Friday, July 10, 2015

Chancellor Carmen Farina Fails Yet Again.



























With much fanfare, educators in New York City looked forward to a new era now that Michael Bloomberg and his non-educators no longer were in charge at the DOE and installed policies that made teaching in the New York City classroom a more hostile environment.  Unfortunately, very little has changed when Mayor Bill de Blasio placed Carmen Farina in charge of the New York City schools.  Ms. Farina has basically followed the Bloomberg era policies and the few things she actually changed, like the elimination of the Children First Networks, and criteria for the Leadership Academy were the ideas of her arch nemesis,  Eric Nadelstern, who allegedly pushed her out and into retirement back in the early years of Chancellor Joel Klein's tenure.  When it came to other Bloomberg era policies, like the ATR crisis, fair student funding, education on the cheap, and large class sizes, nothing changed.  Yes, she gave Superintendents back their authority but some of her picks smacked of cronyism and not competence.   One of her primary goals was to remove the 400 principals she believed should not be running their schools.  However, saying it is one thing, doing it is another and in this she has failed miserably.

Take the latest travesty, the removal of Principal Kathleen Elvin of Dewey High School in Brooklyn.  Despite pleas from Dewey staff and allegations of credit accumulation fraud that resulted in a suspected large increase in graduation rates, Chancellor Carmen Farina failed to remove the Principal.  Interestingly, Principal Elvin was selected by then Superintendent Amiee Horowitz, who apparently ignored complaints by Dewey staff about Principal Elvin and her questionable policies before she moved on to head the renewal schools program.  Yes, the same Amiee Horowitz that discontinued a highly competent Science teacher who reported Regents cheating at her school.  The story is Here.

As far back as when Carmen Farina took over as Chancellor, she was apparently informed of the problems at John Dewey High School but chose to ignore it.  Instead, it was the John Dewey staff that contacted SCI, who dumped it to OSI for review.  OSI apparently sat on the case for over a year as the DOE was hoping the issue would blow over and let the Principal continue her reign of terror on veteran staff and the bloated graduation rate that made the DOE look like their policies were successful.  However, the Dewey staff, sensing that little was going to happen if they let OSI sit on the investigation, took it to the WCBS-TV and the New York Post who blow the phoney "credit recovery" program wide open.  The "credit recovery" scam was known as "easy pass" by students and staff alike and was a joke.

Interestingly, the DOE leadership kept the Principal in place, despite the media onslaught and Chancellor Carmen Farina even said that most of the accusations were unsubstantiated!  However, the media pressure was unrelenting from both WCBS-TV and the New York Post and OSI had no choice to complete and publish the investigation.  What was their conclusion? That much of the "credit recovery program" was a sham with no instruction and work that consisted of packets that in many cases were not completed.

Confronted with the overwhelming evidence of "credit recovery" fraud, Chancellor Carmen Farina changed her tune and now says that she has removed Principal Elvin and will fire her..  It only took eighteen months after the Chancellor was informed for Farina to very reluctantly remove Principal Elvin.  If she was a teacher how long would it have taken to remove her?  Probably one day.  As we see the DOE "double standard" remains alive and well under the disappointing Chancellor Carmen Farina who protected the Principal for eighteen months as too many students were graduated, unprepared academically and shows once again that she has failed the students of the New York City schools.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's time to remove this disgrace Farina, now.

She was put into place to further the privatization movement and her unethical occupancy is to push their agenda...hence the fact that while many superintendents across the state of New York sent instructions home to parents of their RIGHTS to opt out, Farina was a compliant henchwoman and did not.

Parents go in, with their CHILDREN and get in her face...confront her....bring the news media...bring your I-pads and I-phones and take pictures and videos.

We are thousands of voices...tens of thousands...and with parents and educators and good people of conscience we are hundreds of thousands.

Remove this woman now...and when the voices of the people are not listened to, remove those who harm our children...now.

Philip Nobile said...

Chancellor Carmen Farina belatedly and reluctantly fired Dewey Principal Kathleen Elvin for grade-fixing , which is a crime under state education law forbidding persons to "knowingly and willfully, make an unauthorized and false alteration or representation of any grade, credit, honor, award or standing in the permanent record or transcript of any student with respect to a school or college under the supervision of the regents, the commissioner, or the university of the state of New York."

But I did not hear Ms. Farina or the Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon say anything about a criminal referral to the Attorney General. Why not prosecute Ms. Elvin et al.? Where's the downside, except for more dirty little secrets seaping out of the DOE? Exactly. Everybody in the system knows that cheating was, is, an indomitable part of DOE culture--from the anything-goes days of Regents scrubbing to the current craze for faking credit recovery and setting 85% pass rates, or else. What happened at Dewey happens in many, many high schools.

But who's looking? Not Farina, not her OSI stooges, not the transcendentally corrupt Condon, and to be sure not Tina Sciocchetti, the do-nothing executive director of the NYSED's Test Security and Educator Integrity office.

Farina's suspicious conduct in the Dewey case is prefigured in her cover-up of the Cobble Hill Regents cheating scandal in 2005-07. Her dirty little secrets are catalogued in my 39-page indictment titled "The Carmen Farina Nobody Knows" available on scribd: . While we're on the subject, check out my Youtube confrontation with the Chancellor whom I called "the Beverly Hall of the DOE."

Anonymous said...

Watching NYC spend money on a parade for the USA soccer team as we wait til 2020 to be paid for work done in 2008.

Anonymous said...

Why is she keeping the abusive principal Dwarka who nobody wants?

Anonymous said...

It is shameful that they let Ms. Dwarka destroy many competent veteran teachers careers for speaking up , while regents scores have plummeted like never before and many good teachers are leaving.

Anonymous said...

When is Dwarka going be brought up on charges?

Anonymous said...

Not fair that this principal is the only one to take the fall. This is going on in most schools across the board.

Anonymous said...

What is not fair is that she hasn't face a real judge yet? But is coming.

Anonymous said...

Why is corrupted, abusive and incompetent Judy Henry destroying students and teachers of Gateway?. Farina knows about mismanagement, grade fixing, SE violations, bulling of whistle-blowers, pushing older teachers out, funds mismanagement, cronyism, ghost classes and more. They have a crew of untouchables in Gateway protected by Farina and superintendent Mendez: AP Santiago, AP Samaroo, and principal Judy Henry. They all go back long way.They all have a history with each other. The all have a history of serious violations but Farina still let them do more damage to our students. What a nightmare.

Anonymous said...

Here's the Attorney General's website:

www.ag.ny.gov

Here are two relevant webpages at the NYS Education Department:

www.highered.nysed.gov/tcert/part83.html

www.highered.nysed.gov/tcert/respublic/teacherdiscipline.html

Anonymous said...

Fuck it, mine as well start shouting out all the principals. I will start. So many to choose from. I will start with Julie Nariman of Language & Innovation HS in the Bronx, wife of Richard Bost, disgraced/terminated principal from Fordham Leadership HS in Bronx. Little Julie has cooked the books so much this year that her grad rate shot up from under 50%, to over 60%. Limited teacher resources, not offering multiple classes, faking everything. Way to go Julie. Monday morning OSI is getting a phone call.

Philip Nobile said...

Anonymous 7:00PM,
Record the call. Will you disclose your name? If so, offer to go undercover with a tape recorder. See what they say. You never know. Don't let them brush you off. Get a Case #. And report back to Chaz and the rest of us.