Ed Notes Online: Poison Pep Pills

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Poison Pep Pills

The good thing about print journalism and writing a regular column is that you have to get your thoughts together in some orderly way, as opposed to ranting and doing stream of consciousness on the blog. The deadline for my semi-monthly Rockaway newspaper Wave columns is Wednesday at 9am. How to summarize last night's PEP in a thousand words? I began at 7:30am and just about hit the deadline - ok, so I missed by 10 minutes. (Boy, I think back to those 350 word compositions we had to write in school and how painful pulling every word was.)

I have a lot more to say about the UFT and Moskowitz strategies. Maybe after breakfast. Or lunch. Or the gym. Jealous? You can retire after 35 years. Or if it's up to Cuomo and Bloomberg, maybe not.

I copied the Gotham Schools links to stories about the meeting:
The city school board voted to close 10 schools. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, Post, WNYC, NY1)

Poison Pep Pills

by Norm Scott

February 2, 2011

With so many schools being closed this year by the Department of Education – 26 at last count – and charter co-locations – the word the DOE uses while I use "invasion" (one commentator compared them to bed bugs) there seems to be a Panel for Educational Policy meeting every day. Actually, there are two this month and two in March. Memories of last January's marathon ten hour horror story meeting where 19 schools were being closed still haunts people. So now will we have two 5-hour marathon horror story meetings? Not so fast.

The Feb. 1 started at 6pm and ended at 1am. I gave up by 10:30 and headed home (which might explain some wobbly grammar in this column). This meeting was billed as a big confrontation between the UFT, which had called a pre-hearing rally akin to the one last January that packed Brooklyn Tech and led to a massive round of booing during Joel Klein's speech and Eva Moskowitz' Harlem Success Academy machine which followed up the next month with busloads of parents who cheered Joel Klein while spending the evening talking about how they need charters because the school Uncle Joel ran were so awful. But Eva loved Joel because he gave her whatever she wanted. Rumors she had him locked up in her basement with a ball in his mouth have not been confirmed but I suspect the real reason he left the DOE to earn millions as a propagandist for Rupert Murdoch was to get out from under Eva.

Well, the UFT decided to postpone their rally supposedly because the weather report was bad from Feb. 1 to the Feb. 3rd PEP (where the final nail is expected to be driven into the coffins of Beach Channel and Jamaica High Schools, among others). I don't think it was the weather but a strategy to avoid a major confrontation with the HSA parents. One of my colleagues in the Grassroots Education Movement commented: "I think their moving the rally date from the 1st to the 3rd is a tactical disaster (compounding the fiasco of their wider strategy). Moskowitz will able to dominate the hearing (hopefully the D3 parents will out mobilize them), the vote will happen and the result will dominate the news cycle - leading to demoralization and decreasing turnout for Thursday."

Eva didn't postpone anything and showed up, depending on the reports, with either hundreds or thousands of busloads and food for them all. How many buses does that take and what did this all cost? Money that could have gone towards getting her own buildings instead of take overs of public school space. But she has a political, not an educational agenda. She is pushing into white middle class areas where public schools are overcrowded and the massive Brandeis HS campus, which already has four high schools in it, is her target. There was a lot of pushback from just about every upper West Side politician and parent leader. The community board voted 40-0 against Eva and every single PTA lined up against her. But the final outcome of the Bloomberg-dominated PEP was a foregone conclusion (Egypt's Hosni Mubarek often complains he allows way more democracy than Michael Bloomberg does) and Eva prevailed again, but leaving in her wake another neighborhood of people filled with outrage. This time she picked the wrong neighborhood and look for some severe hostility from parents who want more high school space at Brandeis but will be denied as Eva expands her school grade by grade and pushes out some of the existing high schools - which I predict at least two will be set up for failure so they can be closed and have their space given over to Eva over the next few years.

The UFT did show, but mostly with staffers. At times it seems there are almost enough of those to fill a few busloads. I didn't see food for them but then again many of them have UFT credit cards. They did have blue tee shirts to counter Eva's orange ones. The UFT shirts said, "Chancellor Black Do Your Homework" on the front and "Fix Schools = A+, Close Schools = F". Okay, a little lame but at least there was a sense of some pushback at the charter juggernaut.

One of the highlights of the evening occurred when my pals in the Grassroots Education Movement – who term themselves the "Real Reformers" – did their usual thing, wearing their red capes with a big "RR" on the back and this month singing "What a Wonderful World This Could Be" with lyrics like "They don't know much about history....but they do know how to close down schools..."

Battle over public schools escalates with civil disobedience

Joel Klein called the misnamed "achievement gap" the "civil rights issue of our time." Fighting back against the ed deformer strategy of forcing the closure of many inner city schools to make way for favored privately controlled charters is the real civil rights issue of the time. On Monday January 31, I attended a rally of mostly NYC high school students near City Hall and Tweed focused on the forced closing of schools as part of the drive to privatize by short-changing these schools of resources. Shouting “Fix Schools, Not Just Close Them" and "What does democracy look like? This is what democracy looks like" two New York City Council Members and dozens of parents and youth were arrested for blocking traffic at Chambers and Centre Street following the rally. Council Members Jumaane Williams and Charles Barron were among those arrested.

Students began a march to the precinct but on the way they were told that the police, to curtail the march, took the arrested to another precinct. The event was organized by the Coalition for Educational Justice, consisting of community-based organizations, and the Urban Youth Collaborative. I put up a 14 minute edited video of the rally, excerpts from speakers, the push into Chambers St., the arrests and the follow-up march to the police station. Fabulous stuff from a great bunch of students who did us all proud. You can view the video at

http://vimeo.com/19443862

I'm loading up the camera for the next PEP meeting on Feb. 3rd where the UFT promises to come out in force. By the time you read this you might be hearing about a major disruption of the PEP at that meeting to attempt to stop the vote to close the schools. Or not.

~~Above blackout due to CIA censorship of sensitive material. B~~

When Norm is not spending his life videotaping PEP meetings, he blogs at ednotesonline.blogspot.com

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Check out Norms Notes for a variety of articles of interest: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/. And make sure to check out the side panel on right for news bits.

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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 Extended

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Poison Pep Pills

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