Walcott Finally Tests PS 114 In Belle Harbor, Finds Mold And Asbestos In The School

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Test happy Chancellor Dennis Walcott refused to test PS 114 for mold after Sandy.

The school took on five to six feet of water, but Walcott said a sight review of the school showed everything was safe.

The DOE reopened the school, but many parents were afraid to send their kids back and called for mold tests to be conducted on the building.

The UFT joined them in that call.

Finally Walcott agreed and - you guessed it - the school came up positive:

Department of Education officials found mold and asbestos in a storm-damaged Queens school that last week was cleared for students to return — but only after parents insisted that the officials check.

It took scores of complaints from parents and meetings at the school before officials agreed to conduct tests for moisture and other hazards at PS 114 in Belle Harbor, which had been shut for more than a month after Hurricane Sandy.

Late yesterday, DOE officials quietly posted findings of subsequent tests online showing that areas of mold and asbestos in the auditorium and a nearby stairwell require removal.

Additionally, two of 14 water fountains showed elevated levels of copper.

In a letter to parents, Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm committed to removing the mold and asbestos over the coming two weekends.

Great - not just mold, but asbestos and elevated levels of copper in the water.

But Dennis Walcott said he had the results of all the necessary tests for PS 114 in hand and that he KNEW the school was safe.

It turns out Walcott was wrong.

Just as was the case at PS 51 where Walcott and the DOE continued to send students and staff to a school that they knew to be unsafe (in the case of PS 51, with cancer-causing toxins), Walcott and the DOE have sent Rockaway children and school staff into harm's way at PS 114 for god knows what reason.

Walcott was on record last week as saying the following:

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said the water is safe.

"It's part of people's perception that it hasn't been tested," Walcott said. "But it's being tested on a regular basis by the Department of Environmental Protection. That's for the community and the school is part of that community.

Oh, yeah the water is safe - except for the elevated levels of copper in two water fountains.

Teacher, why does my mouth taste like old pennies?

Walcott's refusal to test 114 for mold and other harmful toxins was unconscionable and you can bet those tests never would have happened had the parents, the union and the media not jumped all over him for refusing to conduct them.

Now it behooves everybody to watch closely and make sure the DOE follows up on the testing and removes the mold, asbestos, and copper.

It is not beyond reason to describe Dennis Walcott as one of the worst human beings on the planet.

Seriously, to refuse to test PS 114 for mold after all that storm damage and send kids back in to the school when all it was going to cost was the price of one DOE consultant overrun to test the place is beyond the pale.

The chancellor is happy to spend hundreds of millions on standardized testing but didn't want to spend $50,000 on mold tests - even though kids were back in the school and could get sick from the mold.

Really, one of the worst human beings on the planet.

Sign The Petition Demanding A Membership-Wide Referendum On The Evaluation Agreement

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Some people are under the impression that the UFT rank and file will get the chance to vote on the teacher evaluation agreement that Michael Mulgrew and the UFT leadership are currently negotiating with the NYCDOE.

That is not the case - there will be no up or down vote on the agreement.

Whatever Mulgrew agrees to with the NYCDOE will become the new evaluation system that you will work under.

The MORE caucus is demanding Mulgrew and the UFT put the agreement to a membership-wide referendum.

They have created a petition here that you can sign if you think the membership ought to get a say on the new evaluation agreement.

Here is the text of that petition:

A controversial new teacher evaluation system is under negotiation that will include the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.One expression of the controversy is that one out of every three principals in New York State has gone on record opposing the state law that provided the framework for the negotiations.Once negotiated, the new system will be the largest change to our working lives in years, greater than the changes in many union contracts.  Yet, there are no plans for a ratification vote by the membership.Therefore, we request a membership-wide referendum on whether to accept the new evaluation system once it is negotiated with the city, after a broad and democratic discussion about the new system within our union.

I urge you to sign that petition and send it to all your colleagues.

It may too late to stop the impending UFT sell-out on evaluations, but if thousands of teachers sign a petition calling for a membership-wide referendum, it will give Mulgrew and the leadership around him pause.

12/21/2012

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It's the apocalypse, folks.

If the United Federation of Teachers leadership does not sign off on a new teacher evaluation agreement that is full of junk science, an absurd observation rubric longer than War and Peace, a Student Learning Objective process so convoluted it will be essentially meaningless, and other so-called "reforms" imposed by the corporate education deformers, the world will end.

That's right - the end of human history as we know it is right in the hands of teachers.

Because the Mayans knew, when they ended their calendar on 12/21/12, that the United States public education system would be in crisis and only "Bolder, Faster Change" in the form of high stakes tests in every grade in every subject, teacher evaluations tied to those test scores via a value-added measurement algorithm with a margin of error bigger than the hole in the ozone caused by human hair products, and the immediate firing of as many "ineffective" (i.e., expensive veteran teachers) as possible can save us all from destruction.

And so that figure of the spirit, that man in touch with the soul of the universe, the Dalai Bloomberg, has come to us all with a plan to save humanity from total destruction.

Agree to the evaluation system the NYCDOE has put before the UFT leadership or else.

The phone hacking criminals running the NY Daily News concur - agree to the new system or suffer the wrath of the universe.

So what if the value-added measurement they're going to use on you is error-riddled, subject to wide swings in stability and will eventually tar every teacher as "ineffective" if they hang around long enough?

So what if the Danielson rubric has a 57 page checklist that will be used on you and it is nearly impossible (not to mention ludicrous) to be expected to hit all the criteria on the checklist in a 45 minute class, day-in and day-out, as the new evaluation system will mandate?

So what if the Student Learning Objectives process, which will account for 20% of the evaluation grade, will be complex, convoluted and useless?

So what if the education leaders at the NYCDOE, the NYSED, and the Regents are misleading the public about the "objectivity" and "scientific" nature of this system and know that it has been specifically designed to give districts the tools they need to shed thousands of teachers every year and turn the teaching profession into a right-to-work job?

We simply must agree to what the Dalai Bloomberg has put in front of us, even though we know the system is unfair, unjust and rigged or the world as we know it will end.

You have been warned, my friends - agree to the worst possible teacher evaluation system or be responsible for the end of humanity.

The future is in your hands.

I Wish The Criminals At The NY Post Were Right About This

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The same editors who decided to run a photo of a man about to be killed by a subway train are wringing their hands over the new teacher evaluation system fight between the Mayor of Money and the United Federation of Teachers.

They say that no matter what agreement the two parties come to, the evaluation system will be meaningless because the union will never agree to anything that "has teeth" and is "meaningful".

What the criminals at the NY Post fail to say is that the new evaluation system will be made up of the following components:

Tests in every subject in every grade, both city and state, simply to grade teachers.

A value-added measurement using those scores that is error-riddled and unstable, just like the one the city used for the infamous Teacher Data Reports.

A classroom observation rubric with a checklist the size of War and Peace that will be impossible to score well on.

An evaluation system that puts the test makers and data crunchers first, the children last.

Money and resources stripped from the classroom and given over to testing.

A Student Learning Objective process so convoluted that it will mean nothing when the city analyzes the data and decides which teachers have "added value" to their students' learning.

What the criminals at the NY Post fail to tell their readers is that this system is rigged against teachers, that teachers can come up "effective" on all three components of the system - the state test part, the local "assessment" part and the subjective part - and still be declared "ineffective."

The criminals at the NY Post are right about one thing, though: this system will not improve education for students.

But not because it is without teeth, as they say in their editorial.

Rather because it is half-baked and unpiloted, uses unproven or disproven evaluation methods and puts teachers in competition with each other on the GREAT APPR BELL CURVE so that it now becomes increasingly difficult to help colleagues and students of colleagues when that help will be held against you come evaluation time.

Just see how well this same evaluation system - Rank and Yank - worked at Microsoft.

That's what we have coming to schools all over the state in the form of APPR.

So the criminals at the NY Post are wrong about the union agreeing to a "toothless" evaluation system.

Quite simply by agreeing to the system they did, first during the initial Race to the Top legislation process, then by dropping the lawsuit they won against the Regents and the NYSED over making 40% of a teacher's evaluation tied to tests, they have allowed a system that is unjust, unfair, and harmful for both students AND teachers to be put into place.

So Much For Finland

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Read this article in Gates Education Week about the TIMSS and PISA scores and you will learn that on the latest tests, Finland is no longer the "miracle" education performer:

Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said in an email that the new results call for some rethinking of what he calls the “Finnish miracle story.”

“If Finland were a state taking the 8th grade NAEP, it would probably score in the middle of the pack,” he said, in a reference to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. He said that four of the U.S. states that participated in the 8th grade TIMSS—Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Indiana—posted scores that were higher than Finland’s by statistically significant margins in math, while three more had results that were about the same.

“Finland’s exaggerated reputation is based on its performance on PISA, an assessment that matches up well with its way of teaching math (applying math to solve ‘real world’ problems),” he wrote. “In contrast, TIMSS tries to assess how well students have learned the curriculum taught in schools.”

At the same time, Finland made a stronger showing than the United States in 4th and 8th grade science on TIMSS. In the 8th grade, for instance, Finland scored 552, compared with 525 for the United States. Measured another way, 53 percent of Finnish 8th graders reached either the “high” or the “advanced” level, the top two categories, compared with 40 percent of their peers in the United States.

Even so, Finland’s performance fell short of the results for the top-performing East Asian countries. It also was lower than Massachusetts’ score of 567.

The hand-wringing and kvetching that accompanies these articles about international test comparison studies are over the top.

The obsession with data tracking leads many so-called (and usually self-professed) education "experts" to declare a latest, greatest "miracle" every time out and shriek about how we MUST follow this latest, greatest "miracle" or risk falling into second class country status.

It's interesting how often the "latest, greatest" miracle is shown to be neither the "greatest" nor a "miracle" a couple of studies down the road.

Here in the U.S. we of course had the "Houston Miracle" and the "Texas Miracle" and the "Florida Miracle" and all of those were eventually exposed as fraudulent or oversold.

Now Brookings and a few others in this latest Gates Education Week article on the international scores are saying, "Maybe Finland, while a terrific performer, isn't the 'miracle' we thought it was..."

This begs the question, why do we listen to all the hand-wringing and kvetching from the so-called (and often self-professed) education "experts" when so many of the "miracles" they share with us turn to either be fraudulent (as in Houston) or oversold (as in Finland.)

Is it just possible that the so-called (and often self-professed) education "experts" don't know what they're talking about ?

 Is it possible there is more to education than just this obsession with data?

Is it possible these international test comparisons tell us a lot less than we think about the state education?

Pork alliance removes National Pork Board from Alliance Partners list

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U.S. Food Policy reported on Wednesday that the National Pork Board (a federal checkoff program) was listed as an Alliance Partner on the website of the Pork Alliance, a lobbying entity sponsored by the National Pork Producers Council (a private-sector trade association).

It is against the law for federal checkoff funds to be used for lobbying.

I see today that the Pork Alliance website no longer lists the National Pork Board.  The alliance must have removed the board from the list in the past 3 days, after a complaint was filed by the Humane Society of the United States.

Here, for the historical record, is my screen capture from last Wednesday (click the image for a higher-resolution view).  The National Pork Board appears right below Merck Animal Health.

New USDA organic agriculture survey

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USDA in October released results from its 2011 survey of certified organic production.  Previously, the most recent such statistics came from a 2008 survey. 

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition explains how the survey results could be used to make crop insurance more accessible to organic producers.  Carolyn Dimitri, who used to do economic research on organic agriculture for USDA, and who now teaches and blogs at New York University, summarizes the differences in methods and results from 2008 to 2011.

The one sweeping generalization that I quickly reached is that the number of certified farms with sales declined between 2008 and 2011 for most, but not all of the commodity categories. At the same time, the value of sales increased for most categories, even for those with a decline in the number of farms. Several possible explanations come to mind: (1) farms exited the organic industry after 2008 because of the recession; (2) farms grew larger in terms of acres, which I can check (but haven’t yet); (3) the value of farm sales increased because prices farmers were paid increased, or because they were more productive, or a combination.