Tales of Corruption at the NY State Ed Department

NYSED is corrupt and provides cover for numerous corrupt school districts and, now, charters. Some time folks should compare NYS Comptroller audit reports with NYSED's various district monitoring reports, etc. We have a complete failure of an education governance situation here, and whether any particular school, district or charter (or private school, or state-approved private special ed. school) will get a bad report out of some NYSED staffer is totally dependant on the observed entity's political pull.

The examples you cite are appalling - but honest, there are ones just as bad for public school districts. In fact, a few years ago, the USDOE OIG audited one Long Island district - or tried to - and reported publicly that it was "unauditable." NYSED did a snit on the OIG, but the fact is that the district's own auditors reported it had stopped keeping any records at all re what staff paid with Title 1 funds did and strongly recommended that such records be maintained again. The outside auditors made the same negative findings and recommendations 3 years in a row. NYSED received these audits and had a legal responsibility to do something to enforce corrective action and did absolutely nothing at all - then the USDOE OIG stepped in. And the district was forced to refund a lot of Title 1 money to the feds ... over NYSED's dead body. Wyandanch, if anyone cares.

Don't ask about what NYSED does when it gets a call stating that a public school district administrator is molesting a child. I did ... once ... at a professional conference on school molestation of students by adults, and the reply simply sickened me. If it was a charter administrator alleged to be doing the molesting ... result would be exactly the same.

Whatever NYSED exists for, it does not exist for the furtherance of NY children's educations. Not by a long shot.

Dee Alpert, Publisher
SpecialEducationMuckraker.com


Leonie Haimson wrote:

Love this one:

For example, when State Education Department staff recommended the renewal of Western New York Maritime Charter School’s charter, the supporting memorandum praised the school’s new-found stability – an oblique reference to four principals, or commanders, in four years. The SED staff memo said the school had “faced and met many challenges” and had “learned from its experiences.” “The school has promptly and satisfactorily addressed any and all issues identified in its annual audits and by the Office of the State Comptroller,” the SED memo stated. “The School has implemented (and will continue to implement) strong fiscal monitoring procedures and internal controls.”^[1]

The State Education Department memo, however, did not reference the fact that the Erie County district attorney had filed criminal charges against management for misappropriating $95,000 from 2005 to 2007; that the school could not account for nearly $10,000 in federal grants; that the school’s parent-teacher group had complained that its funds had been stolen; and that charter management had hired an administrator with a criminal record.^[2]

Five months ago, the State Education Department recommended the renewal of the Niagara Charter School’s charter, despite a finding of “misallocation of funds.” The monitoring report, which was not made public,^[3] called the Niagara Charter School “a school in disarray” and noted, “There is, at the very least, the pervasive appearance of fiscal mismanagement and less than ethical behavior on part of the Board of Trustees and school administration.”^[4] Staff recommended and the Regents approved a three-year renewal of the Niagara Charter School’s charter. ^[5]

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-7320
classsizematters@gmail.com
www.classsizematters.org
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonie-haimson

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^[1] SED staff memo to Board of Regents recommending charter renewal, December 8, 2008.

^[2] Buffalo News, March 18, 2010

^[3] Record made available by State Education Department upon specific request, following school’s renewal

^[4] State Education Department, Comprehensive Monitoring Report, March 11-12, 2008

^[5] Memorandum to EMSC Committee, December 4, 2009 and minutes of the January meeting, Board of Regents

New York State Test Scores: Who to Believe?

More on the NY State’s disappointing, even stagnant NAEP results, from the eminent scholar and honorary NYC public school parent, Diane Ravitch.

City Journal Summer 2007.

City Journal Current Issue


Diane Ravitch
New York State Test Scores: Who to Believe?
National tests cast doubt on New York’s feel-good story.
27 September 2007

The release of national test scores in reading and math on September 25 was an embarrassment for the New York State Department of Education. While scores nationally and in many individual states showed modest gains between 2005 and 2007, New York State did not. Only in fourth-grade math was there significant improvement.

The federally-sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is known in the education world as the gold standard of testing, has been collecting test samples of students in the states since 1992. In the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002, Congress authorized NAEP testing in every state to serve as an external monitor of the states’ own claims about their progress. The states develop and administer their own tests, and Congress rightly worried about the possibility that states would dumb-down their tests to inflate the results.

The latest NAEP had very little good news for New York State. Only a few months ago, the state’s Education Department celebrated large test-score gains for eighth-grade students in both reading and math. In May and June, The New York Times ran front-page stories heralding major improvements in the state test scores for eighth-graders: “Eighth Graders Show Big Gain in Reading Test” and “City Students Lead Big Rise on Math Tests.” The State Education Department reported that in grade 8, the proportion of students meeting state reading standards jumped from 49.3 percent to 57 percent, a remarkable increase in a single year, especially in a grade where academic performance had stagnated for several years. Similarly, the state reported that the proportion of eighth-graders meeting the state’s math standards jumped from 53.9 percent to 58.8 percent. These are very impressive gains.

Unfortunately, all of the state’s gains in eighth grade disappeared in the NAEP results—a fact the New York Times mentioned not on its front page but at the end of a story on page A20. The NAEP tests performance in two ways: by scale scores (on a scale from 0-500), and by achievement levels (“below basic,” “basic,” “proficient,” and “advanced”), which are supposed to show what students ought to know and be able to do in their grade. The results:

Only in fourth-grade mathematics did New York students post a solid gain, from a scale score of 238 in 2005 to 243 in 2007. In eighth-grade mathematics, where the state claimed big increases on its own tests, the NAEP scale score was 280 in 2005 and 280 in 2007.

In fourth-grade reading, New York’s scale score went from 223 in 2005 to 224 in 2007, not a significant change. In eighth-grade reading, New York’s scale score went from 265 in 2005 to 264 in 2007, again not a significant change.

The achievement levels demonstrate the severity of the “achievement gap” among different groups in New York. In fourth-grade reading in 2005 and 2007, 19 to 20 percent of white and Asian students were “below basic,” as compared with 48 to 50 percent of black and Hispanic students. These numbers did not change significantly from 2005 to 2007. The size of the gap is similar in eighth-grade reading and eighth-grade math, where about half of black and Hispanic students score “below basic.” Only in fourth-grade math did a majority of black (69 percent) and Hispanic (74 percent) students score at or above the basic level of performance, while 94 percent of white and Asian students ranked at basic or above in 2007.

The New York State Education Department has already suffered a series of embarrassments. A federal study released in June held that New York’s tests were not as rigorous as those administered in many other states. The New York Daily News reported early in September that the state’s math tests in 2005 were easier than those given in 2002. A few days later, The New York Sun reported on a study which found that the reading tests of 2005 were also easier than in previous years.

The disparity between state and national test scores points to one conclusion: New York State—with its multi-billion-dollar annual investment in public education—needs an independent, nonpartisan, professional audit agency to administer tests and report results to the public. Such an agency should be staffed by testing professionals who have no vested interest in whether the scores go up or down. At present, when scores go down, the public is told that the test was harder this year; but when scores go up, state officials never speculate that the test might have been easier. Instead, they high-five one another and congratulate the Regents for their wise policies and programs.

What the public needs are the facts. No spin, no creative explanations, no cherry-picking of data for nuggets of good news. Just the facts.

Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Hoover Institution. From 1997-2004, she was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which supervises NAEP.

Calls Intensify For State Test Audit

By ELIZABETH GREEN
Staff Reporter of the Sun
September 26, 2007

http://www.nysun.com/article/63411

Differences between state tests and a national benchmark test whose results were released yesterday are ramping up calls for an independent audit of the New York State test.
Results from the test known as the nation's report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, showed the scores of New York State students remaining essentially flat in most categories but one, fourth-grade math, where students showed improvements. State tests, meanwhile, have shown declining fourth-grade scores — but improvements in eighth-grade scores.
A Manhattan Institute scholar, Sol Stern, called the discrepancies a "spanking" for the New York State Education Department. "Its claims of fabulous improvements in eighth-grade reading and math scores for 2007 have proven to be just more hype," he said.
A spokesman for the state education department, Tom Dunn, said concerns are flat-out wrong. The NAEP test is not given to all students but to a sample, about 2% of students in New York per grade, and each student takes only a portion of the test, he said. The U.S. Department of Education, which administers the test, advises that results be treated as "estimates," he added.
The president of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, called the discrepancies a "cloud" on returns showing achievement overall went up nationwide.
"What these tests suggest is New York State has a very serious problem with its testing program," an education historian, Diane Ravitch, said, calling for an audit of the program.
The state education commissioner, Richard Mills, praised gains made by minority students. Since 1998, the report showed, the percentage of black and Hispanic students who are proficient in reading and math increased significantly, with increases hovering around 20 points.