at the store, but was not able to fire a shot. He was rushed to Jamaica Hospital, where his family took him off life support on June 13.
No suspects have yet to be charged in Cruz's murder, and thousands of dollars in reward money for anyone with information leading to convictions in the robbery have been pouring in. The Guardian Angels contributed a $5,000 reward and Hispanics Across America donated another $5,000. On top of that, the Police Department is offering $2,000.
Pictures of Cruz with his daughters and wife, Nelli Cruz, were attached to a display board near his body inside the funeral home. Loved ones wrote messages to the slain bodega owner.
"So many thoughts going through my head, wondering if I could have saved you," wrote Cruz's daughter Jalissa, who turned 16 on Monday.
A memorial outside the store was growing by the day as mourners contributed scores of candles, Father's Day balloons and messages. Fliers outlining reward money were pasted to the metal gate of the bodega, along with notes asking the community to show their support for Cruz by attending his wake.
Police said the bodega theft was part of a robbery pattern in the 103rd, 105th, 106th and 113th precincts from March 17 to May 10. Authorities released information about the pattern the day after Cruz was shot, causing nearby store owners and residents to question why the police did not tell the public about it sooner.
"When investigators determine that a series of crimes constitutes a pattern, and it is in the best interest of the investigation to make that public, they do so," said Paul Browne, the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, in a statement.
John Biordi, the owner of Biordi's Deli in South Ozone Park near Cruz's store, said the police have not done a good job in patrolling the neighborhood. He said he had rarely seen police cars since the bodega shooting. "They make you believe that they're helping you," Biordi said. "There should be more police."
He said his store was robbed two months ago in broad daylight, but the incident is not tied to the pattern, according to police.
"It's a shame what happened," he said about Cruz's murder. "You got to keep your eyes open."
Queens Chronicle: Perp Search Continues; Bodega Owner Mourned by Joseph Wendelken...
As investigators continue searching for the killers of Bolivar Cruz, the South Ozone Park bodega owner shot in the face last week, his family and friends said their final goodbyes.
On Monday, a wake was held for Cruz, the father of seven girls, just over three miles from Kennedy Mini Market on 135th Avenue, where the incident took place. Three gunmen entered the market at about 9:30 p.m. on June 11. One jumped over the counter and took $300 from the register. Cruz, who was loading the store’s refrigerators, rushed toward the commotion with his own gun but was shot before he could fire. His 24-year-old daughter, Angelina, was in the store at the time, but was not injured.
The 53-year-old died in Jamaica Hospital Medical Center two days after the shooting. Meanwhile, police posted signs around the market reminding anyone who had information about the incident that they could give anonymous tips.
Standing around a memorial in front of the store, Cruz’s friends remembered him fondly last week. “Tremendous person. Good friend. Good father. Excellent human being,” said Miguel Mercado. Mercado, who was in the market 15 minutes before the shooting, said that the store was popular because those in the neighborhood had to travel all the way to Rockaway Boulevard to get to another bodega.
Other friends and neighborhood residents recalled the 14-hour days Cruz worked to support his children. “All he did was work, work, Monday through Monday,” said Randy Placencio, who lived in the apartment above the bodega before moving to Brooklyn several months ago.
Kennedy Mini Market was one of 19 bodegas robbed in Southeast and South Queens since mid-March. On June 13, two armed men robbed the Ozone Park Food Center atthe corner of Linden Boulevard and the Van Wyck Expressway, the 18th incident. On Monday, Estevez Deli and Grocery in Springfield Gardens became the 19th location hit.
The family and friends of Cruz have asked why police officers didn’t alert bodega owners to the pattern. Others think that the police should have more of a presence in the neighborhood. “It’s too late now (to alert owners). They need some more patrol cars out here,” said a regular Kennedy Mini Mart shopper last week. The shopper added that Kennedy was such an attractive target because criminals could drive right onto the nearby Conduit to make their getaway.
Cruz, who opened the market roughly 20 years ago after emigrating from the Dominican Republic, was returned to his home country to be buried.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Education Advocates: Senate Passes Head Start Reauthorization...
The Senate passed its version of the Head Start reauthorization that the House of Representatives passed in May. The Senate bill would authorize increased funding to expand the Head Start program and would authorize $7.3 billion in fiscal year 2008, $400 million more than was provided for fiscal year 2007. In addition, the bill calls for funding to grow to $7.5 billion in fiscal 2009 and $7.9 billion in fiscal 2010. The Senate bill also would more broadly expand Head Start eligibility and would reconfigure the program to give Head Start officials a larger role.
In May, ASCD sent letters to both the Senate and the House voicing our support for Head Start reauthorization. The next step is for members of both chambers to meet in Conference Committee to agree upon a single bill.
ASCD supports this legislation because we believe that Head Start and Early Head Start programs provide for the educational, physical, emotional, and safety needs of the children involved in these programs, thus serving the whole child and families. These are the necessary components to ensure our children are prepared to succeed when they begin school -- one of ASCD’s highest priorities.
In May, ASCD sent letters to both the Senate and the House voicing our support for Head Start reauthorization. The next step is for members of both chambers to meet in Conference Committee to agree upon a single bill.
ASCD supports this legislation because we believe that Head Start and Early Head Start programs provide for the educational, physical, emotional, and safety needs of the children involved in these programs, thus serving the whole child and families. These are the necessary components to ensure our children are prepared to succeed when they begin school -- one of ASCD’s highest priorities.
Courier-Life: Canarsie HS Rallies to Save Their Principal by Michèle De Meglio...
Canarsie High School’s teachers are taking to the streets to protect their principal.
All this week, teachers are demonstrating outside of the school building to protest what they say is the city Department of Education’s (DOE) decision to remove Principal David Harris.
While a DOE spokesperson said she can’t comment on personnel matters and Harris couldn’t be reached by press time, Canarsie’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT) chapter leader said the department is letting the principal go.
“Principal Harris was recently notified by the DOE that he was being discontinued as of June 30,” explained K.S. Ahluwalia, who is also a biology teacher at Canarsie.
The news came as a shock to teachers who believe that Harris should have been given more time to turn the troubled high school around, as he has been principal for just two years.
In such a “short amount of time,” Ahluwalia said, “it’s not fair” to expect him to fix all of the school’s pre-existing problems.
Canarsie is on the city’s “impact” list, meaning it is one of the most dangerous schools in the five boroughs, and recently received a failing school designation when the state Education Department named it a School Under Registration Review (SURR).
In spite of these setbacks, the more than 60 teachers present at the first of the protests believe Harris is doing his best to improve Canarsie, which is located at 1600 Rockaway Parkway.
“We met collectively as a group and the staff voted that he’s an integral part of Canarsie,” Ahluwalia said.
“He’s made some good changes,” agreed Thea Platt-Glasser, a health education teacher. “He’s definitely improved safety. We’re infusing technology in the classroom more.”
“For the first time in a long time there’s been a principal who is actually a visible presence in the hallway. He’s receptive to students and teachers, he has an open door policy,” Ahluwalia said.
Even with the SURR designation, the state Education Department believed Harris should remain in charge, teachers say.
“We had the SURR committee come down,” Platt-Glasser said, “and they didn’t want Principal Harris to be removed. They wanted to give him a year to straighten out.”
With Harris leaving, teachers fear that additional changes are in store for Canarsie.
They wonder if DOE officials believe the school has had enough chances to improve and must now be closed and replaced with several small schools, which is what is happening at South Shore and Samuel J. Tilden high schools.
“They keep on closing these schools and turning them into little schools,” Platt-Glasser said. “We have teachers who are already transferring to other schools because of the fear that we’re not going to be open in September.”
Melody Meyer, a DOE spokesperson, said a meeting is scheduled for next week for regional administrators to discuss the future of Canarsie High School.
“We are meeting with the parents to address concerns and answer questions,”she said.
All this week, teachers are demonstrating outside of the school building to protest what they say is the city Department of Education’s (DOE) decision to remove Principal David Harris.
While a DOE spokesperson said she can’t comment on personnel matters and Harris couldn’t be reached by press time, Canarsie’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT) chapter leader said the department is letting the principal go.
“Principal Harris was recently notified by the DOE that he was being discontinued as of June 30,” explained K.S. Ahluwalia, who is also a biology teacher at Canarsie.
The news came as a shock to teachers who believe that Harris should have been given more time to turn the troubled high school around, as he has been principal for just two years.
In such a “short amount of time,” Ahluwalia said, “it’s not fair” to expect him to fix all of the school’s pre-existing problems.
Canarsie is on the city’s “impact” list, meaning it is one of the most dangerous schools in the five boroughs, and recently received a failing school designation when the state Education Department named it a School Under Registration Review (SURR).
In spite of these setbacks, the more than 60 teachers present at the first of the protests believe Harris is doing his best to improve Canarsie, which is located at 1600 Rockaway Parkway.
“We met collectively as a group and the staff voted that he’s an integral part of Canarsie,” Ahluwalia said.
“He’s made some good changes,” agreed Thea Platt-Glasser, a health education teacher. “He’s definitely improved safety. We’re infusing technology in the classroom more.”
“For the first time in a long time there’s been a principal who is actually a visible presence in the hallway. He’s receptive to students and teachers, he has an open door policy,” Ahluwalia said.
Even with the SURR designation, the state Education Department believed Harris should remain in charge, teachers say.
“We had the SURR committee come down,” Platt-Glasser said, “and they didn’t want Principal Harris to be removed. They wanted to give him a year to straighten out.”
With Harris leaving, teachers fear that additional changes are in store for Canarsie.
They wonder if DOE officials believe the school has had enough chances to improve and must now be closed and replaced with several small schools, which is what is happening at South Shore and Samuel J. Tilden high schools.
“They keep on closing these schools and turning them into little schools,” Platt-Glasser said. “We have teachers who are already transferring to other schools because of the fear that we’re not going to be open in September.”
Melody Meyer, a DOE spokesperson, said a meeting is scheduled for next week for regional administrators to discuss the future of Canarsie High School.
“We are meeting with the parents to address concerns and answer questions,”she said.
Queens Chronicle: Beloved Principal Says Goodbye by Joseph Wendelken...
The tenure of Sister Marguerite Torre, the beloved principal of Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary School, came to a bittersweet close on Wednesday afternoon, over 50 years after she started her career as an educator in South Queens. Sister Torre served as the school’s principal for the last 26 years after teaching elementary and high schoolers in Catholic schools on Long Island, in Connecticut and Queens, including at Our Lady of Grace School in Howard Beach, where her teaching career started in 1954. She also taught for six-year and three-year periods at Nativity before becoming its principal. Of the hundreds of students she worked with in the decades past, Sister Torre said: “They made my life. It’s such a joy, to be with children.” Diocese and parish leaders decided that Sister Torre will not head Divine Mercy Catholic Academy, the school that will result from the formal merger of Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary School and nearby St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr School next fall. Since the announcement in May, heartbroken alumni and parents of current Nativity students have flooded Sister Torre, a Brooklyn native, with well wishes and thanks. “She gave a lot of dedication to everyone. She knew everyone by name,” recalled Josephine Utairujimalkod, the mother of a Nativity second-grader. Other parents said that Sister Torre created an atmosphere that made them feel their children were safe when they left them at school in the mornings. “Nativity has always had a reputation for having a family environment,” said Sister Torre, noting that Sister Michael McKenna, one of her predecessors, headed the school for 65 years. Second-grader Jessica Keeney recalled that Sister Torre would hug her every morning. “She was very nice,” said Jessica, who gave Sister Torre a ceramic Precious Moments figurine as a thank you gift on Tuesday. “She made my son feel like he was the only student,” said parent Jennie Diaz, explaining that Sister Torre wrote special notes on her fifth-grader’s report cards, even when he did not receive stellar marks. Sister Torre said that she always tried to impart to her students that our purposes were to find our passions and pursue them, even if our talents lie not in the classroom. “I tried to let them realize that they are gifted, that God has given each of them so many special talents,” she said. “We all have a special work to do,” added Sister Torre, who watched with tears welling in her eyes her final graduating class receive their diplomas on Friday. In addition to the lessons she taught, she said that her students taught her unforgettable lessons about honesty and living in the moment. Sister Torre acknowledged that while she always learned from her students, much has changed since she first came to Ozone Park. The area and school once dominated by Italian-Americans now looks the United Nations, she said with a proud smile. But other changes presented challenges. Citing the movies, television and other elements of 21st century American culture that rush adulthood at children, she said: “There are no surprises anymore, and it’s a shame. They get distracted by all this nonsense.” She credits the talents and patience of her teachers and longtime administrative assistant, Mary Romanello, with helping her overcome these hurdles and remain an effective administrator. After she retires, Sister Torre hopes to complete the memoir she started in 1996. She plans to work for her brother, Yankees Manager Joe Torre’s Safe At Home Foundation, which helps domestic violence victims. She also envisions spending her time working with Hispanic Catholics and groups of Hispanic women, an urge she felt after she attended a Mass celebrated in Spanish that reminded her of her time studying in Spain and Puerto Rico decades ago. But beyond all else, Sister Torre said that she looks forward to resting. Upon hearing that, Diaz said: “She deserves it.”
Queens Chronicle: Money For Merit Program Unveiled For NYC Schools by Colin Gustafson...
Over $300 for middle-schoolers who boost their test grades; $600 for high-schoolers who pass a Regents exam; and $25 for parents who review their child’s test results and meet with a teacher to discuss it.
In one of his most controversial moves since assuming control of the New York City public school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a pilot program this week that will pay poor students up to $500 per year for posting stellar test scores.
In one of his most controversial moves since assuming control of the New York City public school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a pilot program this week that will pay poor students up to $500 per year for posting stellar test scores.
Beginning in the fall, the pilot program will offer low-income fourth- and seventh-graders from across the city cash incentives for acing statewide exams, the city Department of Education announced on Monday.
On the low end of the pay scale, fourth-graders will get up to $25 for a perfect score on each of 10 standardized tests taken throughout the academic year, as well as $5 just for showing up for the exam. On the high end, seventh-graders can earn as much as $50 per test — totaling up to $500 per year for a perfect record. They will receive $10 for simply taking the test.
An estimated 9,000 students from 40 schools will participate in the pilot program, which was designed by private consultants and professors to test whether small cash incentives help close the achievement gap for the city’s poorest pupils.
Education officials are currently trying to lure principals across the city, who can sign up for the program in late June. The department has yet to release a list of participating schools that shows which sites in Queens will be participating.
Under the pilot program, consultants will monitor each school’s progress for two years, eventually using students’ test results to decide whether to renew or expand it.
The ambitious incentive program is the brainchild of Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who was recently hired into the upper ranks of the Department of Education as “chief equality officer.” From that post, the professor will advise the mayor and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein on how to boost the persistently low scores and graduation rates of poor black and Hispanic students.
Last week, city officials hailed Fryer’s academic credentials after announcing the new program. “He is extremely well respected and has an incredible background and list of accolades,” said Debra Wexler, an education department spokeswoman.
Fryer’s plan to dole out cash for good scores comes as part of the mayor’s broader antipoverty initiative — intended to influence low-income adult behavior and promote better longterm decision-making, officials said. Key markers for success in the program will be holding a full-time job, maintaining health insurance, making regular doctors’ visits and boosting academic achievement.
The privately funded effort targets three groups — families, students and adults in Section 8 housing — and is modeled after a program in Mexico that has boasted considerable success in reducing severe rural poverty. Already, the mayor has attracted enough private donors to raise the $53 million needed for the effort, even ponying up his own funds to get the ball rolling.
In addition to Fryer’s incentive program for students, the mayor’s initiative will also feature a family-based component that, among other things, rewards parents up to $25 for attending a parent-teacher conference and $50 per month for each child who posts a 95 percent attendance record.
High school students can earn $50 for taking the PSAT exam, and will share $600 with their parents for annually accumulating 11 credits, officials said. Additionally, families will receive a $400 bonus for each child who graduates high school.
About 2,550 families from Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan are expected to participate in the family-focused component of Bloomberg’s program. City officials said they would likely enroll Queens families in the future, if the proposal gets renewed and expanded after its two-year trial phase.
In touting this ambitious plan, advocates cited gains made in other cities that have adopted cash incentive programs — including Chelsea, Mass., and Dallas, where some pupils get $2 for every book they read.
Still, some parents were heavily critical of the new program. At a parent’s forum in Fresh Meadows last week, Robert Caloras of Little Neck blasted the mayor for imposing what he called an incentives-based business model on public education.
By handing out money for good grades, Caloras said the program will undermine the value of learning for love of the topic or the satisfaction of getting a good grade. “Frankly, I find the idea a little repulsive,” he told Deputy Schools Chancellor Chris Cerf. “Some people work hard without ever getting a bonus. Why do they continue? Because they love their jobs. That’s what we need to be teaching our kids.”
On the low end of the pay scale, fourth-graders will get up to $25 for a perfect score on each of 10 standardized tests taken throughout the academic year, as well as $5 just for showing up for the exam. On the high end, seventh-graders can earn as much as $50 per test — totaling up to $500 per year for a perfect record. They will receive $10 for simply taking the test.
An estimated 9,000 students from 40 schools will participate in the pilot program, which was designed by private consultants and professors to test whether small cash incentives help close the achievement gap for the city’s poorest pupils.
Education officials are currently trying to lure principals across the city, who can sign up for the program in late June. The department has yet to release a list of participating schools that shows which sites in Queens will be participating.
Under the pilot program, consultants will monitor each school’s progress for two years, eventually using students’ test results to decide whether to renew or expand it.
The ambitious incentive program is the brainchild of Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who was recently hired into the upper ranks of the Department of Education as “chief equality officer.” From that post, the professor will advise the mayor and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein on how to boost the persistently low scores and graduation rates of poor black and Hispanic students.
Last week, city officials hailed Fryer’s academic credentials after announcing the new program. “He is extremely well respected and has an incredible background and list of accolades,” said Debra Wexler, an education department spokeswoman.
Fryer’s plan to dole out cash for good scores comes as part of the mayor’s broader antipoverty initiative — intended to influence low-income adult behavior and promote better longterm decision-making, officials said. Key markers for success in the program will be holding a full-time job, maintaining health insurance, making regular doctors’ visits and boosting academic achievement.
The privately funded effort targets three groups — families, students and adults in Section 8 housing — and is modeled after a program in Mexico that has boasted considerable success in reducing severe rural poverty. Already, the mayor has attracted enough private donors to raise the $53 million needed for the effort, even ponying up his own funds to get the ball rolling.
In addition to Fryer’s incentive program for students, the mayor’s initiative will also feature a family-based component that, among other things, rewards parents up to $25 for attending a parent-teacher conference and $50 per month for each child who posts a 95 percent attendance record.
High school students can earn $50 for taking the PSAT exam, and will share $600 with their parents for annually accumulating 11 credits, officials said. Additionally, families will receive a $400 bonus for each child who graduates high school.
About 2,550 families from Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan are expected to participate in the family-focused component of Bloomberg’s program. City officials said they would likely enroll Queens families in the future, if the proposal gets renewed and expanded after its two-year trial phase.
In touting this ambitious plan, advocates cited gains made in other cities that have adopted cash incentive programs — including Chelsea, Mass., and Dallas, where some pupils get $2 for every book they read.
Still, some parents were heavily critical of the new program. At a parent’s forum in Fresh Meadows last week, Robert Caloras of Little Neck blasted the mayor for imposing what he called an incentives-based business model on public education.
By handing out money for good grades, Caloras said the program will undermine the value of learning for love of the topic or the satisfaction of getting a good grade. “Frankly, I find the idea a little repulsive,” he told Deputy Schools Chancellor Chris Cerf. “Some people work hard without ever getting a bonus. Why do they continue? Because they love their jobs. That’s what we need to be teaching our kids.”
Amsterdam News: Paying Kids to Take Tests by TananGgachi Mfuni...
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will pay low-income Black and Hispanic public school students for taking tests. The initiative is part of a cash incentive program, Opportunity NYC, geared towards reducing poverty the mayor and Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Linda Gibbs outlined last Monday.
Education advocates had a mixed reaction to the student portion of the program which begins this fall. The city would give fourth graders at participating schools $5 for taking tests and seventh graders $10. For scoring top marks, fourth graders would receive $25 and seventh graders $50. If they score well on all ten tests given throughout the year, fourth graders could receive as much as $250, and seventh graders $500.
Harvard professor Dr. Ronald G. Fryer, Jr. will oversee the incentive plan for the DOE. Fryer, 30, has also been named the Department of Education's chief equality officer. The Black economist advocates cash incentives for students as a means of narrowing the much documented achievement gap between Black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian counterparts.
City Council Education Chair Robert Jackson supports the plan. Jackson said it gave kids "an immediate incentive" and would cause students to have more "self esteem" and get "better grades."
However critics like Medgar Evers education professor Dr. Sam Anderson disagrees.
"I'm not a believer in these kinds of financial rewards for intellectual development. It feeds into the capitalistic structure," said Anderson, who argued the incentive program encouraged students to be materialistic.
"We should not continually instill in our young people that the pursuit of money is the pursuit of all happiness," he said.
Moreover, Anderson said the amount of money being distributed was too little.
"The little bit of money that's paid out is a joke," Anderson said. "You don't buy educational excellence by bribing kids with chump change." Anderson suggested putting money towards college fund instead.
The 40 schools the DOE plans to implement the cash incentive program in this fall are not yet determined. A spokeswoman for the DOE said Dr. Fryer has sent letters out and conducted meetings with principals interested in the program. The program would also give $5000 to schools that participate.
The Opportunity NYC is being paid for by private funding that will come from several non-profits including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Starr Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation as well as Mayor Bloomberg.
The education chair said he might have had second thoughts about the program had it depended on public funds. �I don�t know I would allocate public funds to do this,� Jackson said.
Other features of the Opportunity NYC program give cash rewards, in some cases several hundred dollars, to families if they maintain their health insurance, hold a full time job, send their kids to school, and ensure their kids take and pass tests like the state-issued
Education advocates had a mixed reaction to the student portion of the program which begins this fall. The city would give fourth graders at participating schools $5 for taking tests and seventh graders $10. For scoring top marks, fourth graders would receive $25 and seventh graders $50. If they score well on all ten tests given throughout the year, fourth graders could receive as much as $250, and seventh graders $500.
Harvard professor Dr. Ronald G. Fryer, Jr. will oversee the incentive plan for the DOE. Fryer, 30, has also been named the Department of Education's chief equality officer. The Black economist advocates cash incentives for students as a means of narrowing the much documented achievement gap between Black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian counterparts.
City Council Education Chair Robert Jackson supports the plan. Jackson said it gave kids "an immediate incentive" and would cause students to have more "self esteem" and get "better grades."
However critics like Medgar Evers education professor Dr. Sam Anderson disagrees.
"I'm not a believer in these kinds of financial rewards for intellectual development. It feeds into the capitalistic structure," said Anderson, who argued the incentive program encouraged students to be materialistic.
"We should not continually instill in our young people that the pursuit of money is the pursuit of all happiness," he said.
Moreover, Anderson said the amount of money being distributed was too little.
"The little bit of money that's paid out is a joke," Anderson said. "You don't buy educational excellence by bribing kids with chump change." Anderson suggested putting money towards college fund instead.
The 40 schools the DOE plans to implement the cash incentive program in this fall are not yet determined. A spokeswoman for the DOE said Dr. Fryer has sent letters out and conducted meetings with principals interested in the program. The program would also give $5000 to schools that participate.
The Opportunity NYC is being paid for by private funding that will come from several non-profits including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Starr Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation as well as Mayor Bloomberg.
The education chair said he might have had second thoughts about the program had it depended on public funds. �I don�t know I would allocate public funds to do this,� Jackson said.
Other features of the Opportunity NYC program give cash rewards, in some cases several hundred dollars, to families if they maintain their health insurance, hold a full time job, send their kids to school, and ensure their kids take and pass tests like the state-issued
Huffington Post: Bloomberg's Misguided Pay-the-Student Plan by Diane Ravitch...
Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Department of Education has just approved a plan to pay poor kids to get higher test scores. The city will pay kids if they take tests, pay them if they pass tests and pay them if they get high scores. It will pay them to pass high school graduation exams. It will pay their parents to get library cards and to meet with the children's teachers. It will pay them if their children have a good attendance record.
This plan is insulting to poor kids and poor families. It assumes that they won't do the right thing for themselves unless the government pays them to do it. It demeans the poor parents who do meet their children's teachers; who do have library cards; who do care desperately about their children's schooling. And it insults the kids who are trying their best but having trouble because New York City has the most overcrowded classrooms in the state of New York.
This plan, moreover, is unethical and immoral. It makes the basest possible assumptions about human behavior and acts on the behaviorist view that people are motivated only by hard cash.
If parents want to give their kids money to get an "A" or to pass a course, that's their private affair, but for the government to pay people to take personal responsibility for themselves is repulsive.
From the point of view of schooling, this plan is wrong because it tells kids that they should study only if they get extrinsic rewards. Yet what educators are supposed to do is teach kids to have a love of learning, to encourage them to improve their lives by enlarging their knowledge of the world. If they are going to study only if someone pays them, what happens when the payment ends? What will motivate the kids who are not getting cash payments when their classmates are being paid off for higher scores? The plan destroys any hope of teaching the value of intrinsic motivation, or the rewards of deferred gratification, or the importance of self-discipline for a distant but valued goal.
The pay-for-behavior plan is anti-democratic, anti-civic, anti-intellectual, and anti-social. It is the essence of the nanny-state run amok.
NY Daily News Editorial: Dollars for Scholars...
One in five New Yorkers - more than 1.5 million people - lives in poverty, a population three times the size of Boston and holding steady. This is also a city where we celebrate the fact that only 60% of public high school students graduate in four years and that 65% of students in grades 3 through 8 attain proficiency in math.
We can resign ourselves to such depressing realities or we can search for creative, even radical, solutions. Mayor Bloomberg is taking the latter course, with a plan to pay selected low-income families - adults and children - to do the right thing. If they get a preventive checkup, keep a job, show up at school, pass a Regents exam or take other beneficial actions, a private fund, seeded in part with some of Bloomberg's own billions, will forward them cash.
The most controversial piece of the plan gives money to kids. Nine thousand fourth- and seventh-grade students in 40 public schools will get chunks of change when they do well on each of 10 math and reading tests. Fourth-graders will earn up to $25 per perfect score. Seventh-graders, twice that. High school kids will get $600 for each Regents exam they pass - and they and their parents will split $600 for accumulating 11 high school credits per year.
Using money to encourage students to achieve runs counter to cherished beliefs about the value of schooling, including the not unimportant notion that maybe, just maybe, kids should appreciate learning for its own sake. But what if the plan works? What if it starts to break through the perverse culture that mocks kids who love to learn? What if young people score real, sustained gains?
Those participating in the program will be measured against a control group of low-income kids and families who don't get any monetary rewards. Two years from now, researchers hope to be able to divine whether the incentives encourage poor people to change entrenched behavior the way, say, executives alter the way they do business to get tax breaks.
The best case was made by Theodore Roosevelt more than 100 years ago: "It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." And then: try, try again.
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NY Daily News: How a School Is Forced to Restructure
The No Child Left Behind law requires schools to meet annual goals largely based on student test scores. When schools fail to make "adequate yearly progress," the law assigns them a label and requires them to take certain corrective steps.
- After failing to make adequate yearly progress for one year, schools are put on notice but don't have to take any specific steps.
- After failing for a second consecutive year, schools are labeled "in need of improvement." They have to offer to send their students to other public schools in the district and pay the transportation cost. They also are supposed to develop a plan for improving student performance that might include adding more professional development for teachers.
- After failing for a third straight year, schools are in their second year of "in need of improvement." They must offer free tutoring to students and continue offering public school choice.
- After four years, schools are placed in "corrective action." That requires doing things such as implementing a new curriculum, replacing some employees or extending the school day.
- After five years of failing, schools are in "restructuring planning," which means developing a plan to restructure the school.
- After failing six years in a row, schools are in "restructuring" and must implement their plan. Options include reopening as a charter school; replacing all or most of the school staff; contracting with a private organization to run the school or letting the state take it over; undertaking any other major restructuring that produces fundamental change.
AP: Thousands of Failing Schools Face 'No Child' Overhaul by Nancy Zuckerbrod...
Nationwide, about 2,300 schools are either in restructuring or are a year away and planning for such drastic action as firing the principal and moving many of the teachers, according to a database provided to The Associated Press by the Education Department. Those schools are being warily eyed by educators elsewhere as the law's consequences begin to hit home.
Schools fall into this category after smaller changes, such as offering tutoring, fall short. The effort is supposed to amount to a major makeover, and it has created a sense of urgency that in some schools verges on desperation.
"This is life and death," says John Deasy, superintendent of schools in Prince George's County, Md., where several schools are coming face to face with the consequences of President Bush's signature education law. "This is very high-stakes work."
 AUDIO SLIDESHOW: Failing schools struggle to make the grade INTERACTIVE MAP: Failing schools, by state |
The schools bearing the label are often in poor urban areas, like Far Rockaway at the end of the subway line in the New York City borough of Queens. But they're also found in leafy suburbs, rural areas and resort towns.
Only schools that receive federal aid for low-income students -- known as Title I -- are subject to the law's consequences. But they can be brand-new facilities with luxuries like television studios.
"It's not a Hollywood version of a school that's falling down or total chaos," says Kerri Briggs, acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary issues at the Education Department.
The 2002 education law, which is up for renewal in Congress, offers a broad menu of options for restructuring. They include firing principals and moving teachers, and calling in turnaround specialists.
At Far Rockaway High School -- or Far Rock, as locals say -- restructuring has led to a new face in the principal's office and a new teaching force.
The new principal, Denise Hallett, came from the district's headquarters about three years ago. She splashed colors like hot pink and sunny yellow on the walls of the grand but neglected century-old building. She painted the library floors tangerine orange and replaced the moldy books with new, grade-appropriate reading material.
She also replaced three-fourths of the staff.
"The instruction wasn't happening," Hallett said, offering an explanation for poor test scores, high dropout rates and gang violence. "You've got to make changes in the teaching, so that you have wonderful things that are happening inside the classroom."
Schools in low-income communities have trouble attracting and keeping sought-after teachers. Working conditions are often thought to be poor, and teachers in failing schools face increased scrutiny.
The federal law says schools in restructuring can replace teachers. Local union contracts can make that difficult, but some collective bargaining agreements are starting to permit it. Usually, the teachers transfer to another school or work as substitutes.
Hallett says she's giving her brand-new teachers the support they need to thrive -- and stay. She has a full-time professional development coach on staff and has promised more lesson planning time.
"When I first came in I had my family saying, 'You're going to Far Rockaway?"' recalls Ronalda McMillian, a new teacher. "But as I've come here, I've found I really like it. ... There's a reputation that precedes the school that is not actually present when you walk through these doors."
Felix Cruz walked purposefully through the halls one afternoon clutching balloons for a senior awards ceremony. The 17-year-old says he's proud to attend Far Rockaway. "People just think if it's in Rockaway, it's a bad school. It's a good school," Cruz said firmly.
He is among the students taking architectural drawing courses. Hallett says despite the emphasis that No Child Left Behind places on math and reading -- the subjects tested under the law -- she tries to offer engaging classes that expose kids to careers and make school fun.
The last round of test scores showed Far Rockaway students improved over the previous year in math but were still struggling to make gains in English.
The pressure for principals is real, since principals often are replaced when schools don't make gains quickly enough. Nevertheless, Hallett has a calm, upbeat demeanor -- though expressing a flash of anger when talking about the academic years that precede high school.
"You should know this: I have students who come into this building and they can't read," she said. "Schools have failed them. ... If I have a kid that can't read at grade level four, they're not going to pass a state examination."
The pressure to prepare kids for high school is clear at Long Branch Middle School, a school in restructuring in a working-class New Jersey shore town.
The most obvious sign of the pressure is in a public hallway near the school's main entrance where graphs hang in full view of passing students and teachers. Each bears a teacher's name and shows a growth curve, indicating plainly whether students in a class are making progress on reading and math tests given throughout the year.
Superintendent Joseph Ferraina, a former teacher and principal at the school, acknowledges that such discomforting changes make teachers nervous.
"It's difficult to change schools," he said. "What often happens is we talk about change, change, change, and we go back to what we felt comfortable with."
Ferraina says the wall charts are helping force his school to rely on testing data throughout the year, not just on the No Child Left Behind spring tests.
"There are people working with data every day now," he said. "They're sitting down with people and saying, 'You know what, your class seems to not be doing well in whole numbers. We need to add a lesson in whole numbers."'
The focus on tests worries some who say teachers are focusing too much on preparing kids for exams rather than spending time on important other instruction.
Long Branch, like Far Rockaway, has been organized into small academies where certain subjects are emphasized. The middle school, in a state-of-the-art building, also has moved to block scheduling, where core courses last roughly 90 minutes -- twice as long as typical classes.
Louis DeAngelis, an eighth-grade English teacher, says that pushes him to be more thoughtful and creative about lesson planning. "You can't get up there and sing and dance. You should be able to go bell to bell," he said.
Whether it's the block scheduling or the other changes, student performance is moving in the right direction at Long Branch. Last year, only special education students missed annual No Child Left Behind benchmarks.
Test scores for students with disabilities, for immigrants, poor children and minorities must be separated out under the law. But if one group fails to hit testing benchmarks at a school -- like last year at Long Branch -- the whole school gets a failing grade.
Educators say that's too harsh, and lawmakers and the Bush administration seem open to an adjustment.
Other changes the administration is pushing include giving schools in restructuring more options. The Education Department has proposed letting them become charter schools, which are public but operate more freely than traditional schools, regardless of state limits on how many charter schools are allowed. The administration also wants the federal law to override provisions in collective bargaining agreements to ensure failing schools have complete control over who works there.
"These are schools where there are some significant problems," Briggs said. "Without more serious action, we're going to keep getting what we've gotten."
Regardless of whether No Child Left Behind is altered, the message is getting to schools that they must make real changes now, said Douglas Anthony, principal of Arrowhead Elementary in Upper Marlboro, Md., a suburb of Washington.
During a recent visit, first and fourth graders alike were busy with math and reading basics.
It was around 2 p.m, shortly before the school day was to end, and a time when elementary-age students might typically be playing tag, working on craft projects or just easing into the end of the academic day.
But at Arrowhead, a school in the restructuring planning stage, math worksheets were on the desks, kids were sounding out vowels and special-ed teachers were working with small groups of children.
Superintendent Deasy acknowledges the atmosphere at Arrowhead is more intense than at schools that aren't facing restructuring. He said lessons at schools missing testing goals have to be very targeted, and he says there often isn't time for electives and free play like at other schools.
Critics of the law complain about such constraints. But Deasy said Arrowhead's test scores are heading in the right direction, precisely because students are on task and teachers are talking about instruction rather than cafeteria menus or bus schedules.
Said Principal Anthony: "There's a new level of urgency about the work we have to do for students."NY Post: Mayor Mike's Poverty Perversity by Nicole Gelinas...
To realize how perverse New York City's pilot "conditional cash trans fer" program for the poor is, consider: With the program's privately raised funds, the city's "Center for Economic Opportunity" will pay people $20 per adult and $20 for children each month to take advantage of Medicaid.The philosophy behind the cash-transfer program, which will give families up to $5,000 a year in payments as behavioral "incentives," is thus deeply pathological: It assumes that poor New Yorkers are so unable to think rationally in their best interest that they won't even take advantage of an existing, well-publicized government program without the promise of short-term cash.
The $53 million pilot program, called Opportunity NYC, focuses on six mostly minority neighborhoods - Brownsville, East New York, Morris Heights, East Tremont and Central and East Harlem. This summer, it will start signing a few thousand families and single adults in those areas to get cash payments for behavior similar to that in the above example. If the pilot "succeeds" after two years, the city could do conditional-cash transfers citywide, costing "hundreds of millions," says Linda Gibbs, deputy mayor for health and human services.
All this to elicit behavior that in many cases is just one step above anti-social.
Consider: In the "family-focused" part of the program, "families" - likely mostly single mothers - will reap $25 to $50 a month per head for making sure their kids get to school 95 percent of the time (older kids will get half of the cash directly). But not sending your kids to school 95 percent of the time isn't any reasonable baseline for measuring improvement. In fact, failing to do the basic job of sending your kids to school unless they're sick should be grounds for a charge of neglect.
Paying people not to do something bad is simply terrible policy. Where does it stop? Will we start paying young men between 15 and 32 not to carry illegal guns?
The program is insulting to a breathtaking degree:
* It will pay families $50 each kid for obtaining library cards - a gross affront to the thousands of poor kids who already willingly spend their good-weather afternoons in cramped public-library branches like the one in Arverne, Queens, diligently reading books and asking for homework help when they need it, with no $50 bribe necessary.
* It will also pay parents $25 to attend conferences with their kids' teachers - a slap at the poor mothers who already care so much about their children's education that they enroll in lotteries to get their kids into charter schools.
* It offers up to $350 for each public-school standardized test on which elementary- and middle-school kids improve or earn a score of "proficient." Families with older kids get $600 a year to advance a grade, $400 to graduate and $600 per passed Regents exam.
In support of such payments, Bloomberg's supporters can point to grim data: 45 percent of the city's black kids and 49 percent of Hispanic kids, many of them poor, don't graduate in four years. But even at the worst high schools in the poorest neighborhoods, 30 percent or so of students regularly graduate in four years. And some schools do much better. Far from an unnatural achievement, high-school graduation is a joyful event for thousands of poor graduates and their relatives each summer - even without the city's cash.
Another "incentive" program will cover 9,000 more fourth- and seventh-graders in 20 city schools. These kids (not their parents) will get "small cash payments" - $5 to $10 just to take "interim assessment tests," and up to $500 annually for perfect scores.
What on earth kind of signal is New York City sending to impressionable 9-year-olds - that it thinks they need to be paid to learn?
Lest they feel left out, the program offers similar insults to adults. It assumes, for example, that they can't "maintain full-time employment" for six weeks at a stretch without a $150-a-month bribe.
But hundreds of thousands of poor New Yorkers have proved they can do just that since the end of no-strings-attached-welfare over the last decade. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office has found that over the last 14 years, the average annual income of the nation's poorest families with children (the bottom 20 percent) has grown 35 percent after inflation, more than the rise of any other income group save for the top 20 percent.
These families' earnings - money from work, rather than government payments - more than doubled. This was due in large part to mothers leaving welfare and going to work, supplemented by a federal "earned-income tax credit" that leaves many working families collecting more than they paid in income tax.
The success of welfare reform shows that for most people, once the government removes a twisted economic incentive for poor people to stay home and collect cash, society's normal economic incentives already work.
Many such people may meet Opportunity NYC's formal benchmarks if they think the reward is worth it, making the mayor's program a "success" - but that only means that they respond to clear economic incentives, just as most people do.
The program doesn't do anything to address social dysfunction: the normalcy of single motherhood in the targeted neighborhoods, and the fact that kids grow up in such a difficult home environment that they have a hard time learning when they finally get to school - something $5 for a kid to take a test can't help.
Worst of all, the mayor's program makes the dangerous assumption that a focus on specific behaviors can replace the traits - self-motivation, personal responsibility and, contrary to the Bloomberg cash offers, an ability to delay gratification - that are behind those behaviors. Bloomberg may instead send an unintended message to the truly dependent among the poor that the government owes them money just to participate minimally in society.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor at City Journal. From city-journal.org.
NY Post: 'Poor' Judgment - Paying for Grades Fails Our Kids by Andrea Peyser...
KA-CHING, kids! It's time for Mom to quit her job. And Dad might as well be in jail.
As for you kids, better bone up on your cheating skills. Because scoring well in school is no longer just the key to a brighter future. It's fast becoming the most dependable route to raking in a few Benjamins.
At first, I thought the plan cooked up by the pinheads who influence the Department of Education was a tasteless joke.
But sadly, the geeks with advanced degrees entrusted with your kids' futures seem to lack a sense of humor.
In what has to be the most insulting, bone-headed plan ever cooked up, the city wants to pay kids just for staying in school. And I thought at least a portion of our students used to study for free.
Not anymore.
Kids whose parents chose to (a) stay married or (b) work three jobs aren't eligible for this program, which, so far, will be funded with private donations.
We're not talking chump change. A student could earn $50 just for getting a library card. Two hundred bucks for visiting the doctor. And $600 a pop - up to $3,000 - for passing five Regents exams.
Parents can climb aboard the gravy train, too, raking in dollars just for climbing out of bed and attending parent-teacher conferences, or holding a job.
Make no mistake. This payoff is just for kids living below the poverty line. Middle-class families who want to buy new sneakers or indulge in a cold six-pack on a Saturday night need not apply.
So why should we stop at paying for things like good grades and simple attendance?
Why not add these payoffs to the party?
1. Pay kids for waking up early. Do I hear $20 for each hour of consciousness before noon?
2. Inaugurate the Paris Hilton Dress Code payoff? Do I hear $100 bucks for remembering to wear underwear?
3. We tell kids to say no to drugs. Shouldn't we have to pay them for it? Maybe $25 for passing the marijuana joint untouched. A hundred for skipping cocaine?
And what happens when the money runs out? How will you control thousands of youth, unaccustomed to turning a page for nothing?
This isn't education, New York.
It's a sickness.
NY Daily News: Voice of the People - Students Becoming Test-taking Robots by Mark Weprin...
As a legislator and as a father of two New York City public school students, I am deeply troubled by the recent announcement by Chancellor Joel Klein that city public school students will take four to five additional tests per subject each
year.
Separate from the city's testing, the state gives annual exams to students in grades 3 through 8 in order to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Law.
Our children do not need to spend more time preparing for and taking standardized tests.
The emphasis on testing is turning our schools into test preparation factories that neglect physical education, art, music and science in favor of rote test preparation drills. New York City's children are going to school in the cultural capital of the world, and focusing on test preparation limits opportunities for
exploring the rich art, music and civic experiences that the city offers.
The narrow focus on specific test subject matter denies students access to a broader curriculum.
Today's classrooms rarely devote time to current events, yet we expect the next generation to understand an ever-changing world and to grapple with the weighty issues of our era. Education should help our children to become informed
citizens, dynamic leaders and well-rounded individuals, not test-taking robots.
The city's plan for more testing is a step in the wrong direction. Let's aim for a comprehensive approach to academic assessment. Schools should use a variety of tools, including tests, writing samples and teacher-designed evaluations, to
assess student achievement. More testing does not mean more learning; on the contrary, it means less learning.
Mark Weprin
Member of N.Y. State Assembly
year.
Separate from the city's testing, the state gives annual exams to students in grades 3 through 8 in order to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Law.
Our children do not need to spend more time preparing for and taking standardized tests.
The emphasis on testing is turning our schools into test preparation factories that neglect physical education, art, music and science in favor of rote test preparation drills. New York City's children are going to school in the cultural capital of the world, and focusing on test preparation limits opportunities for
exploring the rich art, music and civic experiences that the city offers.
The narrow focus on specific test subject matter denies students access to a broader curriculum.
Today's classrooms rarely devote time to current events, yet we expect the next generation to understand an ever-changing world and to grapple with the weighty issues of our era. Education should help our children to become informed
citizens, dynamic leaders and well-rounded individuals, not test-taking robots.
The city's plan for more testing is a step in the wrong direction. Let's aim for a comprehensive approach to academic assessment. Schools should use a variety of tools, including tests, writing samples and teacher-designed evaluations, to
assess student achievement. More testing does not mean more learning; on the contrary, it means less learning.
Mark Weprin
Member of N.Y. State Assembly
The New York Sun: Test Scores Were Inflated, Audit Data Show by Elizabeth Green...
A recent audit report says the scoring of statewide tests was reliable last year, but a closer look at the data challenges that conclusion. The data show state education department graders scoring reading tests higher on average than scorers hired by the auditing firm.
The firm, Pearson Educational Measurement, asked independent graders to score a sample portion of tests. Then it compared those scores with ones given by state graders, usually teachers in the same area as the students they are grading, state and city education officials said. The point is to confirm that all students were judged against a single standard, the Pearson report says.
Data inside the report show that state graders' average reading scores were almost always higher than scores from the independent graders. Of 21 questions on the 2006 exam, state scorers gave a lower score on only three. They gave a higher score on 17, with the discrepancy ranging between 0.09 out of nine points for the third-grade test and 0.84 out of 13 for the eighth-grade test.
"That doesn't sound like a lot," a former city testing official, Robert Tobias, said. "But these very fine differences can actually have sort of a multiplier effect."
New York City reading scores mirrored the state trend.
A retired city education department data analyst, Fred Smith, said the tests' high stakes might explain the local scorers' boost. "There's a fear that this is going to be used against them," he said. "That works in the direction of leaning positive."
A state education department spokesman, Tom Dunn, dismissed the idea. "We believe in the integrity of the teachers of the state of New York," he said. "The report from the independent auditor confirms this."
A New York City education department spokesman, Andrew Jacob, defended the city's scoring process and said officials are reviewing the audit.
The Nation: School's Out by LynNell Hancock...
A knot of parents and teachers--some clutching children, others clutching protest fliers--huddled outside Hostos Community College one frosty evening last February. The forty or so Bronx residents had crisscrossed the borough for the rare chance to mix it up with the New York City schools chancellor in a public forum.
A guard met them at the door. No more room, he said, leaving the agitated parents, quite literally, out in the cold. They had hoped to hear Joel Klein explain why he was scrambling the school system's signals for the second time in five years. Inside the Grand Concourse annex, Klein was winding down his pitch to the hundred or so in the audience who had made the cut. "We are enacting these reforms so we can make sure whatever your skin color, wherever you live, your kid will get the education he needs and deserves," Klein shouted into the microphone.
Klein may have appeared an awkward headmaster in his Wall Street suit, but he was on familiar terrain, wrapping his arguments for corporate-style school overhaul in the ethos of civil rights. He is driven by the noble pledge to "finish the job that Brown v. Board of Education began." His path to racial equity, however, employs the efficient tools of business--top-down decisions, marketplace incentives and a belief in private sector solutions to public school problems. Instruction is "data driven." Academic results are "granular." It is a technocratic vision of education, in sync with big-moneyed foundations, at odds with most classroom teachers and many parents.
In the calculus of the moment, each of the city's 1,450 schools is considered an independent franchise. Like a bank outlet or a RadioShack store, any given school is a "key unit" in Klein's new Department of Education. Schools are headed by branch managers, or principals, whose jobs have been reconfigured as CEOs rather than as educators. Principals are expected to contract out for nearly every core service, from testing to professional development to their own support team. Quarterly returns flow out in the form of tests four times a year. Schools must compete with one another, at their peril. The lowest performers on the bell curve may be sanctioned or shut down.
Thomas Sobol, the former New York State education commissioner, believes the battle lines have been drawn between democracy and corporatization. "The arrogance, my God, of saying because we know how to run Kmart, we know how to educate children," said Sobol, professor emeritus at Columbia University's Teachers College. "It represents a giant defeat of democracy."
In Klein's view, "corporatization" and "privatization" are meaningless phrases used to detract from the real revolution underfoot. "There is nothing less public about public schools," he insisted during a recent interview at Department of Education headquarters. His reforms are about strengthening the top in order to bring equity to the bottom. A lone public employee, Klein has nearly unfettered control of 1.1 million schoolchildren and a $15.4 billion budget. "In the end it is my responsibility to say, I think this is the right policy," Klein said. "I need to be prepared to make the tough service delivery decision. The mayor holds me accountable, and the city holds the mayor accountable. We should not have 'shared decision-making.' That's what marks all unsuccessful school reforms."
A lot is riding on Klein's record--including the political future of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which may include an independent run for President. He was the first mayor in thirty-three years to be authorized by the State Legislature to directly pick his own chancellor and who has wagered his mayoralty on the fortunes of the city's schools. Urban school systems across the nation are watching the radical overhaul in New York City. If the plan succeeds, it will mean a triumph for advocates of mayoral school takeovers and a boon for the new breed of CEO superintendents committed to business solutions for public schools. Mayoral control has already taken hold in Chicago, Boston, Cleveland and, most recently, Washington--whose mayor replaced the school superintendent, at Klein's recommendation, with 37-year-old education entrepreneur Michelle Rhee.
If Klein's plan falters in New York, many will argue that the demise was made inevitable by keeping teachers, parents and communities at a yardstick's distance. No matter how competent and committed the players at the top, public-sector reforms on this imposing scale may be doomed if the people most affected are left outside.
It certainly felt that way at the Hostos forum, where a faint chant filtered through the closed windows into the room: "Let the parents in!" As irony would have it, Klein's Bronx appearance was part of a five-borough mission to persuade the masses that the mayor's latest structural overhaul was the best thing for every child. The Bronx parents inside weren't buying it. "No science. No history. Only tests," one mother bellowed, shaking her finger at the chancellor. Applause thundered across the linoleum. "Welcome to the boogie-down," another mother said, followed by more hoots and hollers. "We're real here." She then criticized a recent citywide busing fiasco that left one of the chancellor's corporate consultants $16 million richer and scores of children wondering how they would get to school.
Finally, a statuesque woman from the South Bronx took the microphone, choking back nerves. "I saw a guidance counselor pulling a kindergarten child across the floor like an animal," began Rosa Villafane tentatively. "The principal won't do anything. She's an empowerment principal," Villafane said, referring to one of the chancellor's key reforms that offers the city's principals greater authority to make decisions in exchange for more accountability. "If she won't listen, where do I go?"
The chancellor had a standard reply for her, the one he employed after nearly every appeal that night: "E-mail me," he said. "I'm accountable." He did not follow up the offer with his e-mail address. He then slumped into his chair, chin in hand, looking as if he wanted very much to be somewhere else.
A Harvard-trained litigator and former deputy White House counsel to President Clinton, Klein is many things, but he is not a man to boogie-down in the Bronx. Raised in a working-class family in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Klein graduated from William Bryant High School in Queens, class of '63. That's where his connections to most children in New York's schools end. After graduating from law school in 1971 and launching his own DC law firm, he served as an assistant attorney general with the Justice Department, where he prosecuted the government's antitrust case against Microsoft. His most recent job was as CEO of the German-owned global media giant Bertelsmann.
It's an unlikely résumé for the head of the nation's largest public school system, but one with obvious appeal to the then- Republican mayor. Bloomberg had begun the systemwide makeover before Klein arrived by putting up a For Sale sign on the Soviet-style Board of Education headquarters at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn, an address synonymous with bloated bureaucracy. Redubbed the Department of Education, it moved its offices into the elegantly appointed Tweed Courthouse in the shadow of City Hall. Old faces were replaced, while old ways of doing business were rapidly brought under tight, centralized control.
As soon as Klein took over, he hired private consultants and installed a cabinet of mostly noneducators making six-figure salaries. Fresh young principals with minimal experience were brought in from outside New York to replace the large number of those who left or were forced out. The thirty-two old school districts were scrapped and refitted into ten regions. New Yorkers tend to love rat-a-tat changes. Few mourned the loss of a bureaucracy everyone had derided. "I thought mayoral control was a good idea at first," said Noreen Connell, head of Education Priorities Panel, a research and advocacy group. "It was good when they broke through the facilities funding logjam."
Klein and Bloomberg worked in tandem to cash in their corporate and celebrity connections, hauling in piles of money and a star-studded cast. Caroline Kennedy was hired at a dollar a year to attract philanthropy money into the administration. Former General Electric chair Jack Welch was brought onto the advisory board of the $70 million principal's academy to train the new managers. Klein's former adversary Bill Gates ponied up $51 million in 2003 to help create small schools. Gates's foundation would later increase its investment to more than $100 million. Next came "managed instruction," as Klein would call it, with standardized math and reading curriculum, and the promise to create fifty charters and 150 small schools.
But it became painfully clear early on that the public would have little to no role in the rapid changes in the classroom. Bloomberg entered the re-election season in 2004 taking on the politically irresistible problem of "social promotion"--the practice of moving kids up through the grades whether or not they had learned much. He tested third graders (later adding fourth and seventh graders) and held them back if they didn't make the grade. The approach went before the new Panel for Educational Policy, a thirteen-member appointed board that had replaced the old seven-member Board of Education. Two Bloomberg appointees and a Staten Island borough president appointee were set to join the five parent members to vote against the measure. The mayor swept in and replaced all three renegades on the eve of the vote, a move the tabloids dubbed the "Monday Night Massacre." Klein still counts "ending social promotion" as one of his administration's accomplishments, citing increased nu!
mbers of score-based promotions as evidence.
Contracting Out
New Yorkers still seeking solutions to the woes of public schools were sorely tested on a bitter cold day in midwinter. On January 29 yellow school buses barreled out of their garages onto new, reconfigured routes. No trial runs. Within hours, hollers could be heard from eastern Queens to the North Bronx. Children as young as 5 were cut off from their usual bus routes and issued subway MetroCards. Others were left waiting on cold street corners for an hour or more, arriving late to school. Some children were sent across hectic Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens to catch their bus.
"No New York adult would cross Francis Lewis Boulevard," said Betsy Gotbaum, the city's public advocate. "They certainly wouldn't send their children across it."
The chaos was caused in large part by the financial consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal, an outfit the department hired without competitive bidding at $16 million to find $200 million from the department's budget to divert directly into the schools. Its first order of business was to streamline the city's school bus routes. The net savings for all this grief: $5 million, far less than what was originally estimated.
The head of an independent citywide parent group said the parents had warned officials about the impending debacle two months earlier. "They ignored us, as usual," said Tim Johnson, chair of the Chancellor's Parent Advisory Council.
That debacle spotlighted a flurry of outside contracts signed by this administration, many of them without competitive bids. City comptroller William Thompson Jr. was alarmed to find that the Alvarez & Marsal contract allowed one consultant to charge the city as much as $450 an hour. A subsequent investigation found that Klein's office had signed an estimated $270 million in outside no-bid contracts after Klein took the reins; several contracts had serious problems. Platform Learning, for example, was hired for $7.6 million to tutor city school kids over a five-year period. After three years, Platform had earned more than $62 million, nine times its contracted amount, with two years remaining.
"There is no accountability, no oversight, no transparency in this administration," Gotbaum said. "New Yorkers deserve better." The chancellor claimed that $250 million had been redirected into the classroom. Thompson's office could find only $140 million in savings, and no evidence that any of it had ended up in schools. "At a time when Tweed is demanding more accountability from our superintendents, our principals and our teachers," Thompson said, "we are demanding accountability from them."
The chancellor disputes his critics, saying his administration provides more information and transparency than any in the past. Still, the busing crisis crystallized into public disenchantment with many of the vaunted reforms.
Size Matters
One of the most promising reforms was the creation of new, small high schools. New York already was home to one of the first small-school movements in the nation, promising democratic, grassroots antidotes to large, factory-size institutions. So it was fitting, even thrilling, when the new chancellor embraced small schools as a linchpin of his revitalization plans. Variety and innovation were encouraged.
But in a short time, critics say, the Department of Education turned the mission on its head. An astonishing 200 schools were launched in five years, with more than $100 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Some of them are, without question, excellent environments. Overall, however, the movement has become a mass production of top-down, privately subsidized schools, said Michelle Fine, a City University of New York education professor, that have little to do with their social justice-minded ancestors. Quality has been sacrificed for speed.
To counter these charges, the administration cites comparisons between the small schools and the large ones they replaced. For example, the large South Bronx High School had a 48 percent graduation rate in 2001; five years later, three small schools that replaced it averaged an 83 percent graduation rate. Evander Childs High School in the Bronx graduated just 31 percent of its students in 2002, compared with 93 percent in 2006 for Bronx Aerospace, a small Junior ROTC replacement school.
But these small schools were admitting students who were more likely to succeed, according to a survey of the first fifteen small schools conducted by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). Their entering ninth graders had higher state test scores than those at large schools. The schools also had far fewer special-education students and non-English speakers and in some cases more money per student. The union found that Bronx Aerospace had half the number of special-education kids, nearly four times fewer English-language learners and spent about $5,000 more per pupil than its host school, Evander Childs.
Moreover, a recent study by the New York Immigration Coalition and Advocates for Children found that non-English speakers are not given "full and equitable access" to the small schools. Small schools were allowed to exempt special-education and English-language learners from their first two start-up years. New incentives are in place to help the small schools serve a fraction of these high-needs kids. But large concentrations of these two populations have been shuffled into the remaining large, ill-equipped high schools. The Citywide Council on High Schools has filed a discrimination case with the US Education Department's Office of Civil Rights.
In the end, the small-school initiative exhibited the contradictions of this administration. "They are mass-producing unique schools," said Leo Casey, a top UFT official, "and destroying them in the bargain."
Totalitarian Testing
Nothing has more impact on education than attempts to measure it. Generally, educators believe teacher-generated assessments work best as an organic part of classroom curriculum. CEOs believe company-produced tests administered on a centralized schedule create a more equitable education. "Data collection is part of instruction," Klein told the City Council education committee last January, when questioned on the hours of instruction time lost to test preparation and paperwork (up to two days a week, according to a 2005 UFT teacher survey).
Klein's metaphors tell their own story. The chancellor sometimes refers to children as cars in a shop, a collection of malfunctions to be adjusted. Teachers need to "look under the hood," he says, to figure out the origins of the pings. The diagnostic information is then made available in pie charts and color bar graphs, child by child, as the year rolls along.
"You get granular information this way about a child's strengths and weaknesses," said James Liebman, Klein's chief accountability officer and a Columbia University civil rights law professor. "And you get instant return on the data. We are providing a lot more tools to give teachers the capacity to look at a child and see what they are doing."
The 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act emphasizes state standardized tests to measure each child's level of proficiency. The city's system ratchets up that process, measuring each child's growth from one year to the next rather than his or her ability to hit or miss a single standards target. In may be fairer to use multiple instruments, but it requires millions of dollars and an army of additional tests.
Liebman has designed "progress reports," issuing a grade of A through F for each school in areas of environment, performance and progress--with 85 percent of this information deriving from state standardized tests. "Quality reviews" are conducted yearly by a team of evaluators hired by a British company, Cambridge Education, which charges $16 million a year. The team visits schools to see how well they are using all the data to improve learning. A new "robust" IBM data-management system called ARIS will keep track of every grain of information collected on each child. Cost: $80 million.
The most controversial policy is something called periodic assessments, popular with business models. These are standardized tests, on top of the once-a-year state tests, given to kids every few weeks for additional feedback. The administration had already signed up Princeton Review (owned by Bertelsmann) as part of its $21 million contract to administer math and reading tests for grades three through eight, three times a year. That commitment was scrapped. CTB/McGraw-Hill was hired as a replacement, for $80 million over five years. Starting this fall, the tests will be ramped up to five times a year. High school students will be added to the cycle four times a year. In June Klein appointed Harvard economist Roland Fryer as the department's "chief equality officer." Fryer's main proposal offers cash payouts to students for perfect scores on the McGraw-Hill tests--$25 to fourth graders and $50 to seventh graders. Principals who agree to this experiment will receive $5,000 for!
their schools.
Statistical disputes aside, the basic disagreement is over what constitutes an educated child. Is it someone who can demonstrate "grains" of isolated skills or someone who has the capacity to think and explore with a sense of wonder and depth? So far, the grains have the upper hand. "This administration is preparing children to do these small tasks, stripping education down to its parched bones," said Tom Sobol. "The soul of education is left at the door."
The public is losing faith in the New York schools revolution. In March a Quinnipiac University opinion poll found that 58 percent of those surveyed longed for an independent elected board at the helm rather than the mayor. Klein's surprise announcement of a new overhaul last winter--a sort of decentralization in drag, with tighter control at the top over more empowered principals at the bottom--triggered even more outrage. "There is no evidence that your first reforms improved kids' learning," chided a visibly peeved City Council education chair Robert Jackson in January.
The truth is, the evidence is mixed at best. Klein points to improved academic achievement, higher graduation rates and a greater number of high-quality school choices since the mayor took over in 2002. He claims that 60 percent of ninth graders graduated four years later in 2006, an 18 percent hike. During the same period, math scores rose 20 percentage points, meaning that 57 percent of students in third through eighth grades met or exceeded standards. Reading scores rose 10 percent, to 51 percent. This spring an eight-point hike in math scores across the grades, to 65 percent, meeting standards, and a 5 point rise in reading scores, to 42 percent for eighth graders, was cause for celebration--even though reading scores for third and fourth graders dropped an average of four points.
But the numbers are hotly contested. Diane Ravitch, a former education official in the George Bush Sr. White House, questions why the chancellor counts 2002 as his starting point, when the initiatives did not kick in until January 2003. Test scores can be volatile instruments. The recent eighth-grade reading scores were up all across New York State this year by eight points, from 49 to 57 percent, an indication that the test itself was likely easier. The graduation rate is another bugaboo: The state calculates a 50 percent graduation rate for the city (not 60 percent), because it figures GEDs, English-language learners and special-education diplomas differently from the city. Overall, the radical overhaul seems to have produced modest improvement rather than landmark progress. "Their gains are respectable, not historic," Ravitch told a packed crowd at St. John's University last March.
Perhaps the most notable development has been the mobilization of opponents from among disparate city groups. An overflow crowd of 1,000 angry New Yorkers descended on Manhattan's St. Vartan's Cathedral in late February to protest the latest round of changes. It was a rare coalition of forces, angry enough to set aside their individual agendas to unite against the Department of Education. Here were City Council members, elected officials, activist groups like ACORN, the Working Families Party, labor unions, an immigrant coalition and citywide parent groups.
The most powerful group, and the one that gave this assembly its institutional clout, was the UFT, which has more than 100,000 members. Its legendary statewide political power was forged in the 1960s by black and Latino community groups battling for control of the schools. In recent years the union had made peace with its past, creating real ties to parent groups. In many ways Klein and Bloomberg helped create this assembly by cutting off channels once used routinely by the too-powerful union to influence policy. The effect was to alienate both teachers and parents, pushing them together. "No administration has been as hostile to the union as this one," said the UFT's Casey.
The mayor's response to this historic show of unity has been to dismiss it as a small collection of parents influenced by powerful self-interested groups. But he may be ignoring this group of pols and parents at his peril. Rumblings that February night at Hostos called for an end to mayoral control. The measure is up for renewal by the New York State Legislature in 2009.
Few New Yorkers have any appetite for returning to the old school board days. But most would like to see some democratic checks and balances built into what has become a two-man show. An independent elected board could oversee budget, contracts and policy decisions, and the selection of future chancellors. The input of seasoned educators is needed again at the highest decision-making levels. Regional boards could help return a sense of community to the city's schools. At the classroom level, school-based teams of teachers and parents should be given some real clout. As for testing, department officials would do well to emulate the Republican state of Nebraska, which has invested in teacher-created assessments (now threatened by new legislation) that do not choke curriculums.
Americans tend to hold only a few big ideas sacred. One of them is the promise that its unique public school system can offer every child a crack at the American dream. Ironically, the top-down corporate solutions popular with CEO superintendents like Klein wrest control from the people they claim to serve. "Public schools are the cornerstone of our democracy," said Irving Hamer Jr., Manhattan representative on the last Board of Education. "If we let them quietly slip through the public's hands, we are breaking the covenant of civic participation in this country."
This article can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070709/hancock
A guard met them at the door. No more room, he said, leaving the agitated parents, quite literally, out in the cold. They had hoped to hear Joel Klein explain why he was scrambling the school system's signals for the second time in five years. Inside the Grand Concourse annex, Klein was winding down his pitch to the hundred or so in the audience who had made the cut. "We are enacting these reforms so we can make sure whatever your skin color, wherever you live, your kid will get the education he needs and deserves," Klein shouted into the microphone.
Klein may have appeared an awkward headmaster in his Wall Street suit, but he was on familiar terrain, wrapping his arguments for corporate-style school overhaul in the ethos of civil rights. He is driven by the noble pledge to "finish the job that Brown v. Board of Education began." His path to racial equity, however, employs the efficient tools of business--top-down decisions, marketplace incentives and a belief in private sector solutions to public school problems. Instruction is "data driven." Academic results are "granular." It is a technocratic vision of education, in sync with big-moneyed foundations, at odds with most classroom teachers and many parents.
In the calculus of the moment, each of the city's 1,450 schools is considered an independent franchise. Like a bank outlet or a RadioShack store, any given school is a "key unit" in Klein's new Department of Education. Schools are headed by branch managers, or principals, whose jobs have been reconfigured as CEOs rather than as educators. Principals are expected to contract out for nearly every core service, from testing to professional development to their own support team. Quarterly returns flow out in the form of tests four times a year. Schools must compete with one another, at their peril. The lowest performers on the bell curve may be sanctioned or shut down.
Thomas Sobol, the former New York State education commissioner, believes the battle lines have been drawn between democracy and corporatization. "The arrogance, my God, of saying because we know how to run Kmart, we know how to educate children," said Sobol, professor emeritus at Columbia University's Teachers College. "It represents a giant defeat of democracy."
In Klein's view, "corporatization" and "privatization" are meaningless phrases used to detract from the real revolution underfoot. "There is nothing less public about public schools," he insisted during a recent interview at Department of Education headquarters. His reforms are about strengthening the top in order to bring equity to the bottom. A lone public employee, Klein has nearly unfettered control of 1.1 million schoolchildren and a $15.4 billion budget. "In the end it is my responsibility to say, I think this is the right policy," Klein said. "I need to be prepared to make the tough service delivery decision. The mayor holds me accountable, and the city holds the mayor accountable. We should not have 'shared decision-making.' That's what marks all unsuccessful school reforms."
A lot is riding on Klein's record--including the political future of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which may include an independent run for President. He was the first mayor in thirty-three years to be authorized by the State Legislature to directly pick his own chancellor and who has wagered his mayoralty on the fortunes of the city's schools. Urban school systems across the nation are watching the radical overhaul in New York City. If the plan succeeds, it will mean a triumph for advocates of mayoral school takeovers and a boon for the new breed of CEO superintendents committed to business solutions for public schools. Mayoral control has already taken hold in Chicago, Boston, Cleveland and, most recently, Washington--whose mayor replaced the school superintendent, at Klein's recommendation, with 37-year-old education entrepreneur Michelle Rhee.
If Klein's plan falters in New York, many will argue that the demise was made inevitable by keeping teachers, parents and communities at a yardstick's distance. No matter how competent and committed the players at the top, public-sector reforms on this imposing scale may be doomed if the people most affected are left outside.
It certainly felt that way at the Hostos forum, where a faint chant filtered through the closed windows into the room: "Let the parents in!" As irony would have it, Klein's Bronx appearance was part of a five-borough mission to persuade the masses that the mayor's latest structural overhaul was the best thing for every child. The Bronx parents inside weren't buying it. "No science. No history. Only tests," one mother bellowed, shaking her finger at the chancellor. Applause thundered across the linoleum. "Welcome to the boogie-down," another mother said, followed by more hoots and hollers. "We're real here." She then criticized a recent citywide busing fiasco that left one of the chancellor's corporate consultants $16 million richer and scores of children wondering how they would get to school.
Finally, a statuesque woman from the South Bronx took the microphone, choking back nerves. "I saw a guidance counselor pulling a kindergarten child across the floor like an animal," began Rosa Villafane tentatively. "The principal won't do anything. She's an empowerment principal," Villafane said, referring to one of the chancellor's key reforms that offers the city's principals greater authority to make decisions in exchange for more accountability. "If she won't listen, where do I go?"
The chancellor had a standard reply for her, the one he employed after nearly every appeal that night: "E-mail me," he said. "I'm accountable." He did not follow up the offer with his e-mail address. He then slumped into his chair, chin in hand, looking as if he wanted very much to be somewhere else.
A Harvard-trained litigator and former deputy White House counsel to President Clinton, Klein is many things, but he is not a man to boogie-down in the Bronx. Raised in a working-class family in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Klein graduated from William Bryant High School in Queens, class of '63. That's where his connections to most children in New York's schools end. After graduating from law school in 1971 and launching his own DC law firm, he served as an assistant attorney general with the Justice Department, where he prosecuted the government's antitrust case against Microsoft. His most recent job was as CEO of the German-owned global media giant Bertelsmann.
It's an unlikely résumé for the head of the nation's largest public school system, but one with obvious appeal to the then- Republican mayor. Bloomberg had begun the systemwide makeover before Klein arrived by putting up a For Sale sign on the Soviet-style Board of Education headquarters at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn, an address synonymous with bloated bureaucracy. Redubbed the Department of Education, it moved its offices into the elegantly appointed Tweed Courthouse in the shadow of City Hall. Old faces were replaced, while old ways of doing business were rapidly brought under tight, centralized control.
As soon as Klein took over, he hired private consultants and installed a cabinet of mostly noneducators making six-figure salaries. Fresh young principals with minimal experience were brought in from outside New York to replace the large number of those who left or were forced out. The thirty-two old school districts were scrapped and refitted into ten regions. New Yorkers tend to love rat-a-tat changes. Few mourned the loss of a bureaucracy everyone had derided. "I thought mayoral control was a good idea at first," said Noreen Connell, head of Education Priorities Panel, a research and advocacy group. "It was good when they broke through the facilities funding logjam."
Klein and Bloomberg worked in tandem to cash in their corporate and celebrity connections, hauling in piles of money and a star-studded cast. Caroline Kennedy was hired at a dollar a year to attract philanthropy money into the administration. Former General Electric chair Jack Welch was brought onto the advisory board of the $70 million principal's academy to train the new managers. Klein's former adversary Bill Gates ponied up $51 million in 2003 to help create small schools. Gates's foundation would later increase its investment to more than $100 million. Next came "managed instruction," as Klein would call it, with standardized math and reading curriculum, and the promise to create fifty charters and 150 small schools.
But it became painfully clear early on that the public would have little to no role in the rapid changes in the classroom. Bloomberg entered the re-election season in 2004 taking on the politically irresistible problem of "social promotion"--the practice of moving kids up through the grades whether or not they had learned much. He tested third graders (later adding fourth and seventh graders) and held them back if they didn't make the grade. The approach went before the new Panel for Educational Policy, a thirteen-member appointed board that had replaced the old seven-member Board of Education. Two Bloomberg appointees and a Staten Island borough president appointee were set to join the five parent members to vote against the measure. The mayor swept in and replaced all three renegades on the eve of the vote, a move the tabloids dubbed the "Monday Night Massacre." Klein still counts "ending social promotion" as one of his administration's accomplishments, citing increased nu!
mbers of score-based promotions as evidence.
Contracting Out
New Yorkers still seeking solutions to the woes of public schools were sorely tested on a bitter cold day in midwinter. On January 29 yellow school buses barreled out of their garages onto new, reconfigured routes. No trial runs. Within hours, hollers could be heard from eastern Queens to the North Bronx. Children as young as 5 were cut off from their usual bus routes and issued subway MetroCards. Others were left waiting on cold street corners for an hour or more, arriving late to school. Some children were sent across hectic Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens to catch their bus.
"No New York adult would cross Francis Lewis Boulevard," said Betsy Gotbaum, the city's public advocate. "They certainly wouldn't send their children across it."
The chaos was caused in large part by the financial consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal, an outfit the department hired without competitive bidding at $16 million to find $200 million from the department's budget to divert directly into the schools. Its first order of business was to streamline the city's school bus routes. The net savings for all this grief: $5 million, far less than what was originally estimated.
The head of an independent citywide parent group said the parents had warned officials about the impending debacle two months earlier. "They ignored us, as usual," said Tim Johnson, chair of the Chancellor's Parent Advisory Council.
That debacle spotlighted a flurry of outside contracts signed by this administration, many of them without competitive bids. City comptroller William Thompson Jr. was alarmed to find that the Alvarez & Marsal contract allowed one consultant to charge the city as much as $450 an hour. A subsequent investigation found that Klein's office had signed an estimated $270 million in outside no-bid contracts after Klein took the reins; several contracts had serious problems. Platform Learning, for example, was hired for $7.6 million to tutor city school kids over a five-year period. After three years, Platform had earned more than $62 million, nine times its contracted amount, with two years remaining.
"There is no accountability, no oversight, no transparency in this administration," Gotbaum said. "New Yorkers deserve better." The chancellor claimed that $250 million had been redirected into the classroom. Thompson's office could find only $140 million in savings, and no evidence that any of it had ended up in schools. "At a time when Tweed is demanding more accountability from our superintendents, our principals and our teachers," Thompson said, "we are demanding accountability from them."
The chancellor disputes his critics, saying his administration provides more information and transparency than any in the past. Still, the busing crisis crystallized into public disenchantment with many of the vaunted reforms.
Size Matters
One of the most promising reforms was the creation of new, small high schools. New York already was home to one of the first small-school movements in the nation, promising democratic, grassroots antidotes to large, factory-size institutions. So it was fitting, even thrilling, when the new chancellor embraced small schools as a linchpin of his revitalization plans. Variety and innovation were encouraged.
But in a short time, critics say, the Department of Education turned the mission on its head. An astonishing 200 schools were launched in five years, with more than $100 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Some of them are, without question, excellent environments. Overall, however, the movement has become a mass production of top-down, privately subsidized schools, said Michelle Fine, a City University of New York education professor, that have little to do with their social justice-minded ancestors. Quality has been sacrificed for speed.
To counter these charges, the administration cites comparisons between the small schools and the large ones they replaced. For example, the large South Bronx High School had a 48 percent graduation rate in 2001; five years later, three small schools that replaced it averaged an 83 percent graduation rate. Evander Childs High School in the Bronx graduated just 31 percent of its students in 2002, compared with 93 percent in 2006 for Bronx Aerospace, a small Junior ROTC replacement school.
But these small schools were admitting students who were more likely to succeed, according to a survey of the first fifteen small schools conducted by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). Their entering ninth graders had higher state test scores than those at large schools. The schools also had far fewer special-education students and non-English speakers and in some cases more money per student. The union found that Bronx Aerospace had half the number of special-education kids, nearly four times fewer English-language learners and spent about $5,000 more per pupil than its host school, Evander Childs.
Moreover, a recent study by the New York Immigration Coalition and Advocates for Children found that non-English speakers are not given "full and equitable access" to the small schools. Small schools were allowed to exempt special-education and English-language learners from their first two start-up years. New incentives are in place to help the small schools serve a fraction of these high-needs kids. But large concentrations of these two populations have been shuffled into the remaining large, ill-equipped high schools. The Citywide Council on High Schools has filed a discrimination case with the US Education Department's Office of Civil Rights.
In the end, the small-school initiative exhibited the contradictions of this administration. "They are mass-producing unique schools," said Leo Casey, a top UFT official, "and destroying them in the bargain."
Totalitarian Testing
Nothing has more impact on education than attempts to measure it. Generally, educators believe teacher-generated assessments work best as an organic part of classroom curriculum. CEOs believe company-produced tests administered on a centralized schedule create a more equitable education. "Data collection is part of instruction," Klein told the City Council education committee last January, when questioned on the hours of instruction time lost to test preparation and paperwork (up to two days a week, according to a 2005 UFT teacher survey).
Klein's metaphors tell their own story. The chancellor sometimes refers to children as cars in a shop, a collection of malfunctions to be adjusted. Teachers need to "look under the hood," he says, to figure out the origins of the pings. The diagnostic information is then made available in pie charts and color bar graphs, child by child, as the year rolls along.
"You get granular information this way about a child's strengths and weaknesses," said James Liebman, Klein's chief accountability officer and a Columbia University civil rights law professor. "And you get instant return on the data. We are providing a lot more tools to give teachers the capacity to look at a child and see what they are doing."
The 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act emphasizes state standardized tests to measure each child's level of proficiency. The city's system ratchets up that process, measuring each child's growth from one year to the next rather than his or her ability to hit or miss a single standards target. In may be fairer to use multiple instruments, but it requires millions of dollars and an army of additional tests.
Liebman has designed "progress reports," issuing a grade of A through F for each school in areas of environment, performance and progress--with 85 percent of this information deriving from state standardized tests. "Quality reviews" are conducted yearly by a team of evaluators hired by a British company, Cambridge Education, which charges $16 million a year. The team visits schools to see how well they are using all the data to improve learning. A new "robust" IBM data-management system called ARIS will keep track of every grain of information collected on each child. Cost: $80 million.
The most controversial policy is something called periodic assessments, popular with business models. These are standardized tests, on top of the once-a-year state tests, given to kids every few weeks for additional feedback. The administration had already signed up Princeton Review (owned by Bertelsmann) as part of its $21 million contract to administer math and reading tests for grades three through eight, three times a year. That commitment was scrapped. CTB/McGraw-Hill was hired as a replacement, for $80 million over five years. Starting this fall, the tests will be ramped up to five times a year. High school students will be added to the cycle four times a year. In June Klein appointed Harvard economist Roland Fryer as the department's "chief equality officer." Fryer's main proposal offers cash payouts to students for perfect scores on the McGraw-Hill tests--$25 to fourth graders and $50 to seventh graders. Principals who agree to this experiment will receive $5,000 for!
their schools.
Statistical disputes aside, the basic disagreement is over what constitutes an educated child. Is it someone who can demonstrate "grains" of isolated skills or someone who has the capacity to think and explore with a sense of wonder and depth? So far, the grains have the upper hand. "This administration is preparing children to do these small tasks, stripping education down to its parched bones," said Tom Sobol. "The soul of education is left at the door."
The public is losing faith in the New York schools revolution. In March a Quinnipiac University opinion poll found that 58 percent of those surveyed longed for an independent elected board at the helm rather than the mayor. Klein's surprise announcement of a new overhaul last winter--a sort of decentralization in drag, with tighter control at the top over more empowered principals at the bottom--triggered even more outrage. "There is no evidence that your first reforms improved kids' learning," chided a visibly peeved City Council education chair Robert Jackson in January.
The truth is, the evidence is mixed at best. Klein points to improved academic achievement, higher graduation rates and a greater number of high-quality school choices since the mayor took over in 2002. He claims that 60 percent of ninth graders graduated four years later in 2006, an 18 percent hike. During the same period, math scores rose 20 percentage points, meaning that 57 percent of students in third through eighth grades met or exceeded standards. Reading scores rose 10 percent, to 51 percent. This spring an eight-point hike in math scores across the grades, to 65 percent, meeting standards, and a 5 point rise in reading scores, to 42 percent for eighth graders, was cause for celebration--even though reading scores for third and fourth graders dropped an average of four points.
But the numbers are hotly contested. Diane Ravitch, a former education official in the George Bush Sr. White House, questions why the chancellor counts 2002 as his starting point, when the initiatives did not kick in until January 2003. Test scores can be volatile instruments. The recent eighth-grade reading scores were up all across New York State this year by eight points, from 49 to 57 percent, an indication that the test itself was likely easier. The graduation rate is another bugaboo: The state calculates a 50 percent graduation rate for the city (not 60 percent), because it figures GEDs, English-language learners and special-education diplomas differently from the city. Overall, the radical overhaul seems to have produced modest improvement rather than landmark progress. "Their gains are respectable, not historic," Ravitch told a packed crowd at St. John's University last March.
Perhaps the most notable development has been the mobilization of opponents from among disparate city groups. An overflow crowd of 1,000 angry New Yorkers descended on Manhattan's St. Vartan's Cathedral in late February to protest the latest round of changes. It was a rare coalition of forces, angry enough to set aside their individual agendas to unite against the Department of Education. Here were City Council members, elected officials, activist groups like ACORN, the Working Families Party, labor unions, an immigrant coalition and citywide parent groups.
The most powerful group, and the one that gave this assembly its institutional clout, was the UFT, which has more than 100,000 members. Its legendary statewide political power was forged in the 1960s by black and Latino community groups battling for control of the schools. In recent years the union had made peace with its past, creating real ties to parent groups. In many ways Klein and Bloomberg helped create this assembly by cutting off channels once used routinely by the too-powerful union to influence policy. The effect was to alienate both teachers and parents, pushing them together. "No administration has been as hostile to the union as this one," said the UFT's Casey.
The mayor's response to this historic show of unity has been to dismiss it as a small collection of parents influenced by powerful self-interested groups. But he may be ignoring this group of pols and parents at his peril. Rumblings that February night at Hostos called for an end to mayoral control. The measure is up for renewal by the New York State Legislature in 2009.
Few New Yorkers have any appetite for returning to the old school board days. But most would like to see some democratic checks and balances built into what has become a two-man show. An independent elected board could oversee budget, contracts and policy decisions, and the selection of future chancellors. The input of seasoned educators is needed again at the highest decision-making levels. Regional boards could help return a sense of community to the city's schools. At the classroom level, school-based teams of teachers and parents should be given some real clout. As for testing, department officials would do well to emulate the Republican state of Nebraska, which has invested in teacher-created assessments (now threatened by new legislation) that do not choke curriculums.
Americans tend to hold only a few big ideas sacred. One of them is the promise that its unique public school system can offer every child a crack at the American dream. Ironically, the top-down corporate solutions popular with CEO superintendents like Klein wrest control from the people they claim to serve. "Public schools are the cornerstone of our democracy," said Irving Hamer Jr., Manhattan representative on the last Board of Education. "If we let them quietly slip through the public's hands, we are breaking the covenant of civic participation in this country."
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