Saturday, July 11, 2009

Angel Gonzalez and George Schmidt at PS 123 Protest of Harlem Success Takeover Take 2 - July 10, 2009

Gem began receiving calls on Thursday evening from PS 123 parents and teachers that the DOE had ruled in favor of Eva Moskowtiz and the movers and painters were coming Friday morning. They asked us to be there and we were. That all press reports ignored our strong presence is not surprising. We'll comment more on this in a follow-up as we post more video of Scott Stringer and Tony Avella. See our earlier video of the protest on July 7 as teachers and parents tried to stop Harlem Success from squeezing them out of their space. Here are a powerful six minutes of Angel and George making the case against charter schools.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e_2vwEn_zQ

1 comment:

DAVID PAKTER said...

HOW WOULD ANY OTHER UNION REACT ?

WHAT WOULD THEY SAY? THINK ABOUT IT

WHAT WOULD THEY DO, THINK HARDER
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If a Private, for Profit Corp. came along and said to the Mayors or Police Commissioners of the New York City or Chicago Police and/or Fire Depts

"Greetings Honored Mayors and Commissioners:

This is your Super Lucky Day.

Our highly motivated and trained Private For Profit Professional Organization is prepared to help your Police Dept. solve more crimes and help your Fire Dept put out more fires, faster.

Naturally, at this time, at least in the beginning stages, we will only be prepared or interested in focusing on minor Crimes like Double Parking and the littering of Public Sidewalks.

And our Fire Control Experts will only wish to be concentrating their Professional Expertise on modest size fires such as those that involve someone tossing a burning cigarette into a trash receptacle.

But the big, hard to solve crimes and the big, hard to extinguish fires, in short the big challenges and big problems- well, we will get to those matters in due time, a little later (if we get to those at all).

Also, it is only reasonable that we be able to recoup our large investments and start up costs as quickly as possible. But you are sophisticated Gentlemen. Enough on that score.

Oh, yes- and if you can allocate space to us in your various Police Precincts and Fire Houses- all the better.

Obviously the current Police Officers and Fire Fighters will continue to go out and deal with any major crimes and/or fires.

After all you surely only want to utilize our Private For Profit Services to deal with immediate quality of Life criminal infractions and those annoying burning trash receptacles that everyone agrees are so unsightly.

And be assured that all your currently employed Police and Fire Dept Unionized workers have nothing at all to fear by our "For Profit Professionals" sharing space and utilizing the facilities in their Police Precincts and Fire Houses.

After all we're sure no member of the Police or Fire Unions would want to appear as though they are selfishly going to serve as an obstacle to "Progress" by standing in and blocking any Police Precinct or Fire House front door.

And if we never do get around to tackling the most challenging and vexing problems, major crimes, major fires or whatever- so what!

Not to worry Honored Mayors and Commissioners. We have your back covered.

We can virtually guarantee the Private sector, you know who we mean and the deep pocketed Lobbying entities with all that nice fresh cash to spread around on your next Political campaign will praise you to the skies for having the "courage" and the "boldness of vision" to try something new.

We certainly need not remind individuals of your highly exalted standing that virtually anything, any idea, any enterprise to which you attach the term "New" is always greeted by the general populace as something that smacks of being an "improvement" over the old way of doing things.

In closing may we note in passing that there is a small possibility that the NYC Police and Fire Dept Union members may not greet the above plan with a standing ovation.

Come to think of it, cancel everything we just said but do consider flying this entire proposal by the NYC Schools Chancellor and the President of the Teachers Union.

We are quite certain that will all work swimmingly and all go through without a hitch.

And yes, while our stockholders will certainly make a killing off all this, think of all the money that will be saved by eliminating all those pesky Unionized teachers over time always complaining about "due process" and Tenure.

Again, although the Police and Fire Dept Unions may not go for this plan, hey- one out of three huge large City Unions is not bad- wouldn't you agree?

Sincerely,

The National Association of Charter Schools.

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