Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Harlem Success Academy turns away parent of child with special needs, while battle over HSA invasion of upper West Side heats up

She "won" the lottery for Harlem Success Academy but when they found her child had an IEP and needed 12-1-1, they lost interest.
I interviewed this parent at the parent protest press conference at Rockefeller Center over the biased Education Nation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHwZj8Y9Q7M

Here is more from Leonie on the HSA battle in District 3 on the upper West Side.

Weird!!!! Could that be an act of God?

The SUNY Trustee meeting that was scheduled for today to vote on the Success Charter Application has been postponed. New date TBA

From the SUNY website:

10-20-10: Important Note: A power failure involving SUNY's technology hub in Albany has caused today's meeting of the Trustees' Executive Committee to be postponed. A new date will be announced shortly.

Good piece by Juan G. below, but these assurances from DOE that they haven’t yet decided to put charter in PS 145 are BS; they’ve already told the school that there’s a 95% chance that the charter will be sited in the building.

Citing $11M grant to expand, PS 145 advocates fear growing problem, slam charter school

Juan Gonzalez - News
Wednesday, October 20th 2010, 4:00 AM
Tina Crockett, head of the Parents Association at Public School 145 on W. 105th St., stood in a crowd of angry parents and civic leaders Tuesday and vowed to resist a new charter school in their building.
"Our district just got an $11 million federal grant to bring magnet school enrichment programs to our school," Crockett told me. "If they bring in this charter school, how can we grow our enrollment and fulfill the grant's requirements?"
As is their usual practice, Chancellor Joel Klein and his aides have yet to consult with the PS 145 parents and teachers about plans for a new school in their building.
"No proposal has been made yet, and there will be time for dialogue with the community if a proposal is made," Department of Education spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld said.
When the state Legislature passed a new law lifting the charter school cap this spring, lawmakers required a more transparent process and clear plans for sharing space.
The simple fact is that the SUNY Charter School Institute will vote today on a new charter school application on the upper West Side for the Success Charter Network run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.
That application mentions no site for the school, but Moskowitz already knows the site she expects to get.
She has been advertising her new West Side school on bus stop posters and on a website and has said PS 145 is her desired site.
Tweed educrats notified the PS 145 School Leadership Team earlier this month that their school is one of the few in the neighborhood that is "underutilized," with nearly 320 empty seats.
Local community school district leaders claim the empty seats are a result of the Education Department deliberately keeping PS 145's recruitment zone smaller than those of nearby schools.
Still, under Principal Ivelisse Alvarez, PS 145 has blossomed in recent years. Not only have test scores improved, but the building has become a focus of community activities and even Saturday enrichment classes.
The new federal magnet school grant for the the most segregated schools on the West Side requires that those schools expand by actively recruiting a more racially mixed student population.
"We will not take action that would jeopardize this grant," Zarin-Rosenfeld said.
If you only do the math, said Noah Gotbaum, president of the District 3 Community Education Council, you'll realize that's impossible.
The current PS 145 has only 800 seats. The school has 500 students and expects to grow under the new federal grant. The proposed charter school, on the other hand, plans to grow to nearly 700 kids within five years.
There's simply no way the two schools can both grow in the same space, and Ed Department officials know that.
"Co-location of charters is the new form of public school eviction," said State Sen. Bill Perkins, who spoke at the rally, along with City Councilwoman Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan) and state Assemblyman Daniel O'Donnell (D-Manhattan).
The fight on this one has just begun, they said. Let's see how long it takes Klein's people to publicly announce the plan they've already hatched for PS 145.
jgonzalez@nydailynews.com

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"A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

What media call "philanthropy" for the public schools are actually seed monies to establish a private "market" in publicly-financed education - an enterprise worth trillions if successfully penetrated by corporate America. Cory Booker, one of the "New Black Leaders" financed by the filthy rich, is key to creating a "nationwide corporate-managed schools network paid for by public funds but run by private managers.

"Ed Reformers" want to cash in on public education and to control its content and outcome, not improve it. Provide great education? Baby boomers had as close as this country has ever gotten to it when we were growing up. The Ed Reform Movement has no interest in seeing such a well-educated, democratically astute population ever again.

http://blackagendareport.com/content/cory-booker-clear-and-present-threat-public-education

History of the UFT Pre-Weingarten Years

This award-winning series of articles by Jack Schierenbeck originally appeared in the New York Teacher in 1996 and 1997.

Naturally, from a certain point of view. But, despite certain biases, Schierenbeck, a great guy, was one of the best NY Teacher reporters so this is worth reading. Jack suffered a debilitating stroke many years ago (I used to get secret donations to ed notes from him through a 3rd source.)

This chapter looks interesting:

Class struggles: The UFT story, part 3

“The schism in the union over radical politics [is] a major reason for stalling the growth of a teacher union for decades.” Revolutionary politics and ideology take center stage, as the original Teachers Union becomes a battlefield, pitting leftist against leftist and splitting the union.

Clarence Taylor's "Reds at the Blackboard" focused on the old Teachers Union which disbanded in 1964 after suffering from anti-left attacks.

Of course for another view, check out the review at New Politics of the Kahlenberg Bio on Shanker by Vera Pavone and me: Albert Shanker: Ruthless Neocon

Effective Union Organizing

A video series put together by Jason Mann from the British Columbia Federation of Teachers about social media and how to use it for effective union organizing.

The first series was called New Media For Union Activists Roadmap and it's still available on-line at:
http://www.newmediabootcamp.ca/welcome/
I watched some of them and need to rewatch as they are loaded with information.

The second series started last week and it's called "Online Campaigning for Union Activists"

You can sign up for this free series at :
http://act.bcfed.ca/online-campaigning-for-union-activists/

You Don't Have A Choice - Join the Revolt

Ex-Harlem Success Teacher Comments on Eva the Diva

Ex-HSA Teacher has left a new comment on your post "Fear and Loathing at Evil's Harlem Success Empire ...":

I am a former Harlem Success teacher. Not many people who work/worked for her like her very much. I once made the comment that she is very nice when I first was hired. Two of her closest colleague responded immediately almost in unison, "Eve is not nice!" Over time I realized that there was a lot of political games going on. Another colleague once said to me that he was tired of "being part of a political campaign." Sending out 15,000 applications for only 400 seats in a school is reprehensible. The money that paid for those mass mailings could have paid the yearly salary of another teacher not to mention the heartache of all those parents who applied but did not get a spot. She does good work trying to give disadvantaged students a quality public school education but at a great cost to staff AND the school's educational budget! school budget.

Davis Guggenheim Compared to Riefenstahl

“Waiting for Superman" is the second most intellectually dishonest piece of documentary work I have seen. It is surpassed only by Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," the pro-Hitler propaganda classic, in that regard. Uses personal narratives of adorable children to create narrative suspense that overrides public policy discussion with pure emotion in unscrupulous attack on teachers and their unions, among others

Timothy Tyson
Professor of African American Studies and History
Duke University

How Teaching Experience Makes a Difference

Even as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee and others around the nation are arguing for experienced teachers to be laid off regardless of seniority, every single study shows teaching experience matters. In fact, the only two observable factors that have been found consistently to lead to higher student achievement are class size and teacher experience, so that it’s ironic that these same individuals are trying to undermine both.
- Leonie Haimson on Parents Across America web site

Full article with charts here.

Weingarten/Gates Foundation announce drone-driven teacher evaluation

According to a press release issued by the Gates Foundation, the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, these three have entered a ground-breaking partnership to evaluate teachers utilizing the drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A bird-size device floats up to 400 feet above a classroom and instantly beams live video of teachers in action to agents at desks at Teacher Quality Inspection Stations established by the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

When asked if the drones were authorized to drop bombs on teachers who exhibit inadequacy, Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, replied, "Don't be ridiculous. Gates money puts other methods at our disposal."

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5-million-member American Federation of Teachers said the powerful union has signed on to the drone project...

More at Substance

The Real Reason Behind Push for Standardized Tests: It's All About the Adults

On standardized testing in our schools

A must read article about the standardized test industry.
Written by an insider who has worked as a test scorer, the article outlines a multinational industry based on an army of temporary workers paid by the piece at $0.30 to $0.70 per test, translated in the need to grade 40 tests per hour to make a $12 salary. The article goes on to show how the companies gauge the grading "results" based on the need to ensure new contracts to continue profiting off of our youth. The original article is from Monthly Review. Here it is on Schools Matter blog.

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/12/on-growing-use-of-corporate-test.html

Parallels between America today and Germany in the 1920's and early 30's

"Resentment and obstruction are all the right wing in America have to peddle. Their policies are utterly discredited. Their ideology - even by its own standards - is a sham. They are so bereft of leaders, their de facto leader is a former drug addicted, thrice-divorced radio talk show host. That is literally the best they can muster. But they have built a national franchise inciting the downwardly mobile to blame the government, not the right, for their problems, exactly as Hitler did in the 1920s."

The US Is Facing a Weimar Moment

Published on Sunday, March 15, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Chicago View of Unity/UFT on Charters

After many meetings and debates, the Chicago delegation succeeded in working with the New York United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 (UFT) to push the AFT to take stronger stands on charter school accountability and school closings — though many delegates from Chicago would have liked the language to have been even stronger.

Generally speaking, the New York delegation represented organizing charters as the best model for handling their role in reshaping unions, despite the fact that according to many reports few charter schools in New York have been organized as is the case in Chicago. This logic is the same touted by the Progressive Caucus of the AFT. The few that have been organized are a part of the UFT local though they have separate contracts negotiated with the help of UFT. The Chicago delegation reflection the mindset that allowing new charters to continue to proliferate while attempting to organize existing charters is an end game in which public schools and the union lose.

Jen Johnson, CTU, Local 1 in Substance

Ed Notes Greatest Hits: HSA Rally and Founding of GEM

SEE MY VIDEO ON HARLEM SUCCESS RALLY 2009:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEp7rg_L5JI

Angel Gonzalez and I attended that rally and used the footage to promote our conference on Mar. 28, 2009, which is where the concept of a group like GEM emerged. Until then we had basically been a committee of ICE working with the NYCORE high stakes testing group. The actions of Eva and crew helped spawn GEM. Mommie Dearest!!

I have more video somewhere. I was hoping to get Leni Riefenstahl to edit it but she died. We would have called it "Triumph of the Hedge Fund Operators."

Ed Notes Online

Ed Notes Extended

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Harlem Success Academy turns away parent of child with special needs, while battle over HSA invasion of upper West Side heats up

Good piece by Juan G. below, but these assurances from DOE that they haven’t yet decided to put charter in PS 145 are BS; they’ve already told the school that there’s a 95% chance that the charter will be sited in the building.

Citing $11M grant to expand, PS 145 advocates fear growing problem, slam charter school

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