Pal'n Around With Bill Ayers - updated

UPDATED: Sunday, March 27, 7AM

Shhhhh! Don't tell Sarah Pallin who I was pal'n with. Well, not exactly pal'n. Ayers gave the keynote speech at the NYCORE conference today and I taped it. But in Sarah's world that's all it take to be pal'n.

Ayer's presentation along with artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner, was both political and pedagogical, pointing to new ways we should view the classroom and approach teaching. But rather than get deeper into it, I'll wait for the video to be ready - Ayers said it was OK to put it up.

I didn't get home until 8:30 and I left here at 7:15AM. But don't think it was all workshops and speeches. We all hit the local bar for a post-conference celebration of an exciting day. I mean hundreds of activists, some from all over the nation, but many NYC school teachers, often very, very young. There is some hope since so many of our newer brethren gave up a Saturday for this conference, which had the theme, "Whose Schools? Our Schools!" I've got a bag of tee-shirts I bought with the slogan on them and can't wait 'till summer to wear them around. I made sure to get one extra large since I am aiming to be the poster boy picture in the New Oxford American Dictionary which added the slang phrase "muffin top."

I attended a workshop run by Teachers Unite focusing on the union where a key topic was organizing at the school level. I got a kick when one teacher talked about her chapter leader who I know is one of the worst Unity slugs: pals around with one of the awful principals and can always be counted on to remove any material critical of Unity from teacher mailboxes. TU has a chapter building toolkit for helping people out.

In another workshop we showed about 15 minutes of our upcoming "Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman." The buzz was out there as many people seemed to know about it. I was approached by some pretty high level institutions that were interested and we gave out forms for people who want to hold house parties - you can even invite me over too - if you have food that will get me to my muffin top goal.

The final workshop I went to (there were scads of them) was a standing room only on slaying the 5-headed hydra - the monster of ed deform. I worked in a break-out session with one current NYC teacher and 3 student teachers. As we talked it became so clear that the attempt to destroy neighborhood community schools, particularly at the high school level where these schools barely exist, but also at all levels by the use of charter schools which draw from a wide area outside the neighborhood, is a major cause of the instability and we all strongly endorsed a strengthening of the neighborhood school concept - I think we will see this theme emerge in the coming debated over continuing mayoral control. Another issue raised by one young lady was her discomfort with being forced to sell going to college as the only way to success considering so many poor kids don't have the means to pay for it or their aptitudes or interest level seems low. But she didn't want to be accused of the crime of low expectations, where the penalty is death of your career (I know one teacher who spent 15 months in the rubber room for making a comment to someone that was interpreted as low expectations and reported to the principal.)

Everyone at so many workshops seemed to want to talk about the union response, or lack of, to the ed deform attack. Lots of frustration a-building it seems. The Unity leadership always seemed capable under Randi to race around putting out fires. But now are there so many fires to put out. And Mulgrew just does not that seem that interested (or paranoid as Randi was) - figuring that with 90% of the vote in the last election he has plenty of ice left to skate on.

I heard a superb analysis of why the UFT won't mobilize even in the face of Wisconsin like attacks from one very savvy participant. It goes like this:

In order to fight back UFT/Unity would have to mobilize membership. If they mobilize the membership the level of activity will rise to the point Unity control will be threatened. I chipped in with: The Prime Directive: maintain control. Not only for personal reasons of power and money. They have an ideology that works to motivate their actions.

The discussion got into that ideology a bit with a few points of view being put out there but that's too deep to drill in this post.

A point was made that by building a rank and file that will be activated (which Unity doesn't want to see happen because it is a threat) the leadership can be pushed into more action from below.  "Victories" were pointed to - minor victories- but they give hope.

I took a counter point. I don't want to waste any time or energy trying to convince the UFT hierarchy to do anything. I just don't have enough faith in the UFT leadership to trust that they have good intentions. My view is that whatever actions they are forced to take because of ferment from below are aimed to distract and misrepresent and divert militancy. They want total control and you can't build a movement based on total control that can only be held onto by killing the very democratic structures that are crucial to mobilizing the members.

Basically, I prefer to see the internal critics within not call on the UFT do anything. Instead, just build, baby, build. Build a rank and file movement from the school level up. Unity will try to kill the fires but if you build enough of them they won't know where to turn. Every time you go to the leadership they will tie you up and delay you. Not to say that we don't raise resolutions at the DA as a way to bring issues in front of the delegates that have an independent mind - even those in Unity.

One of the problems I found over the years I've been working with ICE is too much of a sense of talking to the head and not the body - too much time going to Exec Bd meetings where there is no one to convince. Too much time addressing issues to the leadership. I don't believe in writing letters to Mulgrew to make him do something.

If a serious R&F movement develops (as it did so quickly in Chicago) an enormous struggle will ensue over the very life of the union. I've said this before, but Unity/UFT/AFT would rather see the union go into massive decline than give up power. I mean, I've seen people scratch their heads over Randi's actions - "Why would she not fight when faced with a loss of so many members to charters?"

The answer: They prefer to rule a remnant of the union rather than see even a strong union in the hands of others- others which will always include some leftists whom the UFT hierarchy so despise and red bait all the time.

My fear is the upcoming generation of activists will underestimate the UFT/AFT leadership, which will fight dirty in every way possible while they as social justice activists will be honest and open about what they do. I say, "Be careful out there. Be very careful!"
_____________


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Debating School Reform: George Schmidt on Bill Ayres and Mike Klonsky

NOTE: 2 versions of this article were posted accidentally and each elicited comments, which have been consolidated into one post while the other was deleted.

Small schools, and charters as well, have often been pushed by well-meaning people who were then overwhelmed by the tsunami of corporate and foundation money that used the force if its investments to put in place policies that are anti-student and anti-teacher. Anything short of open and active opposition to this is political log-rolling. -------Michael Fiorillo

We sort of fell into the current Bill Ayres/Obama controversy by wondering where Ayres (and Obama) stood during these 13 years of Chicago mayoral control/education reform and its exportation to other cities like New York.

Education Notes has consistently lined up with people like Susan Ohanian and George Schmidt amongst many others to call the high stakes testing and standards movement a major instrument of school privatization and the bash the teacher and union as the cause of failures.

This is a long post but I didn't want to cut any of it. We may take George up on his suggestion to hold a conference on school reform next year and I will throw that idea out to ICE, Teachers Unite, NYCORE, Class Size Matters, ICOPE and other activists that may be interested.

Reading George (and Michael Fiorillo, a UFT HS chapter leader and member of ICE) will get at some of the core issues facing education reformers, so hang in there.

[Bill] Ayers and [Mike] Klonsky both were part of the union bashing "left" here in Chicago in those days. Their disciples in the "small schools" stuff exported those things elsewhere.

By the late 1990s, the same time I was being sued for a million dollars and Mayor Daley and his appointees were trying to drive Substance out of business, Mike and Bill were collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the Chicago Board of Education directly as a "external partner" to a handful of "failing schools."

George Schmidt

I made charges (here and here) the other day about Bill Ayres and teacher unions based more on instinct than knowledge and received comments from both Fred and Mike Klonsky challenging my assertion that behind the Ayres' world view is a certain level of anti teacher (and union) bias. Klonsky urged me to read "Renaissance 2010 Meets the Ownership Society"* and "Private Management of Chicago Schools is a Long Way from Mecca,"** (Feb. 2006 - see abstracts at the end of this post.)

Mike Klonsky said that after reading these articles (I just read the abstracts) I should send a letter of apology to his brother and Bill Ayres.

Not so fast, Mike. Your articles were written in 2006. Where were you guys when Bloomberg and Klein instituted their assault on the NYC school system in 2002? Due to George Schmidt's warnings Ed Notes was able to be out there since 2001 when before Bloomberg took over, Randi Weingarten came out for mayoral control. Wouldst there have been more voices out there then. Besides, I've learned by watching Randi Weingarten, who can say good things but act directly opposite. Watch what they do, not what they say. But there's more.

George had direct experience with Ayers and Klonsky as his school was one of the closing schools:

One of those was the school (Bowen High School) where I taught and was union delegate until I was suspended (February 1999) by Paul Vallas, later to be fired (August 2000) by a vote of the Chicago Board of Education for publishing the CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Examinations) tests in Substance and consistently opposing the use of high-stakes secret multiple choice so-called "standardized" tests for "accountability."

Part of that "accountability" in Chicago was that if your school was "failing" (as measured by the test scores; nothing else mattered) you were forced to buy an "external partner" (in the case of Bowen, Small Schools Workshop; headed by Mike and Bill).

Instead of joining in the critique of the use of so-called "standardized" tests for the corporate accountability attacks on public schools (and unions) in Chicago, Bill and Mike (and most of their colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as others at other Chicago colleges and universities) got on the gravy train, soaked up hundreds of thousands of dollars of CPS money every year, and came into the schools to tell veteran teachers how to "reform" the schools we had worked in for years, decades, and in some cases, generations.

A familiar refrain to NYC teachers.

I want to make it clear. What Ayres did in the 70's has no relevance here. We're more concerned what he did in the 90's and early years of this century in relation to the Chicago model of mayoral control/ed reform that is entering its 14th year and served as a model of the Bloomberg/Klein shakeup of NYC schools, with the destruction of teachers union influence by attacking unions as being the major obstruction to ed reform (see the debate between Linda and Lisa last week.)

So where did Ayres stand through those years? As supporters of small schools (I hear Klonsky's new book is a must read) one must also think of the consequences of how this movement is implemented. In other words, if you get your small schools going in a manner that results in the undermining of public education and teacher unions then where did you really stand? If you acted in a way that contributed to tearing down teachers and teacher unionism, then it's a duck because you quacked. As Mike Fiorillo calls it: political log-rolling.

More from George Schmidt

I'm going to return to the details of the small schools activities in relation to corporate school reform in Chicago after November 4.

Suffice to say, a lot of people profited in the early days of "standards and accountability" here in Chicago and elsewhere, and among those were Chicago's small schools advocates. The fact that the process continued under George W. Bush and No Child Left Behind after 2001-2002 does not wipe out the history between 1995, when Chicago got mayoral control, and 2001, when the Republicans became dominant nationally.

The "ownership society" is in ways a distraction from the neoliberal project that was well on its way via "housing reform," "welfare reform", and "school reform" by the year that Bush defeated Al Gore for President. And the people who supported and profited from the teacher bashing, union busting, and other activities of corporate school reform in Chicago between 1995 and 2001 included Mike Klonsky and Bill Ayers.

I agree with Mike Klonsky about one thing. The stuff from 1968 to around 1976 is mostly irrelevant (except perhaps some of the origins of the myths of "small" as a solution to massively segregated urban school systems).

I'm still waiting to be invited to have at it at a public forum on these questions. Let's just say that certain people for a long time were given the high ground for their theories, while many of the facts that we've published over time in Substance were suppressed.

Finally, about "piling on" [Ayres.]

When Mayor Daley and his appointees at the Chicago Board of Education sued me and Substance for $1 million -- in January 1999 -- and set out to destroy me and Substance, Mike Klonsky was one of the people who assured "progressives" that I was the bad guy. He put it in writing and devoted some considerable energy to that project.

It hurt us dearly back in those days, because it cut off a large swath of potential support at a time when we were under unprecedented attack by the ruling class. Without attributing causation to Mike's behavior back then, let's just say it was a few years later that his projects became defunded by the Daley dynasty. While I might agree in the abstract that there is some general need not to allow the ruling class to pile on "progressives," there is no record of praxis in Chicago that the rule currently being invoked in defense of Bill Ayers was part of the culture of our official progressives. And I don't personally think anything's changed that much since.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net

Mike Klonsky's original comment:

Sad to see leftists and progressive educators piling on Bill Ayers right at this opportune moment and pronouncing various educators at "anti-union." The Weatherman faction of SDS is pretty easy pickens from the right or the left. I ought to know, having led the fight against them in 1968. Problem is, that was 40 years ago and the Weather faction is not really the problem facing New York's teachers or their union at this moment.

And the charge that Ayers is "anti-union" today, or that he supports the current Chicago school reform initiative, Renaissance 2010, is pure bullshit and the people feeding you that crap know it. So if you are really interested in this question, read Bill and my Kappan (Feb. 2006) articles, "Renaissance 2010 Meets the Ownership Society" and "Private Management of Chicago Schools is a Long Way from Mecca," and then go back and tell my brother Fred that he was right all along, and send Bill a note of apology.

Michael Fiorillo's response

My original comment about Bill Ayers was not intended to address whether he has anti-union sentiments. I assume he would declare he does not, and I would believe him.

But that was not really the purpose of my posting, though I perhaps could have expressed it more clearly.

The point to be made about Weatherman was less its arrogance - which was ample - but rather its self-delusion, and there continues to be much self-delusion among so-called political progressives who've signed on to various ed reform programs, only to have them hijacked by the corporate drive to control and privatize public education, with its beach head being urban school systems. From what I've read, that drive has been underway longest and has achieved its greatest influence in Chicago, with DC quickly gaining ground.

Mr. Klonsky, please point out what Mr. Ayers has done to resist these attacks against public education, teachers unions and democracy, by Messrs. Daley, Duncan and others, and I will stand corrected.

Small schools, and charters as well, have often been pushed by well-meaning people who were then overwhelmed by the tsunami of corporate and foundation money that used the force if its investments to put in place policies that are anti-student and anti-teacher. Anything short of open and active opposition to this is political log-rolling.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that activism that results in the neutralization and weakening of unions - even ones as incompetent and misguided as most AFT Locals - constitutes progressive politics.

And it's self-delusion to claim otherwise.

Michael Fiorillo

More follow-ups from George
As I note (and you can print) I look forward to the day when these historical realities can be debated in public and full frontally with equal time to me and Mike (and Billy). On the basis of the realities of Chicago's public schools, the history of what they've been part of, and the alternatives that were rejected when their theories became praxis.

[Bill] Ayers and [Mike] Klonsky both were part of the union bashing "left" here in Chicago in those days. Their disciples in the "small schools" stuff exported those things elsewhere. Oakland was one example I got some information about. But I think the toxic impact of their theories is as close as Bushwick, if I'm not mistaken.

If anyone wants to set that kind of thing up I'll debate any of them -- including Deb Meier -- provided that the structure is equitable. No weighting. Just because I was a classroom teacher and the three of them were honchos (Meier most interesting, let's not forget) doesn't erase the historical realities here.

It's been a very hectic time, but wondrous.

George

MORE
I can't wait until we can all get together, in about a year, for a day-long discussion of urban schools, unions, and "reform." Be sure to write Billy and Mikey and invite them to be on a panel about their projects – especially "small schools" -- and their relationships to corporate "school reform."

Remember, by the late 1990s, the same time I was being sued for a million dollars and Mayor Daley and his appointees were trying to drive Substance out of business, Mike and Bill were collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the Chicago Board of Education directly as a "external partner" to a handful of "failing schools."

One of those was the school (Bowen High School) where I taught and was union delegate until I was suspended (February 1999) by Paul Vallas, later to be fired (August 2000) by a vote of the Chicago Board of Education for publishing the CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Examinations) tests in
Substance and consistently opposing the use of high-stakes secret multiple choice so-called "standardized" tests for "accountability."

Part of that "accountability" in Chicago was that if your school was "failing" (as measured by the test scores; nothing else mattered) you were forced to buy an "external partner" (in the case of Bowen, Small Schools Workshop; headed by Mike and Bill). Instead of joining in the critique of the use of so-called "standardized" tests for the corporate accountability attacks on public schools (and unions) in Chicago, Bill and Mike (and most of their colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as others at other Chicago colleges and universities) got on the gravy train, soaked up hundreds of thousands of dollars of CPS money every year, and came into the schools to tell veteran teachers how to "reform" the schools we had worked in for years, decades, and in some cases, generations.

In the case of the schools where I taught those years, the majority of the teachers were black (or other minorities) and we were under attack by university and college experts who were uniformly white and petit bourgeois and (in relation to our situations) privileged.

So...

Let's do a decade long review of urban "school reform" and invite the proponents of "Small Schools" to the debate, before audiences of union teachers, veteran teachers, in the context of a real examination of their praxis, and not the flaccid articles they can publish, without real peer review, in publications like "Educational Leadership."

But, as I said, it will take a bit of time after November 4 for us to synthesize all the things we're been learning, both from this intense political experience and from the even more important economic situation.

So, let's talk and actually bring people together. But not among university theoreticians who pontificate about what veteran teachers ought to be doing in our overcrowded classrooms. Let's bring them to us and listen to them explain what they actually did during the years, as school reformers in places like Chicago, when their alliances with guys like Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley brought their organizations more than a million dollars in public money to engage in one part of the teacher bashing that was being sold to the USA (exported from Chicago to just about every other major town) as the "reform" urban (read; mostly minority children; mostly poor children; strongly unionized staffs) public school systems.

The facts of history are clear. They just have to well up from underneath the sludge heaps of lies that "progressives" have heaped over them.

Abstracts:
*Would-be reformers need to beware of those who would co-opt the language of reform to undermine its ideals. Mr. Ayers and Mr. Klonsky examine how Chicago's Renaissance 2010 initiative has used the terms of the small schools movement to promote privatization and the erosion of public space.

**Arne Duncan, the brightest and most dedicated schools leader Chicago has had in memory, wants Chicago to be a Mecca where entrepreneurship can flourish. In this article, the authors contend that private management of Chicago schools is a long way from Mecca. There is no evidence or educational research whatsoever to show that privately run charters can produce better results. They urge a renaissance in schools based on expanding and not selling off the public space. This involves mobilizing communities and engaging and unleashing the talent and wisdom of teachers. At his best, Duncan has upheld this direction. In this contested space, this conflict over principles and fundamentals, they hope that Duncan finds a way to bring the resources and support of his business partners into play while preserving and transforming public schools and respecting the rights and the power of engagement of teachers and communities.


NOTE: Arne Duncan signed on to the Sharpton/Klein EEP project as well as the Broader, Bolder approach.

Bill Ayres Follow-up

UPDATED:

One of the first things I learned upon becoming an activist beginning in 1970 that the Weatherman movement functioned as a destroyer of the progressive movement and that people like Bill Ayres were anti-union leftists.

When I said this in the post previous to this, Fred Klonsky disputed me. I backed off. Then Michael Fiorillo followed up and nailed Ayres as an arrogant elitist supporter of the Chicago school model of "reform". I'll go with Mike.

Hello All,

Ayers was an arrogant fool back in the day, and he's an arrogant fool now.

In the '60's, Weatherman, of which Ayers was a founder, was roundly criticized for their dogmatism, arrogance and idiocy. As Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in his history of SDS, it was common among Weatherman's critics to turn the source of their name (from Bob Dylan's "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing,") against them by saying,"You don't need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are." True then and now.

Just as Weatherman represented the dissolution and demise of the New Left, Ayers work for small schools has shown an incredible naivete, having been hijacked by the corporate ed reform movement to destroy neighborhood schools and neutralize/weaken and ultimately destroy teacher unions. I met him at my school about 8 years ago and found that arrogance and sense of privilege - his father was the Chairman of Chicago's electric utility - intact. It seems to me that he has used his work in education to rehabilitate himself. However, no matter what the Right may think, the Left should disregard him.

Best,
Michael Fiorillo

Mike Klonsky has left a new comment on your post "Bill Ayres Follow-up":

Sad to see leftists and progressive educators piling on Bill Ayers right at this opportune moment and pronouncing various educators at "anti-union." The Weatherman faction of SDS is pretty easy pickens from the right or the left. I ought to know, having led the fight against them in 1968. Problem is, that was 40 years ago and the Weather faction is not really the problem facing New York's teachers or their union at this moment.

And the charge that Ayers is "anti-union" today, or that he supports the current Chicago school reform initiative, Renaissance 2010, is pure bullshit and the people feeding you that crap know it. So if you are really interested in this question, read Bill and my Kappan (Feb. 2006) articles, "Renaissance 2010 Meets the Ownership Society" and
"Private Management of Chicago Schools is a Long Way from Mecca," and then go back and tell my brother Fred that he was right all along, and send Bill a note of apology.

Mike Klonsky