As Mulgrew Attempts to Spin Horse Manure Into Gold...

Under Assault Asks:

What's the helmsman doing?

This absolutely glorious Sunday morning has been nearly ruined for me by a UFT post I just read that the charter school legislation passed by Albany this week addresses "most of the UFT's key concerns."

I kid you not. That's the title of the UFT post:

Albany passes charter school legislation that addresses most of UFT's key concerns

What Mulgrew seems to be happy about is this: "We changed the conversation about charter schools." Changing the conversation, though, isn't what I thought we've been paying for the union to do.

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Ed Note:
A couple of things. First, no matter what the law says we all know they will violate it and beat it to death. Parent input? GIVE ME A BREAK! What this means is another hundred non-unionized charters. The union will tell you they are going to organize teachers at these charters. Sure an inept union for its current members will attract teachers from charters who will find that the UFT can't protect them any more from evil employers that they can current UFT members. But they will be very adept at collecting dues. What these hundred schools mean is that they will take kids from public schools which will mean increasing layoffs over time. And when the quota is filled they will come back for another lifting of the cap.

No more non-profits? Watch them morph into something that can make a profit. By the way, Eva is a non-profit. $370,000 a year for running 4 schools, multiplied by 40 when she gets her wish. Call it what you want- maybe personal profit- which there is plenty of room for.

This comment on the NY Times about Believe Charter Schools which we exposed last week with a photo of a Wanted Poster with a hundred dollar bounty for recruiting new students, shows outrageously high salaries:

As a former employee, I can honestly say that I cannot BELIEVE (no pun intended) that there is not enough oversight from the Chancellor to expose the atrocities that are happening on an almost hourly basis at all there of these schools. Principals/”Superintendents” are fired and escorted out of the building midday, months after being publicly hailed and showered with praise by the CEO Melendez. There have been three different principals in the last two years, and the recklessness and haphazard manner with which decisions are being made about how many is spent, and who assumes positions of leadership make it seem as if ideas were drunkenly drawn from a baseball cap. There are people in that building making six-figure salaries who have not made a single contribution to the students or organization at large in their three years. What a great way to make a quarter of a million dollars! The majority of leadership positions are held by people in with less than one, or even zero teaching experience which has led to a major disconnect between themselves, the rest of the staff, and the kids. Don’t trash all charter schools…trash this one and all the others like it. Stop giving 5 years extensions to places like this and then walking away for long periods of time only to do one day “state visits” which consist of student and staff file checks and cursory classroom observation which are hardly enough to unveil the corruption that exist just below those surfaces.

Boy, do I have emails from Eddie Melendez over the last 6 months - nasty, gangster-like stuff - after he tried to harass Susan Ohanian, one of the top educators in this country. Eddie is a classic POS (Piece of Sh-- for those not familiar with the term). Semi-literate ramblings.

Read all the comments about the Believe horror story at the NY Times CityRoom blog.