Video: Great NYC Bloggers Honored at Class Size Matters Skinny Awards

For too many years Americans have had no choice but to suffer with ineffective reporters accountable to nobody .... blogs are the charter schools of the education reporting - minus of course the cheating and embezzlement .... 

Gary Rubinstein at Skinny Awards dinner, June 18, 2013

The huge turnout at last night's 5th annual Skinny Awards dinner for Leonie Haimson's Class Size Matters is an indication of how important the work Leonie does has become. Parent and teacher activists from New York City and beyond cheered the efforts of Leonie and her two blogger honorees, Francis Lewis HS chapter leader Arthur Goldstein (NYC Educator) - who inspired my blogging efforts - and Stuyvesant HS teacher Gary Rubinstein (Gary Rubinstein's Blog), a more recent convert to educational activism through blogging.

I got to sit with the fabulous ladies (and Fred Smith) of Change the Stakes. This is one crew I want to parteeee with and being District 6 (Washington Hts) based they invited me to join them in post CEC6 celebratory events where I am sure I will have trouble finding the A train for the 2 day trip back to Rockaway. (NEXT CTS MEETING: JUNE 28 - CUNY). Robert Jackon, running for  Manhattan borough president (I would vote for him if I lived there) showed up later after I had put the camera away -- the CTS D. 6 crew are BIG fans of his so he was right in his element.

Below is the entire half hour plus of comments from Diane Ravitch and Patrick Sullivan along with Leonie's introduction of the honorees and an explanation of why she named the awards the "skinny" awards.

I extracted a 2 minute segment of Gary's speech in a separate must watch video of his satire on the state of education reporting -- he better bring a food taster to the next Gotham Schools party.


Gary Rubinstein Satirizes Education Reporting at Skinny Awards 2013 from Grassroots Education Movement on Vimeo.

And here is the full monte - a fun half hour of viewing -- excuse the waiters getting in the way and some of my usual shaky video -- thanks to Prudence Hill for forcing me to use her tripod.





AFTERBURN:
I made sure to chat with Leonie's husband, Michael Oppenheimer, a famous environmental scientist who I invited out to Rockaway before it disappears under the sea --- he is not optimistic for the long-term prospects for my ability to avoid having a salt-water swimming pool in my house.