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Paterson Taps Bronx Judge To Be New IG

Gov. David Paterson is poised to announce he has selected Bronx state Supreme Court Justice Joseph Fisch to serve as the next state Inspector General, an aide to the governor confirmed.

Fisch and Paterson go back more than two decades. They first met in the Queens DA’s office, where Fisch worked on two separate occasions (1977-1984 and again from 1987 to 1990) and Paterson was a criminal law associate (a post over which there has been some confusion ever since).

According to The Jewish Press, Fisch attended Paterson’s wedding to Michelle Paige, and Paterson “danced the hora” at the wedding of Fisch’s daughter.

“He’s just the definition of a mentch,” Fisch told the paper, which noted that in 2007, the National Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education – of which Fisch is honorary president – granted Paterson its Man of the Year award.

Fisch has also served as a deputy inspector general and general counsel at the Office of the IG of the MTA and executive director of the Office of Professional Discipline with the state Education Department.

A Harvard Law School grad, Fisch was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2003 (by then Gov. George Pataki) after serving since 1990 on the Court of Claims (appointed by then-Gov. Mario Cuomo). He also serves on the Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics.

Fisch’s appointment does not require Senate confirmation. He will earn $155,200 in his new post. He replaces Kristine Hamann, who was appointed by ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer, got emroiled in the Troopergate scandal and resigned earlier this month.

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 At Junior High School 123 in the Bronx, Jerome Johnson, a seventh-grade math student, also received cash awards.

 Ruth Lopez gives her student Abigail Ortega a certificate showing her earnings from test scores.

Schools Offer Students Cash For Good Grades 

The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her friend Abigail Ortega, “How much did you get?” Abigail mouthed a barely audible answer: $36.87. Edgar Berlanga pumped his fist in the air to celebrate his $34.50.

The children were unaware that their teacher, Ruth Lopez, also stood to gain financially from their achievement. If students show marked improvement on state tests during the school year, each teacher at Public School 188 could receive a bonus of as much as $3,000.

School districts nationwide have seized on the idea that a key to improving schools is to pay for performance, whether through bonuses for teachers and principals, or rewards like cash prizes for students. New York City, with the largest public school system in the country, is in the forefront of this movement, with more than 200 schools experimenting with one incentive or another. In more than a dozen schools, students, teachers and principals are all eligible for extra money, based on students’ performance on standardized tests.

Each of these schools has become a test to measure whether, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg posits, tangible cash rewards can turn a school around. Can money make academic success cool for students disdainful of achievement? Will teachers pressure one another to do better to get a schoolwide bonus?

So far, the city has handed out more than $500,000 to 5,237 students in 58 schools as rewards for taking several of the 10 standardized tests on the schedule for this school year. The schools, which had to choose to participate in the program, are all over the city.

“I’m not saying I know this is going to fix everything,” said Roland G. Fryer, the Harvard economist who designed the student incentive program, “but I am saying it’s worth trying. What we need to try to do is start that spark.”

Nationally, school districts have experimented with a range of approaches. Some are giving students gift certificates, McDonald’s meals and class pizza parties. Baltimore is planning to pay struggling students who raise their state test scores.

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6 More Schools Fail The State’s Passing Grade.. 4 Others Get Passing Grade

The New York State Education Department has identified six New York City public schools, five of them middle schools, as performing so poorly that they are at risk of being shut down. Four others, the state said, would have been added to the list had the city not already decided to close them.

Four city schools, the state said, improved enough to come off the list, bringing the total citywide to 32. Of those, the city has already decided to close five.

To be designated by the state as failing, or among the “Schools Under Registration Review,” a school must fail to meet very basic, rudimentary performance benchmarks. If it does not improve in three years, it risks being shuttered.

The SURR list [pdf], as it is known, is different and much more dire than the list of schools designed as failing under the No Child Left Behind Law, which considers not only basic test scores but also other factors, like attendance and the performance among different subgroups of students (those who are Black or Hispanic, for example).

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60 More New York City Schools Get an ‘F’

Sixty New York City elementary and middle schools have been newly identified as failing under the federal No Child Left Behind law, according to a list released on Thursday by the State Education Department, which also showed that the number of failing schools was rising in both the city and the state.

The list was released more than a month after the city gave out its own grades to more than 1,200 schools. And a comparison of the two assessments showed some surprising contradictions, putting into sharp focus the difficulty of measuring what makes a school successful.

More than half the elementary and middle schools that got an F under the city’s new grading system are in good standing under the federal law, while more than 20 percent of the schools that the city gave A’s are considered failing, the state said.

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