Ed Notes Online: Fightback Friday is Coming as Schools Across the City Stage Local Protests Against Bloomberg’s Budget Cuts

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Fightback Friday is Coming as Schools Across the City Stage Local Protests Against Bloomberg’s Budget Cuts

Friday, May 20th is Fight Back Friday! School communities across the city are uniting to fight budget cuts and lay-offs locally. If you are interested in sponsoring a Fight Back Friday, to sign on and receive a tool-kit, or if you want more information please email peter.lamphere@gmail.com.

At the risk of repeating myself, I know many of you participated in the rally on May 12 but may be ignoring the opportunity to join in Fight Back Friday events where schools citywide take independent action around their schools. Frankly, I feel these actions over time will have a bigger impact than rallies like the May 12 event (how much coverage did it get? What do you think the impact was?) One of the reasons FBFs are worth doing is that over time they pressure the UFT from below. But it also builds links (that have been missing) with the local community. Imagine all 1600 schools building these links to fight the budget cuts and layoffs?

A FBF toolkit has been produced and the organizers will send you one. This FBF too soon for you? Start organizing for June 10. Too soon? Come to the GEM meeting May 23 to think about expanding next year.

You can follow Fight Back Friday events on the FBF blog maintained by our pal at John Dewey HS.
http://fightbackfridays.blogspot.com/. You know, this factoid reminds me of why, despite how bleak things look, I am optimistic. The level of cooperation between the various groups and individuals has been unprecedented.

Here is the latest FBF flier that can be cut down the middle to double your fun.

A message from Sam Coleman (GEM/NYCORE).

Hi all,

Just a reminder. This Friday is a city wide Fight Back Friday. Staff, students and parents all over the city will be dressing in black, wearing stickers, getting post-cards signed and having pickets at their schools.

Wear black, take our schools back!! from the corporate takeover and purposeful underfunding of our cities schools.

-If we add a small tax surcharge for those households with over $175,000 in income we would completely eliminate the need for any lay-offs.
-Hundred of millions is spent on testing!!
-Half a billion will be spent next year on technology infrastructure, much of that given in contracts to private companies with ties back to Tweed and the State Ed. department.

Get your colleagues and school community to wear black, send in pictures, or let us know your school is participating. The more participating schools, the more press we get, the more we can pressure our council members to vote down the mayor's insane budget!!!

Email sam@nycore.org for an email copy of the tool-kit with stickers, fliers to advertise your action, post-cards to the city council you can have people sign.

Its easy and fun!!!!

Sam, for the fight back friday committee

Here is one school's call - Lyons Community School based at the old IS 49 building in Williamsburg, a short distance from where I taught (our school used to feed into it).

Schools Across the City Stage Local Protests Against Bloomberg’s Budget Cuts

This Friday the 20th is being called “Fight Back Friday,” a day in which schools across the city will express their opposition to Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed layoffs.

Activist teacher groups such as New York Coalition of Radical Educators (NYCoRE, Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), and Teacher’s Unite have helped organize the event (the UFT unfortunately has not helped organize the event). Every participating school (30-50 are expected to participate) will stage demonstrations of their own determination, with the baseline factor that all teachers will be wearing black.

At Lyons Community School, a low-income public school in Williamsburg, teachers will take to the streets, reaching out to community members in an effort to halt the proposed budget cuts.

Teachers at Lyons Community School have mobilized significantly around the proposed cuts. Teachers have created t-shirts, posters, fliers, and postcards that urge action against the cuts and provide information to the community about how to fight back.

This Friday, Lyons Community School teachers will take to the streets right outside of the school with creative artwork and posters, talking to community members, distributing information packets, and getting postcards signed.

Contact:
Joshua Sol Lewis, ESL Teacher
347 406 1156

All fliers are available, including stickers to hand out in both English and Spanish.
Email me if interested: normsco@gmail.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 Extended

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Fightback Friday is Coming as Schools Across the City Stage Local Protests Against Bloomberg’s Budget Cuts

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