New Rhee Scandal?: Forged Use of Names in Florida Parent Trigger Petitions, By 29 Accounts

UPDATE: With bi-partisan opposition, the parent trigger bill failed in the Florida Senate in a 20-20 tie vote, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reported April 30, 2013.
Thanks to madfloridian at DemocraticUndgeround.com for this story.
The players, Michelle Rhee, Democrat, StudentsFirst CEO; Kelli Stargel, Republican, Florida State Senate; Carlos Trujillo, Republican, Florida House of Representatives.

Morning update on Michelle Rhee's very iffy Parent Trigger petition in Florida.
Florida Republican legislator Kelli Stargel had a lot of trust in Michelle Rhee and her Students First group when she announced their petition in committee debate. She said she had 1200 signatures in support of a Parent Trigger law in Florida.

Serious Problems Remain for Stargel, Trujillo and Rhee on Parent Trigger Petition

As Kelli Stargel takes to the Senate floor today to defend her Parent Trigger bill, she will be wondering whether or not it was a good idea to get involved with Michelle Rhee.

There were likely to be enough votes and political muscle behind it without having to resort to submitting a fraudulent petition into the debate. But Stargel and House sponsor Carlos Trujillo were getting beat up badly in committee debate and had to counter the overwhelming numbers on unpaid state opponents who appeared at hearings to testify. Top dollar lobbyists weren’t going to be enough..

The House went first, and Trujillo began mentioning that he had 800 signatures of support in his pocket and then Stargel said she had 1200. Some quiet inquiries prompted some foot-dragging by legislative staffs until Stargel’s list, which Michelle Rhee provided was released last week. Miami Herald reporter Kathleen McGrory received the petition late in the week and discovered that a person she knew was on it. McGrory contacted that person who denied signing. After finding another denial, the Miami Herald contacted every person on the list and released the following yesterday afternoon:

On Sunday, The Herald/Times sent an email to each person who had allegedly signed the online petition. Of the 241 who responded, 212 confirmed their signatures..But 29 people said they had not signed the petition.

Here is the background in which Florida Blogger Bob Sikes enlarged on the Miami Herald's piece by McGrory. This is really so outrageous that Rhee continues to get away with actions such as this.

Rhee submits Parent Trigger petition with names who did not sign it?

He updated yesterday with responses from those who did not sign it.

UPDATE (1020AM CDT) From yesterday’s post: Bill Williamson of Palm Bay, Florida denies signing Rhee’s petition saying, ”to the best of my recollection, I do not recall signing a petition seeking support for the so-called Parent Trigger legislation. I do not support any legislation that would enable charter schools to shoulder their way into our public school systems without open discussion and local or statewide referendums.”

..."UPDATE (1034AM CDT) Chip Righter of Delray Beach didn’t sign either and emails “being a single man my entire life, and never married, I would have little interest in a petition seeking any parental position. If someone has rigged this petition, then they must be fired and banned for life to hold any future legislative positions. In the past I have had to pass drug and polygraph tests to get hired for employment. Why should we not demand all politicians to pass annual polygraph examinations to make sure the decisions they are making are in the best interest for American and stop what we all know is their individual financial gain. If politicians were doing nothing wrong why would refuse? American’s think the very lowest of politicians and they have earned their star.

Will Michelle Rhee get away with such antics this time? Or will someone call her on it?

The Parent Trigger law will probably pass in Florida today. But as Bob Sikes points out in his blog: "* What did Stargel know and when did she know it? Her evasions will have a short life expectancy that may get her through a vote today, but won’t last much longer. Not with a petition list that went public the minute she touted it. Trigger’s passage will only bring more heat as it will be tainted with evidence that fraud was committed."

See also this story of a video purporting to be from South Florida, actually being from a California-based advocacy group, from the Miami Herald, April 26, 2013: "Parent trigger bill spawns mystery video from supposed supporters."

Doubt has also been cast on a petition allegedly signed by more than 1,200 supporters of the parent trigger proposal. Three people whose names appear on the petition told The Herald/Times they never signed it.
“It’s sad that they are resorting to these tactics,” said Rita Solnet, a Palm Beach County mother whose non-profit organization Parents Across America opposes the parent trigger bill. “But it puts it all in perspective. It’s people from outside Florida and outside our schools who support this bill. It’s not the real parents.”
The parent trigger bill hits the Senate floor on Monday. It has already passed in the House.
The controversial proposal would enable a majority of parents to demand sweeping changes at failing public schools, including having a charter school management company step in. It would also require principals to notify parents when their kids are assigned to “ineffective” or out-of-field teachers for two consecutive years, and provide information about virtual-education alternatives.

‘Enough is Enough’: Florida Teachers Sue to Block Flawed Evaluation System

UPDATE: May 2, 2013, federal circuit court judge dismissed the teachers' lawsuit, the Miami Herald reported.
From NEA Today: ‘Enough is Enough’: Florida Teachers Sue to Block Flawed Evaluation System

April 16, 2013 by twalker  
Filed under Featured News, Top Stories

10 Comments

By Tim Walker
When elementary school teacher Kim Cook faced her end-of-the-year evaluation last November, she couldn’t help but feel a little nervous. Maybe she shouldn’t have – after all, a few weeks earlier she was voted teacher of the year by her colleagues and the administration at Irby Elementary in Alachua, Florida. But Cook knew that the state’s new evaluation system employed some truly bizarre formulas to rate teachers.
“I was concerned going in,” Cook recalls. “I knew what was in Senate Bill 736, but I still wasn’t really prepared for the result.”
The result was a rating of “unsatisfactory.” Outraged, Cook took to Facebook and posted the scoring details of her evaluation:

Lesson Study: 100/100 points x .20 (20%) = 20 points
Principal Appraisal: 88/100 points x .40 (40%) = 35.2 points
VAM Data: 10/100 x .40 (40%) = 4 points

Clearly, the VAM data significantly lowered Cook’s score. End of story? Hardly. Like Cook said, once you take a look at Florida’s new system, such skewered results may not be all that surprising, but the methods used to produce them are still unacceptable and, according to Cook, even unconstitutional.
Cook is now one of seven plaintiffs in a major lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Gainesville by the National Education Association (NEA) and the Florida Education Association (FEA). The lawsuit contends that the state’s new evaluation system violates the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

After she received her "unsatisfactory" rating, elementary school teacher Kim Cook posted this picture of herself on Facebook.

Senate Bill 736, championed by Gov. Rick Scott and passed in 2011, requires that at least 40 percent of teachers’ evaluation be based on a value-added model (VAM). This particular model comprises a bewildering formula that incorporates test data from students who some teachers have never taught. Irby Elementary only goes through grade 2, so the district used data from the grade 3-5 students in another school down the road (Alachua Elementary) to evaluate teachers in Irby Elementary. Cook’s VAM rating sunk because those Alachua students didn’t perform as well as projected by the state formula.
“It’s surreal. How can anyone justify evaluating teachers using students they have never taught or subjects they have never taught?” Cook asks.
She isn’t alone. Another plaintiff Bethann Brooks, a health science teacher at Central High School in Hernando County, received an evaluation that was in large part based on reading scores of all ninth and tenth graders at Central – many of whom have never been in her classroom.
Evaluations in the upcoming school year will be determined in the same unfair and arbitrary manner and could bring serious consequences. Teachers who are rated unsatisfactory two consecutive years or two out of three years in a row are subject to termination or non-renewal. Transfers, promotions and layoffs are based on the assigned performance rating, and starting next year, salaries will be based on the assigned performance rating as well.
NEA President Dennis Van Roekel praised the seven teachers who brought the lawsuit and said they will have the support of the countless teachers across the nation who are fed up with these flawed evaluation systems.
“Seven accomplished educators in Florida are pushing back against one arbitrary, irrational and unfair evaluation system,” Van Roekel said. “As unthinkable as it might seem for a teacher to be evaluated on the performance of students they do not teach or subjects they do not teach—we know that it’s happening and not just in Florida. NEA is proud to stand with our colleagues in Florida to say ‘NO’ to evaluation systems that don’t help improve student learning or the practice of teaching.”
“This lawsuit highlights the absurdity of the evaluation system that has come about as a result of SB 736,” added FEA President Andy Ford.
The legal action taken by these seven Florida educators will undoubtedly add to the growing momentum against misguided accountability systems that rob students of actual learning and tangle up teachers’ performance evaluations with unreliable test scores. In February, teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle garnered national attention when they refused to administer the flawed MAP test.
Kim Cook believes those politicians who are responsible for these policies should get ready to hear even more.
“Teachers are at the point now where we all have to stand up and say ‘enough is enough.’ These evaluations are designed without any foundation in research and they scapegoat dedicated and talented teachers. I consider myself a very good teacher and I feel the same way about my wonderful colleagues. We pour our heart and soul into our classrooms every day. We will not be devalued any longer.”
__________________________________
Educators’ voices are crucial to the development of well-designed, fair assessments. That’s why NEA encourages members to visit Assessment Advisor, an online site that lets them rate the assessments that they’ve used in their own classrooms.

New Affront to Chicago Teachers, Other Workers: Obama Nominates Penny Pritzker Commerce Secretary

OBAMA NOMINATES CONTROVERSIAL BUSINESS FIGURE PRITZKER TO HEAD COMMERCE DEPARTMENT - OPPOSITION PETITION GATHERS OVER 3,200 SIGNATURES - CONTROVERSY NOW MOVES TO SENATE, WHICH MUST CONFIRM OR REJECT THE APPOINTMENT - MASS CHI. STUDENT WALK-OUTS OVER HIGH STAKES TESTS, TEACHER FIRINGS
President Barack Obama has made a number of moves that have been affronts to teachers and to working people.

His nomination of Penny Pritzker is one of his most brazen affronts to these groups. Of course, one can easily see a pay-back in all this: Pritzker was a key fund-raiser for his 2008 presidential campaign and a behind the scenes funds donations bundler in the 2012 election campaign.

She has drawn controversy in Chicago as the highest-profile member of the Chicago Board of Education overseeing the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), playing most loyal advocate for mayor Rahm Emanuel's "reform" program of closing schools, opening charter schools and fighting against the Chicago Teachers Union. Additionally, she's drawn criticism for her general labor stand --so much so, that progressives launched a petition on the CREDO site gained over 3,200 signatures.

Even by February anticipation of an Obama nomination of Pritzker was giving labor activists the willies, as the Huffington Post reported Februrary 8, 2013. But Obama went ahead, anyway.

Here is the text of the CREDO ACTION petition to Obama against his Pritzker appointment:

Penny Pritzker is an anti-worker business mogul who should not be appointed to head the Commerce Department. Why is this important?

Recent reports indicate that President Barack Obama has chosen Penny Pritzker as a finalist for an appointment to head the Department of Commerce. She is a long-time friend of the President as well as a billionaire, anti-worker business mogul from Chicago. The President received tremendous support during his re-election campaign from unions and working families and it is unacceptable for him to name an anti-worker businesswoman for this position.

As a member of the Hyatt Hotel chain board Penny Pritzker has refused to intercede on behalf of struggling workers. Last summer Chicago workers who organized a rally had the hotel's heat lamps turned on during a mid-summer heatwave. Housekeepers have had their workloads nearly double without proper compensation. All the while Penny has remained silent.

She stood by as her family's hotel chain received a companywide letter from OSHA that warned them of hazards facing housekeepers on the job.

Ms. Pritzker serves on the Chicago Public School's Board of Education. In her role she attempted to bust the union with her fellow board members by closing public schools and opening charter schools, mostly operated by the well-connected, that do not recognize the local union. She has stated that students merely need enough skills in reading, mathematics, and science to be productive members of the workforce. Forget the arts, gym, music, etc.

Her time in public service epitomizes the 1% versus 99%. As one of the wealthiest people in the country she wants our children to become members of the workforce instead of creative, engaged, and well-rounded citizens of the country that she seeks to serve as Commerce Secretary.

Mr. President, we are worth more than a Penny.

Sign my petition urging President Obama to not appoint an anti worker businesswoman as the next Commerce Secretary of the United States.

Here's what some of the press has been saying about Obama's nomination of Pritzker:
The Chicago Tribune wrote a piece lauding Obama for the appointment. However it noted some trouble absent from many of the recent accounts on Pritzker's business history. In addition to the controversies regarding her management stance and her posture towards Chicago students and teachers, she has been involved in banks that got involved in sub-prime mortgages, a role for which she has received kid gloves treatment for her wrong-doing.

During the early 1990s, she chaired Superior Bank, a suburban Chicago lender her family co-owned that later collapsed amid accounting irregularities and subprime loans gone bad. Federal regulators seized it in 2001.

The Pritzkers and their co-owners settled with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for $460 million, without admitting liability. The FDIC also let the family share in part of a recovery the government obtained from the bank's auditor, Ernst & Young. Neither the federal insurance fund nor some depositors were ever made whole.

It was an unusual deal, and Pritzker no doubt will be asked about it.

Recent national press reports have only obliquely addressed Pritzker's contentious role as head of the Chicago Public Schools Board.

The union fought back against Pritzker and the Board's plans this winter with a satire scary bed-time story, “Stand Up to the Fat Cats,” and a coloring book, the Sun-Times reported December 12, 2012.

With good reason, Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis welcomed her departure from the Board. See this interview, published March 14, 2013, by the Chicago Mag, "Karen Lewis Says Good Riddance to Penny Pritzker."

In recent weeks (in Pritzker's absence, as she has moved on from the Board) Chicago students have been staging mass walk-outs (April 24) against standardized tests and Friday, May 2 against teacher firings. Jacob Chamberlain at Common Dreams noted the various controversies she has stirred.

President Barack Obama nominated another corporate billionaire to his cabinet on Thursday, announcing hotel heiress Penny Pritzker—also longtime Obama supporter and "heavyweight" fundraiser— as his pick to be Secretary of Commerce.

U.S. President Barack Obama announces Penny Pritzker, right, as his nominee for Secretary of Commerce (Reuters) As the Chicago Tribune reports:

Pritzker's nomination could prove controversial. She is on the board of Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels Corp., which was founded by her wealthy family and has had rocky relations with labor unions, and she could face questions about the failure of a bank partly owned by her family.

With a personal fortune estimated at $1.85 billion, Pritzker, 54, is listed by Forbes magazine among the 300 wealthiest Americans.

Ahead of her nomination, a petition organized by CREDO Action urged Obama not to nominate Pritzker, calling her "an anti-worker business mogul who should not be appointed to head the Commerce Department."

The Chicago Tribune adds:

Pritzker also could draw fire from labor leaders. Hyatt has long battled Unite Here in Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere. And Pritzker, who served on the Chicago Board of Education until she resigned in March, has been harshly criticized by the Chicago Teachers Union. When she stepped down, a union official said she "has a long and storied history as an anti-labor and anti-worker kind of boss. [...] She could also face scrutiny over the collapse of Superior Bank, which was co-owned by her family. The bank, based in Hinsdale, Ill., was involved in subprime mortgage lending, and its failure in 2001 stirred charges of fraud and mismanagement.

The Tribune reports that Pritzker stepped down from the Chicago Board of Education in March just "days before Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced he had targeted 53 elementary schools and a high school program to close, affecting an estimated 30,000 students."

Such a move allowed Pritzker to avoid "a politically unpopular vote" and "further protests" from angry community members and unionized teachers who loudly objected to the closing.

"We know Penny Pritzker has a long and storied history as an anti-labor and anti-worker kind of boss," Kristine Mayle, financial secretary of the Chicago Teachers Union, told the Tribune in March. "Her policies adversely affect working families. She has worked to close schools and destabilize neighborhoods, and we hope she does a better job in her new position, if she gets it."

And investigative reporter Dennis Bernstein says that Pritzker's nomination is additionally controversial becuase of her involvment in a sub-prime mortgage scandal and the collapse of Superior Bank in Chicago in 2001.

According to Bernstein:

Penny Pritzker played fast and loose with the American Dream. Her pioneering sub-prime operations, out of Superior Bank in Chicago, specifically targeted poor and working class people of color across the country. She ended up crashing Superior for a billion dollar cost to tax payers, and creating a personal tragedy for the 1,400 people who lost their savings when the bank failed. Pritzker, whose family controls Hyatt Regency Hotels, is in the top one percent of the one percent. Her extreme wealth and privilege has not only made her virtually untouchable by law enforcement, but will now allow her to cleanse her sordid sub-prime banking record by becoming the first woman Secretary of Commerce.

During the official nomination ceremony, Obama said of Pritzker, "She knows from experience that no government program alone can take the place of a great entrepreneur."

But as blogger DS Wright suggests at FireDogLake, wouldn't a better Commerce Secretary be someone who was not "at odds with labor unions" or one without "problems complying with bank regulations".

Pritzker's nomination now awaits a confirmation process in the Senate.

Liberal and progressive Democratic senators now must show their integrity and oppose Pritzker's appointment.

Daily News publishes a few leaked NYS high-stakes Pearson test questions; illustrates travesty of Common Core -And an analysis of what News story portends for teachers

'You might as well just put ‘failure to students’ at the top of the exam,' said one concerned parent. The tests, designed to better prepare students for college and careers, are aligned with a Common Core curriculum students will not begin receiving until September.

Kudos to the New York Daily News. Today, Friday May 2, 2013, it ran, "With fifth-grade test now revealed, New York's tougher new reading exams set students up to fail, critics warn" by Corrine Lestch and Ben Chapman, with Juan Gonzalez.


For those concerned with the civic sphere, the imposition of the Common Core illustrates the faults of allowing non-educators and privateers to design curriculum. And those aware of United States government and the constitution recognize that there are prohibitions against the federal government from defining a national curriculum. But, as how it took Republican Richard Nixon to open China, it took Democrat Obama to finagle this merging of federal policy and mass privatization of curricular design. Sure, the Common Core State Standards or Common Core Learning Standards are pitched as standards, but not curricula. But let's be real: they narrowly define the standards to the extent that the essentially set curriculum.

For parents, the release of some of the questions suggest why Pearson and New York State are so adamant about secrecy: they are deeply flawed. The questions are vague; they are grade level inappropriate: the reading level is a few grade levels above the fifth grade level. In fact, these questions pose difficulties for adults with college degrees. These questions will show why some of their children were so anxious, and why they will be labeled failures. So, of course, the invested players forbid exposure of the questions and answer choices. Parents could get incensed to the point that they begin flexing their democratic rights. (In New York City, these rights are only held by the mayor, but across the rest of the state, the Daily News' expose should be of great use to school boards in local school districts large and small.)
The reader comments at the Daily News site touch on additional problems with the tests, such as the time youngsters are subjected to. All of these problems point to the flaws in placing unlimited blind trust in self-appointed education "leaders" such as Common Core architect David Coleman. Like U.S. Education Department Secretary Arne Duncan, Coleman has no certification in education courses such as curriculum development.

These tests have multiple problems. In addition to developmentally inappropriate question, the third, fourth, and fifth grade tests are longer than SATs (3.75 hours), LSATs (3 hours), MCATs (5 hours), and the Series 7 (6 hours).
In 2011, the third graders had only 4 hours of testing over 4 days. Now it's 7 hours over 6 days. Fourth graders have 7.33 hours. Fifth graders have 9 hours. This is outrageous.
Field test questions "don't count" in student scores. They are "dummy questions" (that's another headline in the Daily News) being tried out by Pearson. That is completely unfair. LSAT test takers go into that test knowing one-fifth of exam doesn't count. But 3rd-8th graders across NY state have not been told how many questions don't count!!
The NY State Department of Education thinks the rights of Pearson to create the test outweighs the rights of citizens to know what is in them.
If these tests are so great, show us taxpayers, parents, and teachers the tests. What is there to hide?

For educators, these questions show the absolute failure of leadership of Michael Mulgrew. The United Federation of Teachers president has endorsed the Common Core in principle. His only complaints have been about the lack of a better-defined curriculum, inadequate preparation for teachers and its connection with an overemphasis on test-prep, not that the Common Core is a fundamentally deeply flawed policy. He cheerily argues that most teachers support it. Other than this, it should be noted that these are the high-stakes tests that will be the value-added measures by which teachers will be evaluated. Remember that Mulgrew has repeatedly, insistently, said that this sort of evaluation is a fair objective measure. When teachers feel the whiplash of these tests after the release of the results this September, they should keep in mind who they have to blame for cheerleading their use in evaluations. (This was the evaluation system that the Movement of Rank and File Educators fought so hard to put to a membership vote.) No wonder Mulgrew is relieved to have state education commissioner King impose an evaluation system in a few weeks. (Note that this puts Mulgrew at apparent odds with his mentor and former UFT president and current American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. She says that there should be a moratorium on using them to asses students and evaluate teachers until they are better understood. This is preferable to Mulgrew's general endorsement of such tests; but she should be categorically rejecting such tests. The release of these questions should make it more evident that these tests are fundamentally flawed. The more they are "understood" the clearer it is that Mulgrew and Weingarten should reject these tests out-right.)
UPDATE: Lindsey Christ's report in NY1 suggests that AFT president Weingarten is looking to save a the program from the backlash that it is creating, rather than making a principled critique against the use of the tests as high-stakes tests for students and teachers.

"These standards, which hold such potential to create deeper learning, are instead creating a serious backlash as officials seek to make them count before we make them work," Weingarten said. . . . .
"We're talking about a moratorium on consequences for these transitional years," she said.
Weingarten actually devoted much of the speech to praising the new standards and their potential, a position she shares with the Bloomberg, Cuomo and Obama administrations.

The Common Core eschews fictional literature. It is in fiction where we often develop critical thinking, and where we have essential parables for many epochs, such as the present. For there is no better instance than the present in showing the importance of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes." The story could have been written for the twentieth or twenty-fourth century. In the story, some jokester weavers weave non-existent clothes for a vain king. Their line to him is that these are special clothes that are invisible to people that are stupid, lazy or incompetent. The people surrounding the emperor are too frightened to speak the truth that there are no clothes. It takes an impulsive child to blurt out that the emperor is wearing nothing.
This story gets to the heart of the crisis of the present moment: people expressing the conventional thinking on the Common Core and much of current education "reform" are not exercising critical thinking. Hundreds of voices in opinion framing circles are repeating the flawed, deceptive, illogical points that are rooted in dogma and not in socio-economic realities. So we have in the same issue of the Daily News one of the editorials repeating the talking points that New York State Education Commissioner John King and New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott have been saying. As with so much of current education reform dogma, few are willing to exercise independent, critical thinking, to question the policies, and to speak out and point out that nearly every plank of the education reform program is based on deceptions and fictions.

Of the leaked Pearson test questions for this April's fifth grade English Language Arts state test, the Daily News authors wrote:

It’s full of long, dense, off-the-wall nonfiction passages on making wind tunnels, soil formation and studying whales. There are two short stories, both set overseas. And there’s a vague selection from a poem about loneliness that students must interpret before choosing among four answers that contain two arguably correct selections.

Students got 90 minutes to complete the 32-page test, which contained 42 questions based on six written passages.

The News asked testing experts, teachers and parents to analyze the test, which state and city education officials have kept under lock and key. Everyone who saw it was left dumbfounded by the killer questions.

“You might as well just put ‘failure to students’ at the top of the exam,” said Tracy Woodall, a stay-at-home mom whose son is a fifth-grader at Public School 1 in the Bronx. “There’s no way they’re going to pass this.”

The roll out of Common Core tests in New York State is momentous. While forty-five states got pressured into succumbing to adopting the tests, New York is among a very small number that are actually using the Common Core tests at a state-wide level. When politicians and concerned citizens in various states want to point to this flawed national education policy's actual implementation, they will look to New York for clues as to what they are in for with the Common Core tests.

NYT: Class inequality playing ever greater factor in educational disparity

Class playing ever greater factor in educational disparity
Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say By SABRINA TAVERNISE, February 9, 2012, New York Times
WASHINGTON — Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.
Times Topic: Income Inequality
It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student accomplishment by race.
Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.
“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.
In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan, the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s.
The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. The data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession’s full impact was felt. Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend.
“With income declines more severe in the lower brackets, there’s a good chance the recession may have widened the gap,” Professor Reardon said. In the study he led, researchers analyzed 12 sets of standardized test scores starting in 1960 and ending in 2007. He compared children from families in the 90th percentile of income — the equivalent of around $160,000 in 2008, when the study was conducted — and children from the 10th percentile, $17,500 in 2008. By the end of that period, the achievement gap by income had grown by 40 percent, he said, while the gap between white and black students, regardless of income, had shrunk substantially.
Both studies were first published last fall in a book of research, “Whither Opportunity?” compiled by the Russell Sage Foundation, a research center for social sciences, and the Spencer Foundation, which focuses on education. Their conclusions, while familiar to a small core of social sciences scholars, are now catching the attention of a broader audience, in part because income inequality has been a central theme this election season.
The connection between income inequality among parents and the social mobility of their children has been a focus of President Obama as well as some of the Republican presidential candidates.
One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in overall involvement in their children’s schools), while lower-income families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. This has been particularly true as more parents try to position their children for college, which has become ever more essential for success in today’s economy.
A study by Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by 20 percent.
“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study, by Susan M. Dynarski and Martha J. Bailey, looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989.
James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that parenting matters as much as, if not more than, income in forming a child’s cognitive ability and personality, particularly in the years before children start school.
“Early life conditions and how children are stimulated play a very important role,” he said. “The danger is we will revert back to the mindset of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that, it’s a mistake.”
Meredith Phillips, an associate professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, used survey data to show that affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools (anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities, she found.
Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” was published Jan. 31, described income inequality as “more of a symptom than a cause.”
The growing gap between the better educated and the less educated, he argued, has formed a kind of cultural divide that has its roots in natural social forces, like the tendency of educated people to marry other educated people, as well as in the social policies of the 1960s, like welfare and other government programs, which he contended provided incentives for staying single.
“When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture,” he said.
There are no easy answers, in part because the problem is so complex, said Douglas J. Besharov, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Blaming the problem on the richest of the rich ignores an equally important driver, he said: two-earner household wealth, which has lifted the upper middle class ever further from less educated Americans, who tend to be single parents.
The problem is a puzzle, he said. “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare.”
A version of this article appeared in print on February 10, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Poor Dropping Further Behind Rich in School.

NYT: City Report Shows a Growing Number Are Near Poverty

TIMES NOTES WORSENING POVERTY, MIRRORS NATIONAL OBSERVATION BY BILL MOYERS
The New York Times, April 22, 2013, City Report Shows a Growing Number Are Near Poverty
OPENING OF THE TIMES ARTICLE by Sam Roberts:

The rise in New York City’s poverty rate as a result of the recession has apparently eased, but not before pushing nearly half of the city’s population into the ranks of the poor or near-poor in 2011, according to an analysis by the Bloomberg administration.
That year, according to the city’s measure, about 46 percent of New Yorkers were making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold, a benchmark used to describe people who are not officially poor but who still struggle to get by. That represents a rise of more than three percentage points since 2009, when the nation’s recession officially ended.
By the city’s definition, a family with two adults and two children could earn $46,416 a year and still fall within 150 percent of the city’s poverty level. Unlike the official but rigid federal poverty level, the city’s measure balances the added value of tax credits, food stamps, rent subsidies and other benefits against expenses like health and day care, housing and commuting that reflect New York’s higher living costs. The city says a two-adult, two-child family is poor if it earns less than $30,949 a year. The federal government sets the level at $22,811.
Though more New Yorkers were working in 2011 than the year before, larger shares of children and working adults were classified as poor in 2011, and the proportions of Asians, noncitizens and Queens residents — overlapping groups — each rose by more than four percentage points since 2008.
The city’s analysis warned that cutbacks in federal programs could threaten any recovery and place pressure on the next mayor to maintain or expand public assistance.
“The recent increase in the state minimum wage affects the working poor and near-poor, and paid sick days are important, but missing rungs in the ladder make it really hard to climb out of poverty,” said Nancy Rankin, vice president for policy research and advocacy at the Community Service Society, which lobbies on behalf of the poor.
“The next mayor is going to face a very difficult budget situation in which he or she will struggle to maintain basic services and have little room to expand welfare-related programs or services to needy New Yorkers, a fiscal situation that is getting very little attention in the current mayoral race,” said Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative group.
Mark Levitan, director of poverty research for the mayor’s Center for Economic Opportunity and the author of the city’s analysis, said those he called the near-poor — people making up to 50 percent above the poverty level — were often not eligible for food stamps and other federal benefits available to the poor because of their higher incomes.
Without tax credits and food stamps, the proportion of poor people would have soared to nearly one in three, according to the analysis by the center, which Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg established in 2006 to devise innovative antipoverty strategies.
In the five years after that, though, more New Yorkers plunged into poverty — 21.3 percent by the federal rate and 23.6 percent by the city’s own standard were poor in 2011 compared with 19.8 percent by both measures in 2007, before the recession. Still, while the city’s measure is the highest since it was first calculated in 2005, the official rate is lower in New York than in many other major cities.
While the center’s annual report, to be released this week, suggested that a better job market may have reversed the rising poverty in 2012, its outlook for this year and beyond was more problematic.
“Coinciding with the end of the slump in the job market is the end of the recession-related expansion of the safety net,” Dr. Levitan wrote, which could reduce food stamp benefits on top of prior cutbacks in unemployment insurance, tax credits and the payroll tax rate.

Commentator Bill Moyers has noted how worsening inequality is a fixture of American society. (Actually, the level of income inequality is a greater disparity in New York City than in the rest of society.)
From April 12, 2013, in Alternet: Bill Moyers: We Are Living in the United States of Inequality
"A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government."
The article begins: April 12, 2013, from Bill Moyers.com:

The unprecedented level of economic inequality in America is undeniable. In an extended essay, Bill Moyers shares examples of the striking extremes of wealth and poverty across the country, including a video report on California’s Silicon Valley. There, Facebook, Google, and Apple are minting millionaires, while the area’s homeless — who’ve grown 20 percent in the last two years — are living in tent cities at their virtual doorsteps.
“A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government,” says Moyers, “while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.”
Inequality matters. You will hear people say it doesn’t, but they are usually so high up the ladder they can’t even see those at the bottom. The distance between the first and the least in America is vast and growing.
The Washington Post recently took a look at two counties in Florida and found that people who live in the more affluent St. Johns County live longer than those who live next door in less rich Putnam County. The Post concluded: “The widening gap in life expectancy between these two adjacent Florida counties reflects perhaps the starkest outcome of the nation’s growing economic inequality: Even as the nation’s life expectancy has marched steadily upward…a growing body of research shows that those gains are going mostly to those at the upper end of the income ladder.”
That’s true across America. In California’s Silicon Valley, Apple, Facebook and Google, among others, have reinvented the Gold Rush. But down the road in San Jose it’s not so pretty a picture. Do the math: in an area where one fourth of the population earn an average of about $19,000 dollars a year, rent alone can average more than $20,000 dollars a year, and that difference adds up to homelessness. We talked to Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza, who brought this story to our attention.

For the rest of the article, go to Bill Moyers: "We Are Living in the United States of Inequality."

St. Sen. Drops Welfare & Grades Bill After Dismissing a Mother and her 8 Year Old That He Called a Prop

Oh, the power of video.
Tennessee Republican State Senator Stacey Campfield authored a bill this spring that would cut welfare benefits by 30 percent from children that did not perform well in school. Pretty draconian bill. Seems fair to say, child abuse, but the bill seemed headed to passage.
Then came two citizen lobbyists, a mother and her school-aged daughter. After the state senator refused to give them a fair audience and listen to any of their concerns, he walked away. The video is a pretty Cathy Black moment as he childishly mutters "children as props" repeatedly, as he attempts to leave them.
The real hero in this video is the girl, who speaks up and tells him, “I don’t like the way you take benefits from people.”
Some other moments of shameful conduct by the state senator, noted by writer Elizabeth Parker:

*When Fetuga pleaded,”I’m worried about the lights getting cut off,” the lawmaker chirped, “Well that won’t happen as long as you have a DECENT PARENT.” *When a man chided the state senator, “I’m ashamed of what you’ve been doing, I want you to know that,” Campfield turned on him and snarled, “Dude, you’re a union thug! I know exactly what you are.”

Well, the whole thing got caught on video. Several Republican senators spoke against the bill and its consequences; and he dropped his bill. Highlights from ThinkProgress' article on Campfield's meltdown and state senators' turnaround on the bill.

During the session, many of Campfield’s fellow Republicans stood up one by one to call the measure “troublesome” and express concern about the “unintended consequences” that could put children in danger. State Senator Doug Overbey (R) had a change of heart after hearing from teachers and the state’s Commission On Children And Youth:

I voted for the bill in the General Welfare committee because I thought it was a step in addressing a problem. Since that time, other information has come to my attention. First of all, there’s been comments about how folks in our educational system feel about it. Just this morning I got an email from a teacher in my district that said, ‘Teachers have expressed interest in some form of parent accountability but I can assure you this is not what they had in mind.’ Secondly, I found on my desk a letter from the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth … a 2 1/4 page analysis of this legislation and ultimately urges voting against it.

Talk about trying to add some high stakes to a test! Scroll down the page: you can see a Youtube link for the video.