Ed Notes Online: American Classroom: Portraits from a Public School in Harlem

Showing posts with label American Classroom: Portraits from a Public School in Harlem. Show all posts

Friday, May 23, 2014

Marelli and Bruhn Publish Story of PS 241 in Harlem, a School Undermined by Bloomberg's Ed Deform

In 2001, the year Michael Bloomberg took control of New York City's Public Schools, P.S. 241 had millions of dollars in private donations, a waiting list and enrollment of 900 students. Today, P.S. 241 has an enrollment of only 100 students and is struggling to survive.... American Classroom: Portraits from a Public School in Harlem by Darren Marelli and Mollie Bruhn

American Classroom is a must-read chronicle for anyone wishing to understand how the current status quo free-market education reform policies of charter co-locations, school choice and competition, and accountability have systematically undermined urban public education in America including Harlem’s once proud P.S. 241,The Family Academy. Marelli and Bruhn’s moving story amplifies the voices of P.S. 241’s dedicated teachers and staff as they do their best to serve the City’s most vulnerable students despite grinding poverty, know-nothing bureaucrats and strangled resources."

—Noah E. Gotbaum, member, former President of Harlem’s Community Education Council District 3

Darren and Mollie are the kind of people that make it so worthwhile for me to stay active. I met them early in the life of the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM) when we began to take on the charter school issue. Darren was at a school invaded by the Eva Moskowitz Success Academy monster and they both got involved. Not too much later Julie Cavanagh came to GEM and a year later when we decided to do a film responding to Waiting for Superman, we had the basics of our amazing team, later joined by Brian Jones (Green Party candidate for NY State Lt. Gov) and Lisa Donlan, parent activist supreme on the lower east side. So we are all so proud of this tribute to PS 241 and the people who worked so hard but have been undermined by Bloomberg's deforms.

My name is Darren Marelli and I've been a social worker with the NYC-DOE for the past 14 years. I am writing today to share a book that I am self-publishing with my wife, Mollie Bruhn, who is a Kindergarten teacher in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Mollie and I worked together (with many other talented folks!) on the film The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman.

Our new book is titled, American Classroom: Portraits from a Public School in Harlem. In the spring of 2009, I photographed and interviewed the teachers at my school in Harlem. Months before, the New York City Department of Education had announced plans to close my school—P.S. 241, The Family Academy—claiming that the school and its teachers had failed.

I had worked side-by-side with the teachers at P.S. 241 since 1999 and what I saw was far from failure. Every day I witnessed dedicated, courageous teachers working hard to serve a high-needs student body, while necessary support and resources dwindled away. I felt compelled to honor the people who chose this important work.

American Classroom tells the 13-year story of what happened to the P.S. 241 school community and includes 54 portraits and quotes from staff members during the year that the DOE attempted to close the school.

In 2001, the year Michael Bloomberg took control of New York City's Public Schools, P.S. 241 had millions of dollars in private donations, a waiting list and enrollment of 900 students. Today, P.S. 241 has an enrollment of only 100 students and is struggling to survive. The reasons for these changes are complex and troubling. I believe that the portraits of the Family Academy teachers and the story of our school are important to share. It is our hope that American Classroom will encourage readers to think critically and carefully about the current trends in education reform that impact our teachers, students and communities.

American Classroom's promotion is attached to this email. You can see a preview and order a hard copy or PDF of American Classroom here: http://blur.by/1levJ9v. The Ebook can be found here: http://store.blurb.com/ebooks/472692-american-classroom.

I hope that you enjoy our book and find it to be a useful example of what education "reform" really looks like in our public schools and local communities.

Please share our story!

Best,

Darren Marelli and Mollie Bruhn

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

"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

Friday, May 23, 2014