UPDATED: Rally at City Hall and Close Encounters of the Heated Kind with Mayor Mike by Leonie Haimson - NYC Public School Parents:

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We had a great rally this morning at City Hall to protest the budget cuts to schools. About fifty parents turned up, some with their children, with signs pasted to their jackets saying, “Do not balance the budget on our backs.”

Joining us were Council Members Robert Jackson and Margaret Chin of Manhattan, Mark Weprin of Queens, Jumaane Williams and Matthieu Eugene of Brooklyn, and Diana Reyna of Brooklyn and Queens, as well as Leroy Barr, staff director of the UFT and Donovan Richards, CM Sanders chief of staff.

At the end of the rally we had an unexpected encounter with Bloomberg himself. Pictures from the rally and our encounter with Mayor Mike are now up on the CSM Facebook page .

At the press conference, I showed charts revealing the sharp increases in class size that have already occurred, as well as a chart with the worsening distribution of income in NYC and NY state.

Eliminating 6,000 teaching positions would be an absolute disaster for our children, and would lead to even further increases in class size, probably the sharpest in over 30 years. I concluded that though the mayor may want to roll over the city’s $3 billion surplus, we as parents will not roll over when it comes to our children.

All of the elected officials were eloquent in their defense of our children’s right to a quality education, and pledged that they would fight hard to make sure that there would be no further increases in class size or any cuts to the classroom in the city’s education budget. I handed CM Jackson our petition with over 1,000 signatures and asked him to give it to Speaker Quinn, who will have to protect our children in the budget negotiations.

He emphasized that there was no need for any cuts with the city’s $3 billion surplus; Mark Weprin pointed out that there were plenty other areas that were expendable in the DOE spending policies, including wasteful testing, technology enhancements, consultants and private contracts. CM Chin said as a former teacher and married to a teacher, she knew full well how important class size is and that we cannot afford to let class sizes grow any more. Both Jumaane Williams and Matthieu Eugent pointed out that focusing on improving education is the best investment the city can make.

Sue Dietrich, Staten Island parent and head of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, representing all the PTAs in the city, said her son’s class was already at 34 students; and that it can’t possibly go any higher. She pointed out that the city’s arts programs, like the great chorus at PS 22 that sang at the Oscars, could be lost if there were any more budget cuts to schools.

Noah Gotbaum, President of CEC D3, said the Governor and the Mayor should be ashamed of themselves for favoring millionaires over our kids, and that though Cuomo talked about “shared sacrifice” it was hard to see what if anything the wealthy had sacrificed in this budget.

Lisa Donlan, parent leader and member of the Grassroots Education Movement led us in a chant, “Whose schools? Our schools! Whose taxes? Our taxes? Whose priorities? Our priorities!” Sarah Porter, parent activist from PS132K in Williamsburg, wrapped up by pointing out the mayor’s math was defective and that he needed remedial lessons, since there was no need to cut 6,000 teachers with such a large surplus.

After the rally was over, some of us remained talking on the plaza in front of City Hall, including Sarah, Tina Schiller of PS 234, and Benita Rivera of the Mother’s Agenda, when I noticed the Mayor walking down the steps.

I waved to him and shouted, “Please, Mr. Mayor, do not balance the budget on our children’s backs” and that “Millionaires should pay more, including you!”

To my surprise, he briskly walked over to us. He asked if we were teachers, and we said, no, parents. I showed him the class size charts, and asked him if he would want to have his child in such large classes; how could he consider letting them increase even more?

He countered by saying that city had been subjected to big cuts from the feds and the state and we should criticize them, not him. I followed up by pointing out that the city’s had a $3 billion surplus, but he claimed that there was no surplus; when we disputed that, he added that he needed to save the surplus for the year after.

I told him that I knew he wanted to roll over the surplus, but our kids cannot have their education further damaged. We said he should use the surplus now to fill holes in this year’s budget, and if he needed more money, he should raise city taxes on the wealthy. He said, go tell Albany; and that he’s been up there arguing with them.

We pointed out that he didn’t go to Albany to support the surtax on the wealthy but that he had instead opposed this. Several times he said, “Listen to me! I won’t talk unless you listen to me!” After about five minutes, he got tired of the discussion, and walked off.

Luckily, Benita Rivera was snapping photos with her cell phone; these are on the CSM Facebook page along with earlier ones from the rally, taken by Michelle Faljean of the SI Federation of PTAs:

Thanks Benita, Michelle, and everyone who came today!

After our exchange with the mayor, Erin Einhorn, City Hall Daily News reporter ran over, along with Samantha Gross of the AP, to ask us about it. She has already posted an account of our debate on the DN blog, entitled Mayor Bloomberg Listens! (But Does He Hear?)

UPDATED: The mayor's press spokesman has responded and so have I. several times on the DN blog. Go check it out!

Go check it out and leave a comment! And please leave a comment below.

Leonie Haimson: Mayor Bloomberg Booed and Excoriated for his Proposed Teacher Layoffs and Attacks on Seniority Protections - The Huffington Post

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Mayor Bloomberg was roundly booed at the annual Queens St. Patrick's Day parade on Saturday for threatening to lay off of over 4,000 teachers and his attack on their seniority rights. Check out the video below and excerpts from the Daily News, NY Post andNY1:

Chants of "Save our Teachers" rang out from pockets of the green-clad crowd that lined Newport Ave. and Rockaway Beach Blvd. in Belle Harbor....

Anthony Hannon, 80:...."What he's doing to our teachers and our Fire Department - it's shameful. Who cares about bike lanes? He's an idiot," sputtered Hannon. ....

"The classrooms are already overcrowded and now he wants to lay off thousands of teachers?"asked Jeanne O'Leary, who has been teaching at nearby Public School 104 for 10 years.

... Sondra Smith, 38, a special education teacher at Public School 114... has been teaching in the city school system for 15 years. Despite the mayor's prediction that thousands of teachers could be laid off next academic year, she said she did not fear for her job. Heckling the mayor as he turned the corner onto Rockaway Beach Boulevard, Ms. Smith yelled, "You're against the teachers, and you're against the kids."

She was appalled that she has had to buy school supplies for her 30 students, complained that the classes were overcrowded, and thought that the mayor should embrace a city tax at sporting events to make up for any shortfalls in the school budget. "There are so many things the mayor could be creatively thinking of to save teacher jobs and serve the kids, and he doesn't because he doesn't care," she added."

See also this AP article, in which the destructive effects of the layoffs is explored:

"The proposed New York City cuts, combined with attrition over the last two years, would take roughly one in eight teachers out of the city's public schools and could swell classes to an average of 24 to 29 kids, depending on grade level - far outstripping the national public school average. ...Parent advocates say the city is ignoring an already-broken agreement made in 2007 that was supposed to reduce class sizes across the board."

In the article, Professor Alan Krueger of Princeton, (former chief economist of both the US Labor Department and the Treasury Department) points out that for every dollar spent on keeping class sizes low, the economic benefits would be expected to yield two dollars in terms of increased salaries for these student later in life.

NY1 video excerpt below:

The Kids Need Good, Experienced Teachers by Gabe Pressman - | NBC New York

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A battle is going on across the country for the soul of public education.

I went to public schools in the Bronx. They provided a pretty good education. The public school system has experienced ups and downs since then--but basic principles have remained intact: that every child deserves a good, free education, that teachers with experience are cherished, that parents should be invited into the educational process to work with teachers and administrators for the good of their children, that politicians and other outsiders have no business meddling with our educational system.

Today’s assault on public education is led by politicians across the country. Here in New York, Mayor Bloomberg and his advisers have far-reaching control over public schools. The mayor’s motives may be good but he is not an educator. And his main goals now appear to be to save money by eliminating veteran teachers [they get higher salaries than their juniors] and breaking the power of the teachers union.

Listening to members of the Bloomberg team talk, one might get the idea that the union members are horrible people who value their salaries more than the children they teach. As a reporter who has covered the public schools for many decades, I find that notion absurd. I also confess to a bias based on my life experience. I had three aunts who were teachers and I remember how dedicated they were to the kids and how they pursued courses to improve their ability to teach. And how they never lost their sensitivity to children nor their love of the teaching profession.

City Hall’s actions are somewhat sneaky: helping charter schools in their competition with public schools, without letting citizens know about it. The Independent Budget Office has just disclosed that, in the last year, charter schools received $649 more per student than regular public schools. The Daily News reports that charter schools are getting a windfall increase of 9 percent in New York City even as public schools are cut by more than 4 percent. Clearly the point seems to be: help the charter schools by starving the public schools.

The people of New York have not voted for such a policy. Do the taxpayers count for nothing?

Leonie Haimson, a parent leader, is angry at the way matters are unfolding. “Parents count for nothing in the way our leaders are handling the educational issues,” she told me. “We’ve been completely left out of major educational policy decisions.” Recently, she attended a Congressional hearing on education and, she says, “four parents testified and not one was for public schools.”

Haimson and other parents are organizing a group called Parents Across America, “to represent mothers and fathers in many school districts across this country. I don’t think it benefits our kids to create a system where there are so few incentives to make teaching a life’s work.

It’s interesting that this debate is not going on in Scarsdale or on Long Island. They’re looking to get rid of senior teachers in our most congested urban areas. The twin objectives are solely to destroy unions and save money.”

What is so sad, as this debate continues, is that our political leaders seem to place so little value on the wisdom of experienced teachers. Good teachers are essential to educating our most valuable resource, our children. The politicians seem to think that saving money is more important than saving children.

CNN Debate on Class Size on MLK's Birthday - CNN

Leonie Haimson (ClassSizeMatter.org) debates with Matthew Chingos on CNN yesterday.

Cathie Black Press Conference at Tweed Courthouse

Click here to view these pictures larger

The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman (Movie Trailer) - Grassroots Education Movement (GEMNYC)...

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Parents and teachers on the front lines fighting for Real Education Reform.


A group of parents and educators with Grassroots Education Movement (GEMNYC) are responding to the "Waiting for Superman" film with a film of their own. They are the real reformers. As one patent activist says, "Are you waiting for Superman? YOU are the Real Heroes." This is the trailer. The film is expected to be released in late October.


For more info visit:


The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman


Grassroots Education Movement (GEMNYC)

Leonie Haimson: Parents Across America Demand to Be Heard - The Huffington Post

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Last spring, a new grassroots organization called Parents Across America wrote a letter to President Obama, pointing out how parents had been left out of the education discussion at the national level. From the administration's "Race to the Top" proposals to their proposed "Blueprint" for revising NCLB, parent input has been either dismissed or ignored.

We wrote an article for Education Week, calledShutting Out Parents, about how this conscious disregard of the parent perspective was unacceptable, and must be reversed.

We explained how we wanted to see a quite different set of reforms, focusing on strengthening neighborhood schools rather than closing them down, by providing smaller classes, more parent involvement, and a well-rounded curriculum. Moreover, we pointed out how these reforms are research-based, rather than the highly experimental policies of privatization and test-based accountability currently promoted by this administration.

Why do we reject the administration's priorities? Many parents have already seen the devastating effects of such top-down policies in our children's schools, massively increasing the amount of test prep, narrowing the curriculum, sacrificing art, music and science, and degrading the quality of education in numerous ways.

The President responded in a speech by mischaracterizing his critics as supporters of the status quo, which could not be further from the truth. As public school parents, no one understands better than we there needs to be positive, meaningful reforms in our schools.

We wrote a follow up letter to the President, recently published in the Washington Post's Answer Sheet.In it, we asked him to insist that parent input in decision-making at the national level be instituted at the U.S. Department of Education.

We also focused on the problems inherent in the euphemistically called "School Improvement Grants," a federal program that is forcing districts across the country with large numbers of poor children to close down their neighborhood schools, convert them to charters, or fire half their teaching staffs.

Like the misconceived "urban renewal" concepts in vogue in the 1950's and 1960's , we have seen how these sorts of policies have ripped apart communities and hurt our most vulnerable children.

At the same time, schools across the country are experiencing huge budget cuts, causing the loss of thousands of teaching positions, and even larger class sizes. This is not change we can believe in.

Since our letter was published, we have received enthusiastic response from parents across the country, who are understandably distressed about how their ideas for positive change are being dismissed or ignored.

And we are not alone. See the responses to the recent 2010 PDK/Gallup Poll, "A Time for a Change," in which only 34% of Americans gave Obama an "A" or a "B" on his education policies. The poll showed especially low support for the administration's insistence that public schools be closed down or privatized rather than helped to improve.

More recently, Arne Duncan has gone on a tour of the country, in an attempt to show that he is responsive to the concerns of students, parents and teachers, but has shown no signs of changing his policies.

Our letter to Obama is below. If you agree with our views, leave a comment below, join our Facebook page and/or email us at parentsacrossamerica@gmail.com.

__
Dear President Obama:

Several weeks ago, we wrote to you about our concern that your proposed "Blueprint for Reform" did not acknowledge the critical role parents must play in any meaningful school improvement process. We also expressed our serious reservations about some of the Blueprint's strategies.

Our goal is simple - to ensure that our children receive the best possible education. As parents, we are the first to see the positive effects of good programs, and the first line of defense when our children's well-being is threatened. Our input is unique and essential.

Recently, Secretary Duncan announced that he would require districts that receive federal school improvement grants (SIG) to involve parents and the community in planning for schools identified for intervention. We appreciate this response as a first step; however, more needs to be done.

First, leadership must come from the top. We would like to see meaningful, broad-based parent participation not just in our local districts, but at the U.S. Department of Education, where critical decisions are being made about our children's education.

Second, we need more than rhetoric to feel confident that only educationally sound strategies will be used in our children's schools. The current emphasis on more charter schools, high-stakes testing, and privatization is simply not supported by research. Disagreement on these matters is not a result of parents clinging to the "status quo," as you have recently asserted. No one has more at stake in better schools than we do - but we disagree with you and Secretary Duncan about how to get them.

We need effective, proven, common-sense practices that will strengthen our existing schools, rather than undermine them. These include parent input into teacher evaluation systems, fairly-funded schools, smaller class sizes and experienced teachers who are respected as professionals, not seen as interchangeable cogs in a machine. We want our children to be treated as individuals, not data points. And we want a real, substantial role in all decisions that affect our children's schools.

More specifically, and urgently, we insist on being active partners in the formulation of federal school improvement policies. The models proposed by the U.S. Department of Education are rigid and punitive, involving either closure, conversion to charters, or the firing of large portions of the teaching staff. All of these strategies disrupt children's education and destabilize communities; none adequately addresses the challenges these schools face.

We also insist on being active partners in reforms at the school level, with the power to devise our own local solutions, using research-based methods, after a collaborative needs assessment at each individual school.

Our voices must count. If you listen, you will make real changes in your School Improvement Grant proposals as well as your "Blueprint" for education reform.

We look forward to your response and a brighter future for our children and our nation.

Sincerely, Parents Across America

Natalie Beyer, Durham Allies for Responsive Education (DARE), NC

Caroline Grannan, San Francisco public school parent, volunteer and advocate, CA

Pamela Grundy, Mecklenburg Area Coming Together for Schools, NC

Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters, New York, NY

Sharon Higgins, public school parent, Oakland, CA

Susan Magers, Parent Advocate, FL

Karen Miller, Public education advocate, Houston TX

Mark Mishler, active public school parent, former president, Albany City PTA*, NY

Sue Peters, public school parent and co-editor, Seattle Education 2010

Bill Ring, TransParent®, Los Angeles, CA

Lisa Schiff, board member of Parents for Public Schools*, member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco*, "School Beat" columnist for BeyondChron, CA

Rita M. Solnet, President, CDS, Inc.; Director, Testing is Not Teaching, FL

Dora Taylor, Parent and co-editor of Seattle Education 2010, WA

Julie Woestehoff, Parents United for Responsible Education, Chicago, IL

___
*for identificati

Obama Defends Sweeping Education Reforms in Face of Criticism from Minority and Teachers' Groups - Democracy Now!

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President Obama took on critics of his administration’s sweeping education reform plan on Thursday in a nearly hour-long speech at the National Urban League’s 100th anniversary convention. His address came on the heels of news that New York public school students are not performing nearly as well as prior state tests had revealed. We speak with Diane Ravitch, the former Assistant Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, and Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters.

Harsh Lessons for the Editors of the Daily News and NY Times by Leonie Haimson - NYC Public School Parents

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The Daily News editorial board finally gave up today, and admitted that the city’s big gains in state test scores over the Bloomberg era have been a vast mirage, in an editorial called Harsh lesson for N.Y.

They were apparently briefed by NY Commissioner Steiner on the findings of Harvard's Daniel Koretz, which, according to this editorial and numerous news reports, has found that almost half of NYC 8^th graders who score as proficient on the state exams will never graduate from high school; and three-quarters of those who do graduate need remedial courses before entering CUNY community colleges.

Yet the editors of the News have up to now been very willing victims of this deception – and a lapdog of every single false or exaggerated claim from the Bloomberg/Klein administration.

This, despite the warnings of many testing experts like Bob Tobias, Diane Ravitch, Jennifer Jennings, and Fred Smith that the standards had been lowered, and their own terrific reporting staff of Erin Einhorn, Meredith Kolodner, Rachel Monahan, and Juan Gonzalez, who, for at least three years, have revealed the numerous ways in which the state test scores have been systematically inflated over time.

Those of us at the NYC parent blog have also written about this extensively; see this entry from Steve Koss, analyzing an Erin Einhorn story from Sept. 4, 2007. Einhorn did an ingenious experiment with middle school students, showing how the math exams had gotten easier, and how SED and the DOE should have and probably were aware of this fact (I can’t find the original article online anymore.)

Let’s hope that the News editors will finally learn something from this “harsh lesson” and start showing some independence.

The NY Times also bears some of the blame. I have never seen an editorial in the Times that even mentioned the possibility of state test score inflation; and the paper hasn't yet reported on the Koretz' findings.

In August 2009, when Bloomberg was pressing for extension of mayoral control of the schools and his own re-election, the Times published a credulous story that recounted the steep increase in state test scores without directly quoting any of the skeptics; and also incorrectly used the DOE’s preferred date of 2002 instead of 2003 to claim improvements on the national exams called the NAEPs.



The article omitted any of the abundant evidence that the state exams and their scoring had become easier over time. (See my critique of their August 2009 article, NY Times falls in line with the Bloomberg PR spin control; and the response from Times editor, Ian Trontz: The NY Times response, and my reply. See also Wayne Barrett's take on our critique of the Times.)


What are the chances that now that Bloomberg has successfully won his battle to retain nearly unlimited control over our schools, and is in the midst of his third term, the editors of the News and the Times will apologize to their readers, and admit that the smell they’ve told us was roses was really an artificial chemical, successfully concocted to fool them? Don't hold your breath.

Victory for Parents and Kids in Stage One of Class Size Lawsuit! by Leonie Haimson - NYC Public School Parents

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We received a decision from Judge Barone of the NY Supreme Court this afternoon; the Court denied the city's attempt to dismiss the class size lawsuit. brought in January by the UFT, Class Size Matters, the NAACP, and other parents and community groups.

The city had claimed that only the State Education Commissioner could rule on whether they violated the law when it came to class size; inserted in the language of the law (at their insistence) was a clause that the “sole and exclusive remedy for any violation” would be a petition to commissioner, and “the decision of the commissioner on such petition shall be final and unreviewable.”

This language was the DOE’s sneaky attempt to ensure that they would never have to comply with the law, as they were convinced that the commissioner, then Richard Mills, would get them off the hook, as he had in so many cases before.

Yet the judge found the attempt to box out the court was likely unconstitutional, and that the legislature must have meant that the commissioner had the final right of review over the details of the class size plan, not the city’s compliance, especially as this entire matter flowed out of the court’s decision in CFE.

The city’s other main argument was that our petition should have gone to the Commissioner first in any case.

The judge agreed with our attorneys that this would cause unnecessary delay and would "irreparably damage the children who will during the course of these proceedings be relegated to learning in the overcrowded conditions which the legislature sought to alleviate.”

Yet another victory for NYC parents and their children's right to have a quality education, and another slap in the face of DOE’s outlaw mentality.

The Judge wrote they will see the attorneys in court on July 26 for a pre-hearing conference to start determining the facts of the case, i.e. whether the DOE has actually complied with its plan and reduced class size.

The facts on this issue are clear; they have not.

The Most Dangerous Man in America by Leonie Haimson - The Huffington Post

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Bill Gates sure is a popular guy. He is appearing this afternoon at the national conference of the American Federation of Teachers in Seattle, after having recently been the keynote speaker at the annual National Charter School convention.
Just this week, Warren Buffett announced he was giving an additional $1.6 billion to the Gates Foundation, which already had a $35 billion endowment; by far the largest in the nation.

In the past eight years, the foundation has spent nearly $4 billion promoting his personal education agenda; at first providing subsidies to districts that would agree to close down large neighborhood high schools and start small schools in their place; and now encouraging the rapid and widespread proliferation of charter schools. Gates also is aggressively promoting efforts to create programs that link teacher evaluation and compensation to standardized test scores.

And his generosity has not merely been expressed through his foundation. In 2008, he contributed four million dollars to help persuade state legislators to extend mayoral control in New York City .

As Gates explained at the time,

"You want to allow for experimentation.... The cities where our foundation has put the most money is where there is a single person responsible."

In other words, he supported mayoral control because it allowed him to impose his large-scale experiments on inner city public school students, without fear of resistance from communities; instead, he has only to convince one person. No wrestling with elected school boards, nor with parents who resent having their children's schools closed, privatized, or otherwise radically transformed; no need to bother with any of the messy artifacts of democracy which might stand in his way.

According to publicity materials put out by the Gates Foundation, it has "improved 2,602 schools, engaged 40 school districts, and reached at least 781,000 students."

Actually, it has reached lot more students than that, as its small schools initiative had a profound impact on inner city schools with the most disadvantaged children.

In recent years the Gates initiative has turned districts upside-down, at first establishing as many small schools as possible, creating thousands of new administrator jobs, eating up classroom space, and compelling the neediest kids who were excluded from the new small schools to travel long distances to attend even more overcrowded large schools in worse conditions than before, relegating those schools to failure.

The small schools created in their place, with several schools sharing one building, were forced to fight fiercely over scarce space, losing science labs, art rooms, libraries, and intervention spaces in the process. The same situation is now unfolding in NYC as the rapidly proliferating charter schools are wedged into public school buildings. As a result, the existing public school, with much higher concentrations of English language learners, special needs students, and homeless children, is now in many cases forced to provide instruction and mandated services in hallways and closets.

Such large-scale experiments on children would never be allowed similar fields like public health, where first carefully controlled pilot studies must be performed, with the informed consent of parents, to ensure that the proposed interventions have positive results, and the risk of collateral damage is minimal.

Consider the consent and experimentation protocols enforced when trials for new drugs are undertaken; or the consent and monitoring procedures that were used in developing and implementing the Salk vaccine program against polio, despite the urgency to battle the epidemic of a devastating disease.

Now the US Department of Education under Arne Duncan has taken up the Gates agenda, writ large, but with a perhaps better sense of public relations, calling this single-minded approach "innovation" rather than experimentation.
Former Gates officials fill the high ranks of the department; including Jim Shelton, former education program director at the foundation and now Assistant Deputy Secretary for "Innovation and Improvement". Joanne Weiss has already been promoted from heading its "Race to the Top " fund to become Duncan's chief of staff. Weiss was formerly COO of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which finances charter school expansion with dollars provided by Gates.

Not surprisingly, the $4.3 billion federal "Race to the Top fund" and the other grants being doled out by the US DOE are pushing states to eliminate their caps on charter schools, to forcibly close many schools and/or mandate that they fire their teaching staff; then turning them over to charter school operators or start new schools in their place while adopting teacher evaluation systems linked to standardized test scores.

After pretty much setting the priorities for the administration, the Gates Foundation then stepped in and "helped" states write their applications for the "Race to the Top" funds. Along the way, numerous states, in the midst of plunging tax revenues, changed their laws on charter schools and teacher evaluation to qualify for these funds.

All this, despite the fact that an expert panel from the National Academy of Sciences pointed out that there was no research backing for this agenda, and urged caution before the federal government essentially bribed cash-strapped states to enact its provisions.

Since the panel's findings had to go through a lengthy peer review process, as does all good science, it did not make the short deadline that the US DOE set for public feedback on the "Race to the Top" proposals, leaving them free to ignore it.

When George W. Bush adopted environmental policies that ignored the scientific consensus from expert bodies like the National Academy of Sciences, he rightfully got blasted by advocates and the mainstream media. Where was the outrage when the NAS experts on testing and evaluation were ignored by the Obama administration? Instead, there was ....silence. The NAS warning was pretty much ignored, as educators and politicians were steamrolled by an undemocratic oligopoly of the deep-pocketed Gates Foundation and elected officials (some authoritarian types like NYC's Bloomberg, others merely weak-kneed and cowed by the inside-the-beltway group think.).

But the Gates Foundation has been quite clever in ignoring or suppressing evidence that contradicts its corporate mindset.

In 2002, the foundation commissioned a survey through Public Agenda that asked teachers and parents about their views on small schools, before launching its big offensive. While the vast majority of parents and teachers responded that they believed that class size was more important than school size, the Foundation was not deterred from going forward with its goal of foisting small schools on the nation.

Small schools may or may not be preferable, yet whatever the size of the school, it is the classroom where most learning takes place, and the size of the class is thus an even more critical factor. Unlike the earlier generation of small school proponents, Gates never made class size an explicit, core element of his reforms, but instead focused on the more amorphous buzzwords of "rigor, relevance and relationships."

In 2006, Gates again commissioned a study, called "The Silent Epidemic", which found that three fourths of the high school dropouts surveyed responded that they would have been deterred from leaving school if they had been offered smaller classes:

While some of the students' best days in school were when teachers paid attention to
them, many others had classes that were so big that teachers did not know their names. In our
focus groups, participants repeated again and that they believed smaller class sizes would have helped ensure that teachers maintained order in the classroom and would have provided more individual attention. .... the need for smaller class sizes and more personal instruction emerged more than 12 separate times from the participants in our four focus groups Seventy-five percent of survey participants agreed that smaller classes with more one on one teaching would have improved students' chances of graduating.

Yet again, such findings did not seem to influence their policies, or lead them to encourage school officials to make smaller classes an essential element in their reform.

Subsequently, in independent evaluations of the small school initiative commissioned by the foundation, the value of class size came up repeatedly in interviews with students as teachers, as either the most critical aspect of their new schools, or as a focal point for dissatisfaction when despite their expectations, class sizes remained too large or had increased over time. Some of the new small schools failed miserably; while others succeeded, but when I asked the researchers who wrote these studies why they had not examined class size to determine its possible relationship to these schools' ability to improve student engagement and achievement, they responded that they had not been allowed by the Gates foundation to include this as a factor in their analysis.

The same problematic approach to research is reflected in the Gates' studies of charter schools. Earlier this year, Tom Toch, co- founder of Education Sector, an influential DC advocacy group, was commissioned to do a study of charter management organizations (CMO's), the best known of which is KIPP. Toch concluded after two years of investigation that the CMO's were unlikely to be able to maintain quality while expanding as rapidly as Gates, the NewSchools Venture fund, and others were recommending. His conclusions were changed without his knowledge; as he explained,

"I removed my name from the report because a good deal of my analysis was removed and, as published, the report does not reflect my research findings on the current status and future prospects of charter management organizations."

Among Education Sector's board members and one of the reviewers of this report was a high-level official from the NewSchools Venture Fund, the Gates-supported group that provides start-up money for charter school expansion. Soon after, Toch resigned from Education Sector, the organization that he had co-founded.

What is the next experiment Gates is likely to foist on our schools? It looks to be online learning, as the new magical answer to "personalized" instruction, without the unfortunate need to actually hire any teachers. This practice has been once again pioneered in NYC schools through the discredited practice of "credit recovery," in which students are encouraged to spend a few days online, cutting and pasting their answers into a software program, in order to quickly gain the credits they need to graduate, even if they have failed all their courses and/or never attended class. (See here and here for how this scam is now operating in NYC schools.)

Watch out, America! You have nothing to lose but your public school system, at the hands of the richest man in the country who, like a spoiled child carelessly playing with toys, breaks one after another.