Ed Notes Online: Next Fight Back Friday is June 10th

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Next Fight Back Friday is June 10th

We began the idea of Fight Back Friday as a way to brand an action that many schools could easily plug into. We feel it builds from the ground up and allows each school to reach out to the local community with issues THAT school feels are important. These decentralized actions are important but the citywide branding and coordination from a central body is also important, along with culminating actions in the afternoon after school. Some schools have begun to reach out to their neighboring schools, thus growing small neighborhood cores. This Friday is the last one of this school year. There is still time to join in - even if it's just a small informational morning picket with a few teachers. We have tool kits for you to use. Email Julie Cavanaugh (juliereed15@hotmail.com) with any questions. Shee will send you the tool kit with all the fliers and stickers and such. We are happy to help you think through all the steps.

That's my spiel. Here is the official one.

Next Fight Back Friday is June 10th

From the FBF blog:

FBF gives every school community a chance to stand up and say NO to the cuts and lay-offs at whatever level the community can be organized.
Everyone wears black (Wear black, take our schools back!). It can be as simple as just that.

We have stickers people can print out with messages about the cuts and the kinds of changes we would all like to see in education that folks can wear and give out.

We have fliers that you can adjust to fit your school, which you can use on the day of.

Many schools have a picket outside of school either before or after the school day. We have fliers you can use to publicize the picket during the week leading up to the 20th.

The fliers will be in at least English and Spanish, and if we can, Chinese.

We have post cards that we are asking people to get signed that will then be delivered en-masse to city council members. You can print those out, or come get them at a couple of different locations.

We ask everyone to take pictures to send in that then go on our fight back friday blog and face book page.

We will be putting out a press release and press statement and pushing the press to cover as many school events as we can. And the more schools participating the more coverage we will get.
Please, even if it sounds hard or overwhelming, consider pushing your school community to join in. Email Julie Cavanaugh (juliereed15@hotmail.com) with any questions. We will send you the tool kit with all the fliers and stickers and such. We are happy to help you think through all the steps.
This is a way for your whole community to work together, parents, students and staff, to build solidarity within and across schools. These actions are great for training ourselves to do the organizing that we need if we are to turn the tide of the destruction of public education. In order to fight for the transformations we all want to see in our education system, we need to do the grassroots educating, organizing and mobilizing that it takes to move whole communities.

Photographs from the May 20th Fight Back Friday

https://picasaweb.google.com/108122375451944539262/FightBackFriday52011?authkey=Gv1sRgCMCKyYvbr9GTpgE

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Though some of the schools below are not officially branded as a FBF school, all are holding some action this Friday.
Participating Schools

PS 261, Brooklyn
PS 321, Brooklyn
Sunset Park High School, Brooklyn
PS 306, Queens,
PS 69, Queens
PS 503, Brooklyn
PS 254, Brooklyn
Facing History School, Manhattan
International School for Liberal Arts
Lehman High School, Bronx
PS 368, Bronx
PS 230, Brooklyn
Paul Robeson High School, Brooklyn
PS 24, Brooklyn
MS 136, Brooklyn
PS 193, Brooklyn
Bushwick School for Social Justice
Academy for Urban Planning
John Dewey High School, Brooklyn
PS 157, Brooklyn
Green School, Brooklyn
PS 123, Manhattan
Frederick Douglass Academy 5, Bronx
El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice
PS 15, Brooklyn
East Brooklyn Community High School in Canarsie
PAIHS, Queens
Neighborhood School, Manhattan
Childrens' Workshop School, Manhattan
James Baldwin School, Manhattan
Humanitites Prep, Manhattan
Lyons High School, Brooklyn
FDR High School, Brooklyn
Goldstein High School, Brooklyn
Jamaica High School, Queens
Bronx International HS, Morris Campus
High School for Excellence, Morris Campus
Alfred E Smith High School, Bronx

If your school is not taking part let me know your feelings why.

No comments:

"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, June 8, 2011

Next Fight Back Friday is June 10th

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