(AP) NEW YORK – Hundreds of New York City teachers who are paid full salaries to do nothing while they await disciplinary hearings will be released from the city’s “rubber rooms” this fall, officials announced Thursday.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the teachers’ union announced a deal to reassign most of the teachers to administrative or nonclassroom work while their cases are pending.

About 650 educators, more than 500 of them teachers, are in the teacher-reassignment centers, costing the city tens of millions of dollars a year, including $30 million in salaries, officials said.

The teachers generally spend months or even years in the so-called rubber rooms playing Scrabble, reading or surfing the Internet while still collecting full salaries of $70,000 a year or more. The nickname refers to the padded cells of asylums, and teachers have said the name is fitting, since some of the inhabitants can become unstable.

The city has blamed union rules that make it difficult to fire teachers, but some teachers assigned to rubber rooms say they have been singled out because they blew the whistle on a principal who was fudging test scores.

“The rubber rooms were the result of a broken and protracted teacher-discipline process,” Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said Thursday. “This deal goes a long way in improving the way the union and the department deal with teachers accused of and charged with wrongdoings.”

Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room in 2004-05, said he was ecstatic to hear they would be closing.

“We want to coach those that are not prepared for this profession to move on. However, we also want justice for those who have been accused of wrongdoing,” Ramos said. “The rubber room has been the wrong answer for so long.”

Ramos, who is now a middle school principal in San Jose, was an assistant principal in East Harlem when he was accused of lying at a hearing on whether to suspend a student. Ramos denied the allegation but quit before his case was resolved and moved to California.

David Suker, a teacher who is currently assigned to a rubber room in Brooklyn, said educators there were waiting Thursday to hear details about how the system would be dismantled.

“It’s just another typical day in terms of powerlessness,” Suker said.

Instead of going to rubber rooms, most teachers will perform administrative work in department offices or nonclassroom work in their schools, according to the agreement.

The deal expands the list of charges for which school officials can suspend teachers without pay to include violent felony crimes.

Officials also agreed to increase the number of arbitrators who hear teachers’ cases from 23 to 39, and said they hope to catch up with backlogged cases by the end of the year.

According to Rafael Reuveny, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs in Bloomington, the entire negotiation in Congress is “politics as usual” and meant to stall or defeat vital climate change legislation.

“We are trying to win this fight for our lives through consensus. Such compromise will never materialize — not in this country and not internationally,” said Reuveny, co-author of Complex Transformations: Democracy and Economic Openness in an Interconnected System (Cambridge University Press, 2009). “No matter how often President Obama pleads for it, bipartisanship has become a joke. So, while the two sides continue this ridiculous game, Rome — read: the planet — is burning.”

Reuveny said it’s imperative that President Obama bypass this unproductive haggling. “He must issue an Executive Order to the Environmental Protection Agency to immediately implement a system that will cut greenhouse emissions of the American economy by meeting the goals set by the Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House in 2009,” he said. “He should also order the EPA to design an all-inclusive command and control system of greenhouse emission quotas and monitoring to be backed by severe and immediate penalties on units that would emit more than their allotted amount.

“During his State of the Union address, President Obama made a bold move calling out Supreme Court judges, declaring their decision could enable U.S. and foreign corporations to determine our elections,” Reuveny said. “Surely, the president realizes that his opportunity to affect this crisis is coming to an end as energy-consuming corporations gain even more political power. An executive order is the only solution.”

Reuveny’s research focuses on political conflict and how it interacts with international trade, democracy, migration, and the environment. He is the co-author of “Climatic Natural Disasters, Political Risk, and International Trade” (Global Environmental Change, forthcoming) and the author of “Exploring the Link between Climate Change and Migration” (Human Ecology, 2008) and “Climate Change Induced Migration and Violent Conflict” (Political Geography, 2007).

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Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.

The federal readout is just one measure of Duncan’s record as chief executive of the nation’s third-largest system. Others show advances on various fronts. But the new math scores signal that Chicago is nowhere near the head of the pack in urban school improvement, even though Duncan often cites the successes of his tenure as he crusades to fix public education.

“Chicago is not the story of an education miracle,” said Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank in Washington. “It is, however, the story of a large urban system that has made some gains and has made some promising structural changes.”

For more than seven years, starting in 2001, Duncan tried to rejuvenate his city’s struggling schools: jettisoning staff, hiring turnaround specialists, shutting down those deemed beyond hope. He pushed a back-to-basics curriculum, spawned dozens of charter schools and experimented with performance pay. State and federal test scores and graduation rates rose on his watch, and Chicago became a laboratory for innovation. As a result, the reputation of its schools has improved markedly since 1987, when an earlier education secretary, William Bennett, called them the worst in the country.

‘Focused on outcomes’

Yet questions have arisen this year about the magnitude of Duncan’s accomplishments. The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which represents business, professional, education and cultural leaders, concluded in June that gains on state test scores were inflated when Illinois relaxed passing standards and that too many students still drop out of high school or graduate unprepared for college. The Consortium on Chicago School Research, a nonpartisan group at the University of Chicago, reported in October that Duncan’s closure of low-performing schools often shuffled students into comparable schools, yielding little or no academic benefit.

“Obviously, you always want to get better faster,” Duncan said in an interview when asked about the federal math scores. “I was focused on outcomes — improving graduation rates, making sure that students who graduated had a chance to pursue higher ed. You can have the best test scores in the world, but if kids aren’t going that next step, you’re not changing their lives.”

Duncan also said he had adjusted his school closure policy a few years ago to ensure better opportunities for students. He said that he was unhappy that the state had relaxed passing standards and that graduation rates remain unacceptable. About half of Chicago students fail to graduate on time with their peers.

In January, Duncan said at his Senate confirmation hearing: “We’re proud to have made significant progress . . . and to really be a model of national reform. But again, hard work is going to continue there and is far from done.”

In the interview, Duncan said he is careful not to exaggerate his record. Critics, however, say his legacy is routinely overblown.

“There’s been this rhetoric about dramatic gains, dramatic success, that we have to replicate this model because of its dramatic success,” said Julie Woestehoff of the advocacy group Parents United for Responsible Education. “And here in Chicago, we’re looking at these schools and going, ‘Uh . . . ‘ ”

In 2003, President George W. Bush’s education secretary, Rod Paige, faced similar, perhaps stronger, criticism when his much-highlighted record as leader of Houston’s schools in the 1990s came under scrutiny. Questions were raised that year about the reliability of Houston’s reported dropout rates.

Duncan’s record is of more than historical interest. He wields considerable power through the combination of his Chicago connections, shared with President Obama, and his oversight of billions of dollars in reform funding. The Education Department is dangling an unprecedented $3.5 billion in grants for school systems to turn around weak schools and $4 billion for states to pursue innovation.

With 418,000 students in 675 schools, Chicago faces challenges on a scale exceeded only in Los Angeles and New York. Eighty-five percent of students come from poor families, and 12 percent have limited English skills.

Tours in a handful of Chicago schools this month found educators pushing against formidable obstacles to establish a climate of learning. For some, simply asserting control over a campus represents a big victory.

In the North Lawndale neighborhood west of downtown, dotted by decaying rowhouses and apartments, Johnson Elementary School was given a new staff this year and renamed the Johnson School of Excellence. Duncan, in one of his last actions before leaving Chicago, proposed the restart in January because of the school’s perennially low test scores. The nonprofit Academy for Urban School Leadership, which pairs master’s degree candidates with teaching mentors in a residency program, runs the school and 13 others under contract. Johnson serves 300 students from pre-K through grade 8.

In the last school year, officials said, police were called to the campus nearly every day to deal with angry parents or disruptive students.

“It was a war scene,” said Jennifer Earthley, mother of a fourth-grader and a fan of the new regime. “The administrators were afraid of the children. The children did what they wanted to do. We have been on the low end for a long time. All we have been looking for is a passionate group of people who care.”

Now, attendance is up and fights are down. Students are drilled on respect, manners and lining up in the halls. In one fourth-grade classroom, teacher Katelyn Funderburk counted “5-4-3-2-1″ after asking students to pull out their textbooks. “Steven Earthley got it opened fast and folded his hands,” she said. “Thank you.”

Hitting the reset button

At William R. Harper High School in West Englewood, loudspeakers blared the theme to “Beverly Hills Cop” one afternoon and students swirled in the hallways as the principal shooed stragglers to class. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Kenyatta Stansberry called out. “Y’all are going to be late. Let’s go, baby! You need to run!”

The 700-student school, in an area blighted with crime and boarded-up houses, had fallen on hard times when Stansberry took over in 2007. She said she spent much of her first year dashing to altercations — the intercom alert “10-10 on 2,” for example, would mean a fight on the second floor — and extracting the campus from the Crash Town gang’s grip.

Then Duncan hit the reset button (another purge a decade earlier had failed to yield much improvement). Stansberry stayed, although most of the staff was let go. She was given extra resources, including three deans to help manage students, money for gifts and incentives, and a reading catch-up program. Misconduct fell, attendance rose and test scores edged up a bit. More ninth-graders were rated on track to receive a diploma.

Neighborhood troubles remain a deep concern. Stansberry said four of her students died violently off campus in the last school year. Such killings became a national issue this fall after a student, Derrion Albert, was beaten to death near Christian Fenger Academy High School on the city’s South Side. Duncan returned to Chicago in October with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to pledge a campaign against youth violence.

As if in solidarity with that goal, posters of Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. flank the whiteboard in English teacher Fadia Afaneh’s room at Harper. She high-fived her ninth-graders as they placed commas correctly in sentences, transforming street lingo into standard English. Much of what she teaches is remedial, Afaneh said, but she is determined to help students advance. First, she teaches them to write a complete sentence. Then, a paragraph.

“Basically, all kids deserve an excellent education,” she said, “and that doesn’t always happen in this country. I know.”

Read Answer Sheet blogger Valerie Strauss on why Arne Duncan’s record from Chicago matters.

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“She has written critically about legal opinions under Bush that addressed the war in Iraq, interrogation methods, a military tribunal system denying certain rights to detainees captured in the war on terrorism and Bush’s use of presidential signing statements to ignore provisions of new law.”

(Indystar.com) The nomination of the Indiana University professor tapped by President Barack Obama to become a top legal adviser has effectively been tabled by Congress.

The Bloomington Herald-Times reported that Dawn Johnsen is one of six nominees who failed to receive a vote before the Senate recessed this month. Without a vote or action to carry over the nomination to the next session, it is up to the White House to decide whether to renominate the candidates or consider some other action.

The president has made no statement about his intentions on the issue.
The IU law professor was an ardent critic of the Department of Justice during the two terms of President George W. Bush. She joined IU in 1998 after spending five years at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, including two years as its acting assistant attorney general.

Obama had nominated her to head that office.

Her husband, John Hamilton, served on the board of Monroe County Community Schools and is president of City First Enterprises, which invests in neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. Hamilton headed the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and the Family and Social Services Administration under then-Gov. Frank O’Bannon.
Reached by the Herald-Tribune on Tuesday afternoon as he shepherded nieces and nephews around the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., he said he couldn’t speculate on what the administration’s decision might be regarding renominating his wife, but he chose to remain hopeful.

“We’re enjoying our vacation,” he said, “looking forward to health care being done, and looking forward to the conformation process continuing.”
Johnsen and her family have moved to Washington, and she has commuted between there and Bloomington in recent months.

Johnsen was nominated last January and approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in a vote along party lines in March, but she never received a vote by the full Senate.

The Senate approved 30 Obama appointees before the session ended, but failed to act on six, according to the Washington Post. The other five are Christopher Schroeder and Mary Smith as assistant attorney generals, Louis Butler and Edward Chen for the U.S. District Courts and Craig Becker for the National Labor Relations Board.

The native New Yorker’s politics lean to the left — Johnsen once was the legal director of NARAL Pro-Choice America — and in recent years, she has devoted her advocacy to concerns about terrorism policies under Bush.

Johnsen challenged attempts to regulate abortion in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and her stance on the issue may have drawn opposition from social conservatives in the Senate.

Saying “no,” Johnsen told her students, is the most important role for a lawyer advising the White House on the boundaries of presidential power.

She has written critically about legal opinions under Bush that addressed the war in Iraq, interrogation methods, a military tribunal system denying certain rights to detainees captured in the war on terrorism and Bush’s use of presidential signing statements to ignore provisions of new laws.

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Here are some highlights from an interview regarding Pierson’s book Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy extracted from globetrotter.berkley.edu.

• “I’m not going to pretend that I would be ecstatic about a government that was pursuing conservative policies”

• “By off center we mean that there is a disconnect between where public opinion seems to be and where public authority seems to be headed. That’s why the subtitle of the book is The Erosion of American Democracy. It’s not just because liberals object to what the conservative majority might be doing, but because it seems to reflect a breakdown of responsiveness and accountability.”

• It’s important to set the stage that in 2000 and 2001 there was no evidence in public opinion polls that people were chomping at the bit for a big tax cut.

• The impeachment of President Clinton, which it’s very clear public opinion did not favor. Public opinion had settled strongly on a way to resolve that clash, which was a vote of censure. Republicans were quite aggressive on the issue and simply refused to allow — this is an example of agenda control — they refused to allow a vote of censure to come to the floor of the House. They instead pursued a different course which every poll showed was not what the American public wanted.

• The core argument of the book, which I think broadly has been pretty well accepted, is that neither Reagan or Thatcher really succeeded, although there was a lot of hue and cry around the time. [Neither] of them succeeded in fundamentally changing the structure of social policy because of the political challenges that they faced in doing that, and the fact that when they were very aggressive about it there tended to be a pretty strong popular outcry. In the Unites States, for example, Reagan is elected, begins to talk about cuts in Social Security, and there’s such a strong outcry against it that it plays an important role in the fact that Republicans lost twenty-six seats in the 1982 midterm elections, and that pretty much ended the conversation of a radical reform of Social Security.

Now, who says College professors ever push liberal indoctrination?

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For many researchers, the funding will help them hire or retain employees and purchase equipment.

The funding includes:

* $603,633 in National Science Foundation grants for Mohammad Younis, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Younis works to understand the vibrations and mechanics of miniscule electro-mechanical systems. Applications for research include protecting the hard disk of a laptop computer to deploying a side-impact air bag.

* $550,584 in National Science Foundation grants for Eriks Rozners, associate professor of chemistry. Rozners studies ribonucleic acids, or RNA, and seeks a way to chemically modify RNA. The research could lead to new therapeutic measures such as antibiotics or anticancer drugs.

* $360,120 in National Institute of General Medical Sciences grants for Koji Lum, associate professor of anthropology and biological sciences. Lum studies how the malaria parasite evolved resistance to the once-effective medication chloroquine.

* $191,250 in National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism grants for Michael Nizhnikov, a postdoctoral associate in the psychology department. He studies why infants exposed to alcohol have a higher incidence of alcohol abuse later in life.

* $126,226 in National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke grants for Lisa Savage, professor of psychology. Savage is studying the brain’s cortex, including how it adapts to damage to other regions of the brain. Research could help with treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

* $156,922 in National Science Foundation grants for Adrian Vasiu, associate professor of mathematics. Vasiu is a numbers theorist who studies Shimura varieties, and will write several papers and two books to be used by graduate students.

* $233,427 in National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders grants for Patricia Di Lorenzo, professor of psychology. She studies how neurons communicate with each other in the brain. Her research could help with treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and could also help in the development of brain-machine interfaces like artificial limbs.

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Audio coverage on the NPR page.

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UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof told KGO-TV late Friday afternoon more than 40 people, at least some of them students, had been arrested and the protest appeared to be coming to a “safe end.”

Demonstrators had occupied Wheeler Hall on Friday morning to protest a 32 percent increase in student fees and job and program cuts. Campus police had said earlier in the day the demonstrators were barricaded behind fire doors on the second floor.

A group of students also rallied outside the building.

The occupiers were demanding laid-off custodial workers be rehired and amnesty for anyone arrested in the protest.

——

Information from: KGO-TV

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) — Students barricaded themselves inside buildings on University of California campuses to protest a 32 percent increase in student fees and budget cuts that have led to slashed programs and lost jobs.

Demonstrators at UC Berkeley occupied Wheeler Hall on Friday and hung a sign from a window that read “32 Percent Hike, 900 layoffs,” with the word “Class” crossed out in red. A group of students also rallied outside the building.

Campus police said they had arrested three of the demonstrators inside.

Police would not say how many protesters remained in the building. University police Lt. Alex Yao said demonstrators were barricaded behind fire doors on the second floor, but police had control of the rest of the building.

The Daily Californian student newspaper said it received a text message from a protester in the building who put the number still inside at 60 undergraduates and graduate students.

The occupiers were demanding the university rehire laid-off custodial workers and give amnesty to anyone arrested in the protest.

At UC Santa Cruz, Provost David Kliger said a group of students was blocking exits at Kerr Hall, which houses science departments and administrative offices.

Kliger said he would not consider the students’ demands until they cleared the obstructions.

About 30 to 50 protesters staged a takeover of Campbell Hall at UCLA on Thursday, as regents met across campus to approve the fee hike. More than 50 students were arrested during protests at UC Davis.

Regents say they had to raise fees because the cash-strapped state government can’t meet the university’s funding needs.

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Charles North’s analysis offered a substantially higher savings estimate for the state thanThe Arizona Republic’s estimate of $8.3 million over a period of nine years, published in an article last month.

North said his analysis was based on information that was “speculative” but was reasonable enough to allow him to reach his conclusions. He was paid to conduct the study by the Center for Arizona Policy, a conservative research and advocacy group that supports school choice.

He appeared at a state House committee hearing chaired by state Rep. Rick Murphy, R-Glendale, to consider changes to the private-school individual tax-credit program.

Under the law, individuals can donate up to $1,000 a year to fund tuition scholarships and take a dollar-for-dollar credit off their state tax bill. The money is collected by school-tuition organizations, which then disperse it in the form of private-school scholarships.

Murphy’s committee is considering changes to the individual tax-credit law but does not plan to discuss suggestions until its next meeting, which has not yet been scheduled. A second House committee has met twice on the same issues but, after taking testimony, does not plan to meet again.

How to estimate savings

Supporters of the tax credits argue that the program saves the state substantial money because it enables students who normally would attend publicly funded district or charter schools to attend private schools. The cost of the tax credits to the state budget is more than offset by the savings from not having to pay per-student funding, supporters say.

A key to estimating savings is to determine how many students would not attend private schools without the tax credits. These students represent savings for the state. Students who get tax-credit scholarships, but who would have attended private schools regardless of the credits, represent a cost to the state.

North, the Baylor professor, estimated that in 2008, at least 11,697 students attended private school solely because of the tax-credit scholarships. He reached this number by first checking the Web sites of tuition organizations to see which ones placed a heavy emphasis on awarding scholarships based on students’ need. Then, he assumed that half of the students getting scholarships from those groups went to private school only because of the scholarships. He assumed the same for a quarter of students from the other tuition groups.

North made the assumptions despite the fact that there is no uniform standard to determine need among school-tuition organizations, or STOs. The Republic reported Sunday that although the 12 largest organizations say financial need is a factor, many also considered other factors, such as recommendations by those who made tax-credit donations. Parents of private-school students often seek donations from friends and relatives, who can request their gifts be directed to those students; many STOs say they honor at least some of these requests.

“This is admittedly speculative, but it seems reasonable to me based upon my own perceptions of families with financial need from my own service as a board member at a private school in Texas,” North said after the meeting.

By contrast, The Republic’s analysis assumed that no more than 7,530 students went to private school because of the tax-credit incentive. The number represents the entire growth in private-school enrollment from 1999, when the first tuition tax credit took full effect, to 2007.

The Republic showed its analysis to economists from Arizona State University, the Arizona Department of Revenue, an accounting professor at Northern Arizona University, the finance director of the Department of Education and an analyst for the Goldwater Institute. None expressed concerns with the methodology.

North, who supports tax-credit scholarships, said that relying on private-school enrollment growth to calculate the financial effects of tax credits understates the savings. The reason is that the growth of public charter schools during that time likely drained many students from private schools. In addition, the national trend for most of the past decade was a decline in private-school enrollment. Despite those factors, he said, Arizona’s enrollment still grew thanks to the scholarships.

In addition to issues such as cost savings, the committee sent a survey to 53 tuition organizations asking nine questions. Among them was whether the organizations have ever helped parents “swap” tax-credit donations to help reduce the tuition costs for their own children.

The law bars parents from taking a tax credit that benefits their own children. But in a swap, groups of parents agree to earmark donations for one another’s children. Each of the STOs said they never “arranged, facilitated or otherwise encouraged” the practice.

Tom Chabin, a Flagstaff Democrat and committee member, said the practice exists and jeopardizes the non-profit status of the STO because it runs counter to IRS requirements to remain a tax-exempt organization.

“As soon as we want to roll up our sleeves and work together, as I think we want to do, I’m ready to get down to the truth of this, so we can save the STO program and save the scholarships for poor kids and stop the practices that threaten the whole program,” Chabin said.

by Ronald J. Hansen and Pat Kossan – Nov. 17, 2009 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been the biggest player by far in the school reform movement, spending around $200 million a year on grants to elementary and secondary education.

Now the foundation is taking unprecedented steps to influence education policy, spending millions to influence how the federal government distributes $5 billion in grants to overhaul public schools.

The federal dollars are unprecedented, too.

President Barack Obama persuaded Congress to give him the money as part of the economic stimulus so he could try new ideas to fix an education system that most agree is failing. The foundation is offering $250,000 apiece to help states apply, so long as they agree with the foundation’s approach.

Obama and the Gates Foundation share some goals that not everyone embraces: paying teachers based on student test scores, among other measures of achievement; charter schools that operate independently of local school boards; and a set of common academic standards adopted by every state.

Some argue that a private foundation like Gates shouldn’t partner with the government.

“When you team up with the government, you compromise your ability to be critical of the government, and sometimes you compromise your ability to do controversial and maybe unpopular things with your money,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of

the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank. The institute, is among the many that have received money from the Gates Foundation.

Another concern is that as a private foundation, Gates doesn’t have to disclose the details of its spending like the government does.

The big teachers’ unions dispute some of the goals shared by Obama and the foundation. They say student achievement is much more than a score on a standardized test and that it’s a mistake to rely so heavily on charter schools.

“Despite growing evidence to the contrary, it appears the administration has decided that charter schools are the only answer to what ails America’s public schools,” the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union, said in comments about the grant competition submitted to the Education Department.

The NEA added: “We should not continue the unhealthy focus on standardized tests as the primary evidence of student success.”

The American Federation of Teachers submitted similar comments. Together the unions have 4.6 million members.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan welcomes the foundation’s involvement.

“The more all of us are in the game of reform, the more all of us are pushing for dramatic improvement, the better,” Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Bill Gates said his foundation is not the government’s partner in the new grant program, which the government has called the “Race to the Top.”

“It’s no secret the U.S. education system is failing,” Gates said. “We’re doing all kinds of experiments that are different. The Race To The Top is going to do many different ones. There’s no group-think.”

By:Libby Quaid

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