About Education Notes and Norm Scott

Norm ScottBio

Short version:

Norm Scott spent most of his 35 years in the NYC Board of Education as a UFT member teaching in an elementary in Brooklyn. In the 70s he was a member of an opposition caucus to Unity. In 1997 be began an independent publication,  Education Notes, a newsletter for NYC teachers which he turned into a blog, ednotesonline, in 2006. He is a founding member of UFT Caucuses Independent Community of Educators (ICE) and MORE, in addition to the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), Real Reform Studios, producers of The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman, and Change the Stakes, a group of parents and teachers opposing high stakes testing.

 

Long form 

Norm Scott is a founding members of Independent Community of Educators (ICE), Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), and Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE), a caucus in the UFT that challenges the current leadership. He worked in the NYC school system full-time  from 1967 to 2002 and part time from 2003-5. He spent 30 years teaching elementary school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and 5 years as part of a team of district tech support for teachers. Since retiring officially in 2002 he has been active in real education reform (as opposed to corporate driven ed deform) and in the union at the city (UFT), state (NYSUT) and national (AFT) levels, working with a variety of groups. In 1997 he began publishing Education Notes, a monthly newsletter for teachers attending the UFT Delegate Assembly, expanding into a tabloid distributed citywide for two years in 2002 and into a blog, Ed Notes Online, in Aug. 2006. Between late 2003 and 2012, ICE  raised issues related to the union's seeming unwillingness to oppose the education corporate-based reforms that were undermining the public school system. The Grassroots Education Movement was founded as an offshoot of ICE in early 2009 to broaden the battle for public education to include parents and students. In the fall of 2010 a GEM committee called Real Reform Studios responded to ed deform film, Waiting for Superman, by making its own 65 minute "The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman" which premiered at Riverside Church in May 2011 in front of an audience of 650 people and with Diane Ravitch as the keynote speaker. GEM divided into 2 branches: A teacher/union oriented group - MORE - and Change the Stakes, a parent group focused on high stakes testing which has led the opt out movement in NYC.