Ed Notes Online: Washington Irving Campus Acts Up Against Eva Moskowitz Invasion

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Washington Irving Campus Acts Up Against Eva Moskowitz Invasion

Evil has been given a reported 27 rooms in the school, prime real estate located in the heart of Gramercy Park, the most outrageous land grab since the railroad barons.

UPDATE:

Press Release Subject: Opposition to Eva Moskowitz’ Elementary School Co-Location at Washington Irving High School Campus, 40 Irving Place, Manhattan, Union Square.

Parent & Teacher Rally &

Press Conference

Thursday, Oct. 25^th, 2012

5pm, Main Entrance Stairs

(before the start of Parent Teacher Conferences)

Public Hearing: Nov. 1, 6PM -

Anti Moskowitz Co-location Rally at Washington Irving
October 18, 2012

Video at: http://vimeo.com/m/51866144

We made this happen today! Against all odds (a beaten down rest staff of the phasing out original school, 2 brand new schools with hardly any union structure and 2 other fairly new schools) we united the campus in opposition to this handover of public space to a private buddy of the mayor. 72 members of our community came out! Our UFT Manhattan Borough office is standing behind us full force and the administrations from inside were rooting for us as well! We had a constructive dialogue with all the Principals last week and they understand that we fight for our schools, the schools they lead.

Below, some excerpts of rally speeches:

Together WE are the leaders of this movement!

We have a voice and we will be heard!

Today, we put Bloomberg and Moskowitz on notice!

We don’t want Eva Moskowitz inside our campus!

We don’t welcome bullies!

She makes parents play lottery for seats in her schools.

We have advice for her! CO-LOCATE to Vegas if you like to gamble!

We fight for a quality education for ALL students!

We work with ELL students, we work with poor students, we work with hungry students, we work with homeless students, we work with special ed students.

We don’t get rid of them because they might score low on tests!

We love our students! (heart signs up!)

An elementary school inside our campus is a bad fit!

OUR Barry Faulkner murals might have to go for her new cafeteria.

Faulkner’s Murals grace the walls of the National Archives in DC!

Eva, don’t even think about putting your hands on our murals.

This is public art!

We fight for Public education!

Keep the the public in public education!

We are the public!

We are what democracy looks like!

Bloomberg wants to give three floors of our school to his friend?

We don’t approve!

Whose schools? OUR Schools!

Mayor Bloomberg ONE TWO THREE. GO away and let us BE!

Bloomberg & Moskowitz want to turn education into a business. Their bottom line is: Profits!

Our bottom line is: Quality education for ALL students.

We are fighting an uphill battle

but we fight it with dignity and pride!

And we know that what we do is right by our students. Thats the only thing that matters.

This is a fight Good vs EVA!

Handing over schools to rich buddies is NOT the answer!

Closing Schools is not the answer.

Funding our schools is the answer!

The only one who used our library in the last 3 years was Bloomberg. He gave a press conference. We have not had a librarian for 3 years for our students!

That’s whats going on here!

Separate and Unequal? Charter Schools.

Quality Education for ALL? Public Schools!

This is the civil rights issue of our time!

We won’t back down!

fighting for our student

fighting for our schools.

They thought we wouldn’t care. Boy are they wrong. We care every day! We are teachers, that’s what we do!

Press Release:

Thursday, Oct. 18^th, 2012

7:20 am, Main Entrance Stairs

The community of teachers, parents, and students is enraged that the DOE intends to put an elementary charter school, led by Eva Moskowitz, into the Washington Irving High School campus.

They believe that it is a bad fit for a school that is predominantly filled with high school students and fear that the loss of 3 floors, 27 full sized classrooms, and numerous support rooms will take away resources, space and opportunities from their students.

They also fear that some of the famous Barry Faulkner Murals will fall victim to the construction of a new cafeteria and that some of the scenes that feature tasteful nudity, and scenes of historic battles, might be censored to make them “1st grade friendly”.

They will speak out in strong opposition to the DOE proposal at the rally and press conference.

Their announced agenda is: Fighting for a quality education for ALL of their students.

Education is not a lottery. Those who want to play lottery with other people's children should co-locate into a casino in Vegas.

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

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Washington Irving Campus Acts Up Against Eva Moskowitz Invasion

No comments: