Results tagged “dianeravitch”

City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein characterized last year's assessment test scores as "good," but critics say that they represent a lack of progress and a failure of Mayor Bloomberg's efforts to reform city schools. City kids' scores stayed flat on national assessment exams in math and reading, with a slight improvement in 4th graders' math scores and a drop in 8th graders' reading scores. "New York City’s eighth graders have made no significant progress in...

Today, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Klein released the "first-ever" public school progress reports with letter grades. The reports are meant to give educators and parents a snapshot of how well schools are doing and empower them to keep improving. Mayor Bloomberg said, "With these Progress Reports, parents no longer have to navigate a maze of statistics to determine how their child's school is doing and how it compares to others. And our educators now...

Randi Weingarten=Sandra Froman? Mayor Bloomberg had some fighting words for those who criticize his handling of the public schools. He compared his critics to the National Rifle Association: "You always do have the problem of a very small group of people who are single-issue focused having a disproportionate percentage of power. That's exactly the NRA." He also accused the UFT of wanting to roll back reforms:

There's the political power of people who just want to pander when they come out and they find something wrong with everything. There are the newspapers that can never find anything good enough. They're in favor of change but they've never yet in their whole publishing history seen a change that was good enough.

The UFT and other groups have questioned his next steps to further reorganize the school system. Weingarten, president of the the UFT, told the NY Times, “When the mayor sometimes is in a bad mood, he goes off in ways that he shouldn’t go off, but it’s not often that the mayor makes comments that are reminiscent of Giuliani-like comments. This may be a change of direction, because the mayor usually supports the teachers.”

Deuce Seven on the Williamsburg Bridge, by Will Sherman. And more here.

In other school news, two school employees were fired after four boys and their families filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Department of Education and one employee. The boys had been strip-searched when another teacher lost her ring and thought the boys had it.