Schmidt on Obama and the White Working Class

5/9/08
Norm:

Thanks for forwarding THE HUFFINGTON POST (Richard GizbertHillary's $6.4 Million is a Wise Ivestment, for 2012Posted May 7, 2008 06:06 PM This is not really a case, as some have suggested, of throwing good money after bad.)

Now that the Clinton phenomenon is sputtering to its final termination, more and more people should enjoy watching one of the things Barack Obama does best: winning over white working class and rural voters.

Many people in the media missed the facts about Obama first time around, especially since many of them were being spun by the Clinton machine. It's a variation on the White Blinddspot, and very funny to watch, since it will have been so widespread nationally (from AFT to the major pundits to, of course, the Republicans).

In late 2001, when the Democartic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat here in Illinois was still a pipe dream for Barack Obama, he began slowly building his base. A key was the Illinois Federation of Teachers, which endorsed him against the regular Democratic Party guy, setting up a screaming confrontation within "labor" over the endorsement. For months, I had to listen to very savvy political people swearing at me saying that (a) nobody with that name could get the nomination and win the Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate less than two years from 9/11 and (b) Illinois was not ready to elect another black senator (theoretically, Carol Moseley Braun was such a bad act that she had ruined the "seat").

Obama went out, after getting the nomination, and charmed people all the way from here to the Mason Dixon Line. Remember, southern Illinois is farther "south" than some portions of the Confederacy, and has some of those traditions (some of the worst Klan activity in the "North" in the 20th Century was in Illinois and Indiana).

Day after day, people would report, first wide eyed and then just chuckling, about how Barack Obama would go to some meeting in a place where there were no black people and leave with grandmothers wanting to bake him pies. In those days, Michelle wasn't as front and center, but she was a similar asset.

The Clintons have taken their nastiest shot, and truly deserve to be remembered forever for it. But they didn't write any script that's going to save the McCain campaign. Once Barack Obama rests up (and he's good at that, too) for the next rounds (which begin with the AFT convention in certain ways) it's going to be fun watching all those pies being baked from Portland, Maine to San Diego.

George Schmidt

On the Clinton attempt to destroy Obama, check out Bob Herbert in today's NY Times.

Hillary in '12

The campaign has begun.
The surprise is that so many pundits don't see it.
They ask"What is the rationale?" for Clinton to continue.
It's all about getting elected president – in 2012, stupid.

Education Notes has been speculating on this for months.
March 26 Education Notes: Is Clinton Strategy Designed to Undermine Obama Chances to Win? We focus on the role the UFT/AFT has played and will continue to play in the goal of making Hillary president.

The Feb. 12 The Randi Weingarten Succession Obsession in where we claim Hill in '12 campaign begins the day Obama gets the nomination.

Randi, Hillary and Oback on April 12 inspired a comment asking what Weingarten has to gain with a Republican administration. A lot to gain in terms of having an enemy to blame all the things Unity can't win for teachers. Dictatorships require enemies. McCain would be perfect.

And if Obama were to win, having him in the White House is not user friendly to the UFT. Better to wait for the big enchilada Clintons, which can inspire so many sleepovers in the Lincoln bedroom. Pajama parties, anyone?

Richard Gizbert's Hillary's $6.4 Million is a Wise Investment, for 2012 in the Huffington Post (May 7) makes many of the same points. "Clinton's only chance, for 2012, is to continue to damage Obama so badly that McCain wins in November. That would allow Clinton to take a run at McCain or some other Republican, four years from now."
I posted the entire piece at Norms Notes.

Scenario: Obama loses to McCain - the bigger the loss the better for Clinton (the longer the Clinton campaign, the better the chance to bloody Obama and the more votes lost).
McCain is a disaster as president.

Voila: Victory in '12 for the old war horse who will have another 4 years to build up resources and power. That is why I think the very idea of an Obama/Clinton ticket is so unlikely – unless they think someone will try to bump Obama off – something in the year 2008, 40 years after MLK, is on so many people's minds. (Imagine the crazy charge to come from the right wing Clinton-haters.)

I still think that no matter what the voting patterns in the primaries, Obama still has the better chance considering the enormous magnet for hatred the Clintons have become for too many people.

While there is truth to the point that Obama is winning the black vote overwhelmingly while losing some of the white vote, the sooner the campaign ends, the better Obama's chances of winning over the Clinton votes, though my feeling is that racism is so endemic that any little excuse – and the Clintons are providing plenty of excuses– and a sizable chunk of people will refuse to vote for Obama under any circumstances. This doesn't necessarily mean he can't beat McCain because of the overwhelming factors of the Republican failures.

So, the Clintons are going to do everything possible to make sure that doesn't happen using the "let everyone have their say" argument. They will then make a big show of supporting Obama -wink, wink - after the convention, knowing it is too late. Remember to do what we always tell you about Randi Weingarten - watch what they really do, not what they say.

At the April Delegate Assembly Weingarten was asked - will you be giving Obama the same level of support you are giving to Hillary, she smiled (sort of) and said, "We don't want McCain to win, do we?" The tone with which she answered gave something away. Then this was followed by a slap at Obama. We've also heard about chapter leader training has been used to slam Obama - a great way to get the word out to members without being on the public record.

After the election, the Clintons - and Weingarten - will spend the next few years mending fences.

And they will be aided by the entire AFT/UFT apparatus. Behind the scenes of course. That will be Weingarten's focus as AFT president.

Important to UFT members is how this plays out in the amount of real support Obama will get considering the UFT/AFT has such a big stake in Hillary.

The fact is that the entire union was manipulated into supporting Hillary with not one debate taking place in bodies like the Delegate Assembly or Executive Board. More intriguing, with Obama winning 90% of black votes, where have the black members of Unity Caucus and their supporters in New Action been hiding? Are we being led to believe that not one black member is for Obama? Not one even is willing to stand up and call for a debate at any level?

Where have the Obama supporters in the UFT been all this time? And will they continue to sit by in silence? Will someone get up at an upcoming DA or Exec Bd meeting and call for the UFT to end the sham and support Obama?

There's a Delegate Assembly on May 14. Will we continue to hear the sounds of silence?

Obama, Clinton, the UFT, Shanker, Kahlenberg

Boy, that's a mouthful.

With today's primaries promising to be somewhat important (my belief is that Obama has been damaged to such an extent, he will be hurting badly by tonight) I wanted to comment on a bunch of stuff related to the Democratic party and the splits going back 40 years to 1968.

Remember that year? Assassinations, the crazy Demo convention in Chicago, the UFT 3 month strike in Ocean-Hill Brownsville - all events that have major impact on today's events. Richard Kahlenberg's "Tough Liberal" spends a lot of time justifying Shanker's actions and blaming the New left, the New Democrats, the limousine liberals, etc for the problems the party has had.

As I read it I kept saying- this book came out at this time as justification for Hillary Clinton to be president. Do many of the attacks on Obama point back to 40 years of splits? Do the wounds of the '68 strike still play a role in the Obama-Clinton split? These are issues worth exploring and we'll take a shot at it at some point this week - if I can force myself to open up Kalhlenberg's book once again.

By the way, a review of Kahlenberg's book (funded by Eli Broad and other foundations that just love the ed reform teacher attack movment) written by Vera Pavone and myself will be published in New Politics summer edition. Interestingly, Michael Hirsh, a writer for the NY Teacher and a member of NP's board, will write a response in the following edition. Hmmm. Will Shanker/Kahlenberg come up smelling like roses? A funny thing, but the NY Teacher edition following our submission of the review had an article by Kahlenberg "explaining" Shanker's real position on charter schools.

Al had a lot of splaining to do that goes way beyond charter schools.

Uppity.... With Malice Toward None

I was talking to some supposedly liberal teachers not long ago and was surprised at their animosity to Obama. "Distant. Arrogant. Slick. Thinks he's better than regular people." For a second I thought the next word to be uttered would be the dreaded "Uppity." Well, we haven't gone that far. (Well, maybe we have - look upper left.)

Now these are people active in the UFT. Has the Clinton machine been aided in the onslaught on Obama in more subtle ways by UFT underground propaganda? (ie. Randi Weingarten's hint at the April DA that they tried to reach out to him but have been ignored. It was more the way she said it than the actual words that made me take notice.)

I headed home with the intention to write about this but it seemed best to stay away from such a volatile topic. But I now feel free to put my toe in the water after Maureen Dowd used the word today in her column in the NY Times. Quoting Bill Clinton, she wrote:

“The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules,” the former president said. “In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it.”

Oh, well, at least Bill didn’t use the word uppity. And don’t you love this paean to rules coming from a man so tethered and humbled by rules that he invented an entirely new sexual etiquette to suit his needs in the Oval Office?

Why does Obama, the one with the bumpy background and mixed racial heritage, the one raised by a single mother who was on food stamps, seem so forced when he mingles with the common folk?

Karl Rove and other Republicans say he comes across as the snooty product of a Hawaiian prep school, Cambridge, Columbia and Hyde Park, and that is what led to the damaging anthropological “bitter” disquisition. Yet George H. W. Bush’s attempts to paint over his patrician style with a cowboy veneer was a silly sort of masquerade, obviously engineered by Lee Atwater, who brought the props of pork rinds and country music.

Voters also don’t seem to mind Hillary, with her $109 million bank account, selling herself as the champion of the little people. The blue-collar queen shared her thoughts about the “outrageous” Rev. Wright with the blue-collar king, Bill O’Reilly, last week. In reality, as first lady, Hillary was renowned for her upstairs-downstairs tussles in the White House, and her high-handed treatment of the little people in the travel office, on the switchboard and on the residence staff. The reports were legend about the Clintons’ problems with the Secret Service, and I once saw Bill dress down an agent in a humiliating way over a couple of autograph seekers who got past a rope line in Orange County, Calif.

Obama, on the other hand, may seem esoteric, and sometimes looks haughty or put-upon when he should merely offer that ensorcelling smile. But he is very well liked by his Secret Service agents, and shoots hoops with them. And I watched him take the time one night after a long day of campaigning to stand and take individual pictures with a squadron of Dallas motorcycle police officers on the tarmac.

It must be hard for Obama, having applied all his energy over the years to rising above the rough spots in his background, making whites comfortable with him, striving to become the sophisticated, silky political star who looks supremely comfortable in a tux. Now he must go into reverse and stoop to conquer with cornball photo ops.

“I do think that one of the ironies of the last two or three weeks was this idea that somehow Michelle and I are elitist, pointy-headed intellectual types,” he said, adding sincerely, “I filled up my own gas tanks.”

It’s hard not to be who you are, but it’s doubly hard to be who you’ve strived not to be. Obama not only has to figure out how to unwind with a Bud. He has to rewind his life.

If people think the love of the white male working class for Hillary, so many of whom despised her not too long ago, has nothing to do with racism, they are ignoring something endemic to American society. That the Clintons have chosen to exacerbate it all will cost them dearly in the short and long run.

Dowd touches on points of personal relationships in comparing Obama and Clinton. I remember a friend almost not marrying a guy because, though he treated her very well, he demeaned waiters and other help on a regular basis. There are lessons about character in the way people treat others at all levels. Abraham Lincoln was the master (Dorris Kearns Goodwin is a MUST read.) When some people compare Obama to Lincoln, that is part of what they are talking about. (Check out George Schmidt's personal reflections of Obama that we posted on norms notes.)

But there are other areas of comparison. Obama is painted as weak when he doesn't hammer Hillary in a negative manner and he has been forced to respond because he is branded as a wimp if he doesn't.

If Lincoln were out there today, he would be attacked for being weak and indecisive. No matter how badly he was attacked he never struck back. It used to drive his advisors crazy. (But Lincoln had the strength to put every single opponent in his cabinet.) Obama has tried to take a similar tack and has been pushed to show how "tough" he is.

Some more quotes from Maureen Dowd's column illustrate this point:

Paul Gipson, president of a steelworkers local in Portage, Ind., hailed her “testicular fortitude,” before ripping into “Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle.”

James Carville helpfully told Eleanor Clift of Newsweek that if Hillary gave Obama one of her vehicles of testicular fortitude, “they’d both have two.”

"With malice toward none, with charity for all" were not just words Lincoln used in a speech, but words he lived.

Can't you just imagine the workup Bill Clinton and James Carville would be doing on him?

Lincoln is proof that toughness can take many forms. I have a sneaky suspicion there's a whole lotta more Lincoln in Obama than he is given credit for.

And did Thomas Friedman in essence endorse Obama in his column today (Who Will Tell the People) when he touched on a similar theme:

Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is “toughening up” Barack Obama so he’ll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

I don’t know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”

While you're perusing the Week in Review section, check out Frank Rich's "The All-White Elephant in the Room" which compared how McCain's preacher supporters get a free pass even when they attack the Catholic church.

Randi, Hillary and Barack

UPDATE2: George Schmidt on Obama and the Chicago Teachers Union
A remarkable piece by George (who disagrees with so much of Obama's program) but talks about him as a man.
"I remember the numerous times he'd come by the union offices (before he was an intergalactic star) and thank us or just talk. He was also at just about every union event. After he was elected to the Senate, he came by the CTU to thank everyone on the staff."

And read why Michael Moore has just endorsed Obama.
_______________________________________________________________
UPDATE1: Clinton and Labor
from Counterpunch, Vol 15, no 7: April 1-15
"U.S. labor unions bitterly point out that Clinton (along with two of her own top staffers, Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson) has been lobbying for Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe, while the latter has consolidated his regime’s record as the most dangerous in the world for labor organizers. In the six years since Uribe took office, over 400 labor activists have been killed. In 2008, almost one unionist a week has been assassinated."

Bill Clinton was paid $800,000 by Columbia based Gold Star Int'l to promote the US-Columbia trade deal that Hillary is supposedly denouncing. Did she tell Bill to give the money back?
________________________________________________________________

We all know where the UFT/AFT stands - four square for Hillary.

Ed Notes has been speculating what Randi et al. will do when Obama gets the official nomination.

So, when she was asked exactly this question at the Delegate Assembly on April 16 - will you be giving Obama the same level of support you are giving to Hillary, she smiled (sort of) and said, "We don't want McCain to win, do we?"

Well, do we?

How do Hillary and Randi benefit if Obama wins? Four and probably eight years in the wilderness. Basically, for Hillary, it's over.

But if Obama gets the nomination and loses, the bigger the better for the Clintons, then it's "I told you so" time and the "Hillary in '12" campaign begins.

Some pundits have speculated as to why with so little chance, the Clintons continue to cut up Obama. Her fighting spirit is what they attribute it to. Nah! It's all part of the cut-your-losses-today-plan-for tomorrow strategy. Sort of like what happened with their "support" for Gore and Kerry.

So Randi's follow up to the question was insightful. "We have reached out to Obama, but they don't respond," was what she said. Hmmm. You know, code for -- arrogant.

I've heard from chapter leaders about the not so subtle anti-Obama stuff at chapter leader training sessions. Videos of Obama coming out in favor of individual merit pay. Terrible. After all, Hillary and Randi are for their own versions of merit pay, so that's all right. And they were fed all the stuff about how Hillary wants to rid us of NCLB while Obama is ho-hum. Hmmm. Naturally the history of AFT/UFT/Randi/Clinton support for NCLB from day one is somehow left out.

Using chapter leader training to spread the anti-Obama message is a sign of the undercurrent of what things are all about.

There's a story in Kahlenberg's "Tough Liberal" Albert Shanker book about Bill and Hillary Clinton favoring testing of veteran teachers when he was governor of Arkansas in the 80's. Shanker was toying with the idea as part of his reform movement, saying in 1984, "there is ample evidence that states – through past hiring practices– have hired people who are illiterate."

Admittedly, these tests for vet teachers were supposedly for literacy. But if you were for testing vets, why not in subject areas and beyond? Were Shanker and the Clintons in favor of a literacy tests for, say, politicians? And how about having lawyers retake the Bar exam every 5 years? And doctors retake med boards? Oh, boy!

Shanker invited Hillary the 1985 AFT convention to debate Rand researcher Linda Darling-Hammond, who was apparently opposed to testing veteran teachers. Kahlenberg writes, "Politically, [Hillary] Clinton said, the weeding out of incompetent teachers helped create the political environment in which the public would support new taxes and further investments in education."[p. 290]

Linda Darling-Hammond is now one of Obama's chief education advisers, and a noted critic of Teach for America.

Ahhh! Hillary arguing the case for testing veteran teachers opposed by one of Obama's chief education advisers. Wish I had a video of that debate to show chapter leaders.

I’m going to Obama with a banjo on my knee

The Wave's Howie Schwach editorialized on how Obama’s refusal to wear a lapel pin that would demonstrate his patriotism will cost him votes. My guess is that Obama can wear a jacket made of lapel pins and he will not get those votes. No matter what polls show, when it comes time to pull the lever, a lot of people will not vote for a black man for president. I think it’s called “racism.”

Some comedian said that the only time you see a black man as president in movies and on TV is when some cataclysm is about to hit. What’s more likely? Obama as president or the earth getting hit by an asteroid? He has my vote anyway, but I’m writing this from under my dining room table.

Coming soon: What Randi said about supporting Obama at the Delegate Assembly on Apr. 16 and how she said it - I wish I had a picture of that crocodile smile when she said, "We don't want McCain to win, do we?"

Starting Now: Hillary in '12

Back Issues- Angelet on Rampage

Here are some links to backdated articles that I just posted:

Ding Dong at Bayard Rustin Ed Complex - Principal John Angelet is leaving.
But even though he's a lame duck, he is hell bent on taking people with him. He is on a rampage and this wouldn't have happened if he had been removed when he was supposed to a few weeks ago. The UFT needs to make a big stink over this. Here's a bitter guy who was forced out but is exacting revenge. All his actions against teachers from the point he announced he is leaving should be declared null and void.


Race on the Table - Globally and Locally. Excerpt from my Wave column from April 4, 2008.
I address some of the Obama/race stuff and also a local issue at PS 106 in Rockaway where the PTA president wrote a piece in the Wave raising issues about white teacher attitudes towards kids of color. You can track the full PS 106 story by clicking on the link in the sidebar.

The Rising Costs of Health Care and NYC Union Contracts - forum April 22. Chapter Leader John Powers will be one of the speakers. John and his colleagues have been on the case of the GHI/HIP merger and has pressured the UFT to provide more info. ICE has joined in with John for support.

Race on the Table – Globally and Locally

Excerpt of my column that appeared in The Wave (www.rockawave.com) on April 4, 2008.

Barack Obama’s speech on race has opened up a long-needed area of discussion, not only on the national level, but out here in Rockaway. Howard Schwach’s editorial on March 28 on the Democratic primary being about race and gender touched a chord. Sure, 50 percent of white voters voted for Clinton and an even higher percentage of black voters are for Obama. We should also say that in Italian areas and Jewish areas, candidates of those persuasions also garner votes based on how people identify with them. So, yes, all political campaigns are based to some extent on race, gender and ethnics.

[Wave Editor] Howard Schwach’s presentation of how Geraldine Ferraro was forced to resign for “telling a political truth” as a comparison of Obama’s relationship to his pastor a bit simplistic. I detected something petulant in Ferrara’s position along the lines of “look at all the advantages blacks have.” Obama did address white backlash over these issues in his speech. Sometimes I don’t get it. Obama is half white and half black and somehow the white half disappears when people talk about him.

PS 106 and Race
I bring race up in a column focused on schools because of PS 106 PA President Joyce Bunch’s It’s My Turn column in last week’s Wave in which she castigated PS 106 teacher Miriam Baum (unfairly, I believe) for her recent column on the schools in which she expressed the extent of teacher satisfaction with Principal Sills. Rather than get into the details of whether UFT President did or do not call Sills a bitch at a UFT meeting (she probably did – but she’s called me much worse and recently called a high school principal in Manhattan an A-hole.) Or the so-called “slanderous” comments about Sills forging a teacher’s signature on a faked observation – which I heard about literally the day it happened and have discovered has happened in more schools than we want to imagine, especially with Leadership Academy principals, which leads us to think about exactly what kids of training they are being given.) Joyce Bunch is basically defending Sills, and that’s her right.

Of more interest to me was points of anger she expressed at racial attitudes people may have towards kids and their parents in black communities. This touched a real nerve, given the debates going on about race and how that might affect the education process or the relationships between what is often white teachers and poor people in a black community. The idea has been raised by some that black kids would be better served by black teachers. But some people in the black community have also talked about the attitudes of middle class black teachers being much closer to those of white teachers when it comes to poor kids. Results in communities with a majority of black teachers like Washington DC (overwhelmingly,) Chicago and Bed-Stuy have not been any better.

Bunch points out that the community around PS 106 is not homogeneous, stating that she is an attorney and other parents are professionals. She says, “If someone receives a welfare check, so what?” As a white, Jewish young man who entered teaching in 1967 with a whole mess of preconceptions and received a wonderful education by the children and their parents, most of whom were on welfare, I agree wholeheartedly. And I continue to learn, working with current and former teachers of various races to try to reform the system in a way beyond the current corporate, market based driven schools based on a ridiculous competitive model that unfortunately people like Joyce Bunch and Principal Sills seem to have signed onto.

When I mentioned Bunch’s article to a young activist friend of the same mixed race as Obama, she said, “You cannot write about race and schools without reading Lisa Delpit’s “Other People’s Children” which I immediately bought and will follow up with in the future.
Bunch closes her article with an invitation for me to sit down with the PS 106 PTA to create a dialogue and I would be happy to do so. (My email is at the end of this article.) But I want to get one more thing clear…

Bees in my bonnet
I put 35 years in the system as a teacher/activist/reformer in a Hispanic/Black community in which I stood with local activists against an ethnic/white dominated school board, so I have some sensitivity to the issues Bunch raises. I’m proud to have been a teacher and the overwhelming majority of my colleagues were decent, well-meaning and competent. Thus column is aimed at teachers. When Bunch says I have a bee in my bonnet about Sills that is partially due to some of the things teachers (who I respect enormously) tell me. But it also goes to the one personal contact I had with her during the massive battle over the ratification of 2005 contract that took place between the UFT leadership and groups opposed to the contract.

With the UFT doing everything it could to keep the opposition out of the schools, we went around the city with leaflets to put in teacher mail boxes to provide them with both sides of the issue. I went to a hundred schools and in just about every one I was given the courtesy of being allowed to reach out to teachers. And when a principal felt uncomfortable, they were unfailing polite (for instance the principal of PS 114 asked to look over the leaflet and then said “OK.”) Some said they would check and asked me to come back. But not Sills, who was incredibly nasty and abusive over my request, refused to listen to even a 10 second explanation and ordered me off the premises immediately. (The person who was told to escort me out was horrified and said, “Don’t worry, that’s’ the way she treats people.”) When you have contact with so many people over so many years and you meet the rarity of someone treating me like Sills did, you get an inking that something is not right. But maybe she was just having a bad day. I look forward to the dialogue with Joyce Bunch and her colleagues if they are still interested.

Is Clinton Strategy Designed to Undermine Obama Chances to Win?

What role will the UFT/AFT play if Obama is the nominee?

On Feb. 12, in part 2 of our post on Randi's Succession, we wrote:

[Randi's] plan being to use a national forum [as AFT President] to help Hillary get elected. Ooops! Actually, if Obama is the candidate and loses to McCain, Hillary becomes very viable in 2012, so think long-term. Who do you think the Weingarten/Clinton forces will really be rooting for?) An Obama loss and AFT HQ becomes Hillary Central.

If Obama gets the nomination and loses to McCain, Hillary gets to say "I told you so" and becomes the instant candidate for 2012. At the time, I read the piece to my wife, upon which she, basically a Hillary supporter at the time, said "WHY? HOW COULD THEY WANT McCAIN?" I responded because for the Clintons and their supporters it is about them, not the party. I told her we would be watching the true level of enthusiasm Randi Weingarten and the AFT/UFT have for Obama – oh, there will be lots of surface stuff, but with Randi's star so hitched to Hillary, an Obama win, leaving Hillary in Siberia, would not be part of the plan.

Today, Maureen Dowd ("Hillary or Nobody") raises this same point (has she been reading my blog?):

Even some Clinton loyalists are wondering aloud if the win-at-all-costs strategy of Hillary and Bill — which continued Tuesday when Hillary tried to drag Rev. Wright back into the spotlight — is designed to rough up Obama so badly and leave the party so riven that Obama will lose in November to John McCain.

If McCain only served one term, Hillary would have one last shot. On Election Day in 2012, she’d be 65.

Why else would Hillary suggest that McCain would be a better commander in chief than Obama, and why else would Bill imply that Obama was less patriotic — and attended by more static — than McCain?

Why else would Phil Singer, a Hillary spokesman, say in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday that Obama was trying to disenfranchise the voters of Florida and Michigan. “When it comes to voting, Senator Obama has turned the audacity of hope into the audacity of nope,” he said, adding, “There’s a basic reality here, which is we could have avoided the entire George W. Bush presidency if we had counted votes in Florida.” So is Singer making the case that Obama is as anti-democratic as W. was when he snatched Florida from Al Gore?

Some top Democrats are increasingly worried that the Clintons’ divide-and-conquer strategy is nihilistic: Hillary or no democrat.

(Or, as one Democrat described it to ABC’s Jake Tapper: Hillary is going for “the Tonya Harding option” — if she can’t get the gold, kneecap her rival.)

A few days ago, David Brooks ("The Long Defeat") estimated Hillary's chances of getting the nomination as at best 5% and he wondered why she would be risking the party's chances by undermining Obama to such an extent he can't win.

When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness.

Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance? Are leading Democrats so narcissistic that they would create bitter stagnation even if they were granted one-party rule?

We've speculated (here and here) on the lack of democracy in the way Randi Weingarten went about steamrollering the UFT into supporting Hillary Clinton (Are there NO Obama supporters in the UFT, in particular amongst Black UFT'ers and in particular Unity Caucus?) by not allowing the Delegate Assembly to even discuss the endorsement, denying Obama supporters at least the sense of fairness.

Unity Caucus discipline will take care of their Black members. It is hard to believe that not even one Unity Caucus Black member would not be for Obama, with polling numbers around the nation showing a massive drift of Black voters moving from Hillary to Obama.... But in the "democracy" in Unity Caucus, democratic centralism will suppress any sense of support for Obama.

It's all about how to manage the membership. The UFT payed [Hillary advisor] Howard Wolfson to advise them on how to use massive UFT resources in Hillary's campaign without having to go through an endorsement by the members or even hold a discussion where Obama supporters might get to raise a stink.

With the end-game approaching, let's see if members of Unity Caucus are freed to express their enthusiasm for Obama. Randi, hedging her bets as usual, did do some gentle trashing of Obama's positions on education at a recent DA. The UFT (it will take Randi a bit of time to turn over the top level of the AFT in her image) will make it look like they support Obama, while undermining him. This is where Weingarten is at her most brilliant. Feinting left while going right. Or is it feinting right and going left? Actually, it's both at the same time.

There is sure to be some resentment of Black members within Unity Caucus if the UFT slacks off. Mike Mulgrew, Michelle Bodden and other supposed Weingarten successors will have their work cut out for them avoiding cracks in the machine.

I will miss the daily obfuscation show in the UFT when she starts racing around the county this July after her election as AFT president campaigning for Hillary – in '12.

More on Obama and Education in Chicago

Finally, we are getting some hard core information on Obama and the Chicago school issue from someone involved in the front lines and this looks like somewhat of a plus for Obama. (See my comment below after Julie Woestehoff's points.)

Leonie Haimson has gone to a source and sent the following to her listserve:

As you know, I have always been reluctant on this list and elsewhere to get involved in partisan politics; for one thing, my organization's non-profit status depends on not endorsing any candidates for elective office.

But I think because of the previous discussion of Obama on this list and assorted claims that he supported or was somehow involved in some of the worst aspects of the so-called education reform agenda in Chicago, its important to set the record straight.

I turned to my friend Julie Woestehoff, the president of Parent United for Responsible Education, who has worked in Chicago in support of parent rights and parent involvement in the public schools for many years. Julie is a fantastic advocate, and she co-authored our letter to the parents of LA which we wrote in June 2006, when they were considering Mayoral control in that city. (For a copy of this letter, which received a lot of media attention at the time, see http://www.classsizematters.org/lettertoLAparents.html)

Just a little background – LSC’s or Local School Councils are like our School Leadership Teams – teams made up of parents and staff that are supposed to make important decisions at the school level and that the administration in Chicago has been trying to weaken over many years (sound familiar?)

I urge you to read Julie’s unedited observations about Barack Obama below.

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters

Hi Leonie-
Glad to offer my 2 cents, and I don't mind your sharing any of it.

First of all, Sen. Obama is my neighbor (we vote in the same polling place), and he has also been my state senator and currently my US Senator. I've always voted for him and we have a nodding acquaintance. He is just as charming, funny, straightforward, and thoughtful in person as he seems. Our community is absolutely thrilled with his candidacy -- but it's the senior African-Americans who seem happiest ("Never thought in my lifetime..."). In addition, my husband is a minister in the United Church of Christ and has enormous respect for Obama's church and its pastor, both of which are major influences on him. So I'm not unbiased. But I do have some history to relate.

As a state senator, Obama supported our elected, parent-majority local school councils during a time when we were under attack by Paul Vallas, the schools CEO at the time. Vallas wanted to be able to veto LSC principal selection decisions in cases where the LSC decided not to rehire a principal when his/her contract was up. PURE proposed a compromise, to bring in independent arbitration. There's an entry on my blog that quotes Obama in support of that process, which was made law and has worked well for almost 10 years now:

http://pureparents.org/index.php?blog/show/Obama_on_LSC_principal_arbitration_process

We wanted him to take up the LSC cause more vigorously than he did, and he disappointed us from time to time, but never on anything major. As a sidelight, I encountered Michelle Obama when she was a member of the Chicago Board of Education's Accountability Council, a now defunct group whose responsibility at the time was to review schools for potential interventions. She and a couple of other women on the council were the only ones who stood up against CPS's efforts to get them to rubber stamp any intervention that Vallas proposed. Again, she didn't get out and rock the boat, but she was strong and intelligent.

As our US Senator, Obama made the effort to get onto the Senate Education Committee and his office has been very responsive to our communications about NCLB and related matters. I've had some extensive discussion with his education aide. Where we agree most is on the importance of parent involvement. If elected, I believe that Obama will direct the USDE to take significant steps to promote and strengthen the role of parents. Obama also gets the problems with testing and has begun highlighting that in his speeches and campaign themes.

It's not true that Obama supports Renaissance 2010. He has been publicly supportive of charter schools, but his support developed prior to the wholesale appropriation of charter and other new school strategies that undergird the disaster Mayor Daley calls Renaissance 2010. Even the heretofore positive notion of small schools is tainted, at least in Chicago, by their being used to justify massive school closing and privatization. This is all fairly new stuff and even we have to work hard to keep up with the various mutations. I believe that Obama is aware of what's really going on and that he gets the issues.

Finally, the fact that Obama was recently excoriated for having Linda Darling-Hammond as one of his education advisors speaks pretty well for him. If you haven't read Mike Klonsky's blog on this topic, here's an example:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-6z6IhP08cqXp9kfshYQPv87gCfJyFg--?cq=1&p=1924

I hope this helps!!
Julie

Norm's follow-up:

On this point:

Even the heretofore positive notion of small schools is tainted, at least in heretof, by their being used to justify massive school closing and privatization. This is all fairly new stuff and even we have to work hard to keep up with the various mutations. I believe that Obama is aware of what's really going on and that he gets the issues.

It seems I've veen hearing about some of this for years, way before this occurred in NYC. Schmidt's Substance has been running stuff on this for many years. Debbie Lynch ran and won in the Chicago Teachers Union election back in 2001 I believe partly on the school closing issue. I ran articles in Ed Notes around 2001/2 addressing this issue in Chicago and that was one of the lessons we tried to bring to the UFT when the small schools business started in NYC. So I would love to hear more than a belief he is "aware" and "gets" the issue. Silence is still complicity and if we are electing a president I would sure like to know where he/she stands on the kind of educational malpractice we've seen in Chicago and NYC and other places.

Comment on out previous post from anon:

So let me get this straight. You want Klonsky to join George Schmidt in attacking Obama in the middle of campaign against Clinton and McCain? And on what issue? Mayor Daley's school reform plan. Have I got that right?

Response: Al

I want to put up as much information unfiltered on where Obama has stood on the Chicago school - I won't honor it by calling it a reform plan. I would like to see Schmidt and Klonsky and others give us some hard info on where Obama has stood if anywhere at all over the past 13 years. Klonsky was correct to crit. Russo but provides nothing much more than that. By the way, I don't consider Schmidt's criticism more of an attack on Obama than on Clinton.

Read more on Chicago school un-reform at Under Assault in this post.

Smearing Obama: More Wind from the Windy City

George Schmidt's critical look at the Obama Ed program which we posted here seems to have been joined by Alexander Russo. I get the feeling Schmidt is not an admirer of Russo. But neither is he an admirer of Mike Klonsky. So, who is lining up where? Klonsky at his Small talk blog accuses Russo of a smear job and if you take his narrow slice, it sure looks that way. He also hints that maybe this is part of the Clinton dirty tricks campaign.

Interestingly, Randi Weingarten raised the issue of Obama's positions on education - gently, but negatively - at the Delegate Assembly on Feb. 6. Maybe not exactly a dirty trick - a slightly smudgy trick. Like the Clintons with their buddies Joel Klein and Andrew Rotherham are not in the phony Ed reform movement up to their ears.

Though right now I am inclined to support Obama, though I am also concerned about the things Schmidt pointed to. I mean, silence on the part of Obama in the face if the Richard Daly/Paul Vallas onslaught is complicity. I wish Klonsky would comment on this aspect of George's statement:

There has been no difference between Barack Obama and Mayor Richard M. Daley on any of the corporate "school reform" plans foisted on Chicago since Daley pioneered the "mayor control" dictatorial model of school governance (thanks to a vote of a Republican dominated Illinois General Assembly, a la the Gingrich Congress) in 1995.

Despite the fact that many community leaders and even some public
officials have challenged Mayor Daley on "Renaissance 2010" -- especially the wholesale relocation of children as schools were closed and often flipped for charter school use, Barack Obama was not public with any criticism of "Renaissance 2010." In fact, his positions are indistinguishable from Mayor Daley's or those of his Hyde Park neighbors and the people pushing privatization, charterization, and corporate "school reform" out of the University of Chicago and elsewhere in corporate Chicago. Rumor locally has been that Barack Obama has included Arne Duncan [the Joel Klein of Chicago] and others of that ilk in his informal educational brain trust.

Here are some excerpts from Klonsky's post which you can read here in full:

Russo won't get the job

Is Alexander Russo auditioning for a job in the dirty-tricks department of the Clinton campaign? One might think so after reading his latest attempt to smear Barack Obama and his school reform supporters. On his TWIE blog, Russo claims that Obama’s co-sponsorship of a bill promoting a Teacher Residency Program, in effect, makes the senator a supporter of school closings, teacher firings and turning over public schools to “outside organizations.”

Klonsky closes with:

Whether or not one agrees with the TRP narrative’s positive description of AUSL, or with Obama’s candidacy, it would be pretty hard to give any credence to Russo’s pitiful anti-Obama smears. Sorry, Alexander. You don't get the job. They already have hired the best in the business.

Politics Are Us: Follow the Money

A recent comment by a reader on the NYC Education News listserve after I posted a link to George Schmidt's comments on Obama's education record in Chicago:

From what we've seen being played out in NYC public education, I've wondered if Barack's primary votes and money have been coming just from Democrats. After all, Republicans skewed the 2006 senate race in CT by crossing party lines so they could vote for Lieberman, and thus block his Democratic opponent. They were able to cross lines in Fro, independents could vote on either side in several of the early states, plus anyone can e-mail money to a candidate.

My suspicions are sadly confirmed by the ednotes article you sent. We already know that the GOP is incredibly active in privatizing the public school system, and, from Schmidt's perspective, Barack evidently supports that movement, along with its chief instrument, No Child Left Behind. Perhaps Ted Kennedy is supporting Barack as a way to preserve NCLB, which he co-sponsored. However, does that mean Kennedy is also inside the privatization loop, or is he too oblivious to see the uses for which NCLB has been co-opted?

That prompted this response:

Sorry, but this is absurd. Anyone who thinks that Obama's support is "Republicans crossing over" hasn't been paying attention, to what he says, to who is supporting him, to what is happening in our country.

I heard him speak a few weeks ago and he said, "we have to support our teachers, and pay them more. They should not have to only teach to the test. Children should have art, and music, and gym, and languages...,

Obama is running against the right, against Bush's policies, all down the line. Because he has excited and activated so many people, including young people, independents and those who are turned off by politics as usual, he actually could beat the Republican, in a landslide. And a landslide is what we'll need to turn the country around, including away from the attack on public education.

Which prompted this response from me:


I am pretty cynical about most politicians and subscribe to the belief expressed by that great political theorist Pete Townshend of The Who: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss/ I'll get on my knees and pray we don't get fooled again.

It is oh so easy for Obama to say teachers should get paid more.
Bloomberg said that too - as long as they put more time in and gave up chuncks of their contract.

And he thinks teachers shouldn't teach to the test?

Where did he ever take such a stand in Chicago his home base where that's what they do?
Chicago, where the BloomKlein style of reform began in 1995.

Has he played any role at all in diverting the attack on public education in Chicago?

The writer says to pay attention to who is supporting him. I say: "Follow the money."

George Schmidt, who clearly liked Obama as a man, squarley put him in the same camp as Daley/Bloomberg/Joel Klein camp. If you didn't get to his piece yet you can read it here.

Pray we don't get fooled again.

And if you admire Clinton, do not forget where Joel Klein came from. It is so easy to use rhetoric but always examine what politicians have done.

Trying to compare anyone to Bush makes them look good.

My wife works in the health field and she read Paul Krugman today and said she likes Clinton's universal health care plan better than Obama's and will vote for her on that basis.
I disagree. So what if Clinton says all the right things. I will bet a chunk of her money comes from the pharmecuticals and health care industry which will have to make a big buck out of any plan. Will Clinton/Obama be more loyal to the voters or to the people funding their campaigns? Any plan will be what the people who can profit from it says it will be. Follow the money.

But there are some differences if you believe the rhetoric. Take Cuba for instance, a place I got to visit legally in the late 70's when Jimmy Carter opened a brief window of liberalization.

John McAuliff, Executive Director. Fund for Reconciliation and Development writes:
Barack Obama has pledged unrestricted family travel and remittances, not just "easing" Bush restrictions of one visit every three years. He also has called for negotiations with Raul Castro without preconditions.
Hillary Clinton is Bush light on Cuba, seeming to take her cue from Sen. Bob Menendez and her Miami based Cuban American sister in law.Both candidates would do well to listen to the 2/3 of Americans who support normalization of relations and the right to travel to Cuba.

McAuliff's entire piece is here.


Two articles in the NY Times this past week on Bill Clinton and Obama were illuminating.

One delves into the actions of Obama when it came to a nuclear leak.

An excerpt:

"The history of the bill shows Mr. Obama navigating a home-state controversy that pitted two important constituencies against each other and tested his skills as a legislative infighter. On one side were neighbors of several nuclear plants upset that low-level radioactive leaks had gone unreported for years; on the other was Exelon, the country’s largest nuclear plant operator and one of Mr. Obama’s largest sources of campaign money. Since 2003, executives and employees of Exelon, which is based in Illinois, have contributed at least $227,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns.

The complete article is here.

The other one is about Bill Clinton and a uranium deal in Kazakhstan that led to praise for a dictator, a big deal for a Canadian who contrubuted millions to Clinton's foundation in exchange for lending his prestige to the arrangement. I think Borat may have been at the same meeeting.

The article is here:

While the Obama piece is not as bad as the Clinton article, rereading both of them side by side makes me want to take a shower. Despite all this, there's a good chance I'll vote for Obama because no matter what he said or Clinton said, as someone who was 15 when Kennedy was elected and turned my generation onto politics, there is something in what Elena said about activating and inspiring young people. It probably won't last, but I'll get on my knees and pray they won't get fooled again.

Schmidt on Obama and Education

Hello Everyone,

Given Barack Obama's stated enthusiasm for merit pay, I thought there might be things we needed to know about his relationship to renaissance 2010 in Chicago. Therefore, I e-mailed George Schmidt, since he would be in a position to know. Below is his response.

Best,
Michael Fiorillo

Subject: Re: Obama/Renaissance2010

1/26/08

Here are the facts:

1. The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. Senate was a blow against white supremacy and all of us should cheer. The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. Presidency would be the same, on the world scale. I don't think we can overestimate its importance. The man is qualified – or more qualified - than about half the politicians who have been elected to that office during the past 140 years, and certainly better by far than any of the last four Republicans. (My family always told me to consider Dwight Eisenhower in a different way, since both my parents served in World War II).

Having struggled against white supremacy, racism, and racial segregation all my adult life, I'm in wonderment about how this is developing.

However:

2. There has been no difference between Barack Obama and Mayor Richard M. Daley on any of the corporate "school reform" plans foisted on Chicago since Daley pioneered the "mayor control" dictatorial model of school governance (thanks to a vote of a Republican dominated Illinois General Assembly, a la the Gingrich Congress) in 1995.

3. Despite the fact that many community leaders and even some public
officials have challenged Mayor Daley on "Renaissance 2010" -- especially the wholesale relocation of children as schools were closed and often flipped for charter school use, Barack Obama was not public with any criticism of "Renaissance 2010." In fact, his positions are indistinguishable from Mayor Daley's or those of his Hyde Park neighbors and the people pushing privatization, charterization, and corporate "school reform" out of the University of Chicago and elsewhere in corporate Chicago. Rumor locally has been that Barack Obama has included Arne Duncan [the Joel Klein of Chicago] and others of that ilk in his informal educational brain trust.

Needless to say, he has no interest in hearing from critics of "Renaissance 2010" or from those of us who maintain that No Child Left Behind has to be abolished.

4. Barack Obama has close ties with a large number of corporate types who are happy with the Daley dictatorship. Most important of these is John Rodgers of Ariel Capital Management, which has placed Arne Duncan and one member of our seven member Board of Education at the "top" of the school system, despite the fact that Duncan had absolutely no experience, training, knowledge or credentials to head up a public school system. Obama's allies, in fact, were partly responsible for Duncan's quick rise to the top of the executive heap.

Ideologically, he seems to share the economic philosophy of the majority of his colleagues at the University of Chicago Law School -- and that is, ultimately, a very reactionary conservatism.

We may go further than this for Substance as we discuss our positions.

5. On the many occasions when I met Barack Obama while I was working for the Chicago Teachers Union, I found him amazingly charming, intelligent, and all of the other things that have brought him this far. He was a superior candidate for the Illinois Senate and for the U.S. Senate from Illinois. He was also, and always, a Chicago politicians, with all the deals that entails.

In those days during the early 2000s -- prior to Renaissance 2010 and prior to his election to the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama was a regular at Chicago Teachers Union events. He even came to the union offices to thank us all after he was elected to the U.S. Senate and prior to his national debut with that speech at the Democratic Convention. I have shaken his hand more times than I have shaken the hand of any politician, ever, and find him immensely likable.

We also have dozens of photographs of Barack Obama at various Democratic Party and union functions. As we've reported, one of the reasons Barack Obama is where he is today is that the leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union in 2003 broke with the labor unions, via the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and endorsed Obama for the U.S. Senate nomination over Dan Hynes, a regular organization guy.

I personally had heated arguments about this with "regular" Democratic Party types (many of them friends) in the CTU during those months, and always countered the opposition to Obama with something like "Will you listen to the guy for a minute..."

6. I oppose Barack Obama's plans for health insurance, which in my opinion will continue the ruin of the American health care system that's developed since the "market" took over and greed ruled over the hypocratic oath. If "Sicko" were made today, there could be a very interesting piece devoted to an interview with Barack Obama.

7. I'm disappointed that his education policies will be in the same
neo-liberal vein, and I don't expect much from him on No Child Left Behind. Our position is that it must be abolished.

8. On February 6, in the Democratic Party Primary here, I will be voting for John Edwards or Dennis Kucinich. With rare exceptions, for the past 40 years I have voted as a Democrat, although sometimes holding my nose. Were there a viable socialist party contending for power in U.S. elections, I'd probably investigate that option deeply.

While I will doubtless vote for the candidate of the party who is running against the Republicans, it will be with a heavy heart, since I think the Presidential election will prove an even bigger disappointment than the Congressional election of November 2006. I worked the streets and all day election day in the Sixth Illinois Congressional District on that transformation on November 6, 2006, and we were not working for a compromise on the war in Irag. As you know if you read Substance closely, we covered the Obama speech against the Iraq war in Substance, both then and since. Most recently, we reprinted the actual text of that speech in Substance.

My one regret about that event is that we didn't take photographs of the speakers, foremost (now) among whom was Barack Obama.

However...

Even in as strong a Republican district as the Sixth Illinois (where Henry Hyde had vacated his seat after decades of reactionary leadership in the U.S. House), the people we were dealing with were focused on many issues, most notably the war. Although our candidate (Tammy Duckworth, a disabled Afghan War vet) lost narrowly to the Republican, the intent of the voters was clear, and it was not to continue to compromise with Bush.

You may share this widely and freely with colleagues, comrades, friends, and anyone else who is asking about Obama's education stands.

Anyone who stands with Richard M. Daley is an enemy of public schools and public employee unions.

Solidarity,

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

Today's Quickies

October 12, 2007

Getting High on High Stakes

Initial report. I'll be posting updates and pics of the conference as more reports come in and we look at the video.

Despite the awful weather, about 60 people, mostly from the NYC school system, attended yesterday's HIGH STAKES: How the Testing Craze Leaves NYC Children Behind forum at Fordham.

Great work by Teachers Unite's Sally Lee in organizing this event and the events to follow. There will be 4 this year, plus possibly some other activities.

Many groups were there - Jane Hirshman from "Time Out From testing", Seth Rader from NYCORE and others I can't remember now. There's obviously lots of activity out there by a number of teachers active on all sorts of issues. It is interesting that to most of them, the UFT is not a factor. Leo Casey was there from the UFT scoping things out but did not speak.

Speakers Stan Karp (Rethinking Schools) and Ann Cook (The Urban Academy) focused on different aspects of the testing craze. Stan talked about the national impact of NCLB and what can be done to fight it. Ann focused on the NYC and NY State angle. I taped both talks and at some point we will make them available when we figure out how to do that effectively.

But the urgent message is to do something right now by contacting all political reps at all levels. Ann made the point that in NY State and NYC, they have gone way beyond what NCLB requires. At the state level the State ed dept and commissioner Richard Mills are the culprits. Mills is appointed by the state board of regents. They are basically chosen by the State Assembly where Shelly Silver has the basic power.

ICE's Lisa North presented a positive view of the work the UFT did last year in putting out a high stakes testing report and called on them to do more. I didn't say anything negative (for a change) as a courtesy to Ann Cook, who has a very good relationship with the UFT).


THE UFT and Testing

The UFT made a big show of putting together a pretty good testing report after a year of meetings and then does nothing in terms of getting some state ed reform by using some muscle with Silver. A perfect demonstration that the UFT refuses to spend any political capital for real reform. Was the entire testing committee and report (led by Aminda Gentile, who handled it all with style) just a show? "See, we're with you teachers when you complain about how testing has affected you in the classroom but we will do nothing to force change." Let me give them the benefit of the doubt at this point and watch to see if there's any action on pressing for massive reform of the state ed dept (like how about refusing to accredit a Chancellor with no ed background.)

Save the date for the next forum: Dec. 6 on privatization, location to be announced

And HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YA SALLY


ICE and the Forum
The forum organizing committee has reps from ICE, TJC, and others. These events are an opportunity for many progressive forces for change to work together. And a willingness to work with the UFT, as opposed to being just critical.

A core group of ICE'ers were involved from the beginning and it was a pleasure working on this, as opposed to spending our time on the details of caucus politics. ICE has always had a dual core of people interested in ed/politics and I have been in both wings. My feeling is that ICE shifted too far towards the internal UFT political infighting, maybe because of the activity of our reps on the UFT Executive Board. Now that there is no opposition on the Board, it allows some of us to focus on how the big issues affect teachers.

The political caucus wing of ICE will still be active in keeping the feet of the UFT leadership to the fire and I will remain active in that area. TJC will also be doing the same and we look forward to more cooperative endeavors with them.


Return to Evander High
By ANDREW WOLF
The New York Sun - October 12, 2007
http://www.nysun.com/article/64462
Wolfe echos the words of eduwonkette and Leo Casey on the Evander small school sham. These figures unearthed by eduwonkette sum it up:

"In August of 2005, the New York Times highlighted the "success" of one, Bronx Lab.
Eduwonkette took a closer look at Bronx Lab's data, noting that "46.6% of their kids were proficient in reading and 52.7% in math when they walked in the door, while Evander's entering students passed at rates of only 11.1% in reading and 12.8% in math."

Randi Weingarten Discusses Her Life as a Lesbian Labor Leader in the Gay City News.

This is an excellent story. While many people in the UFT knew about Randi's situation, gay teachers wondered why Randi was never public. It is a breakthrough even today when such a powerful labor leader, set to move to the national stage with the potential to run the entire labor movement in the USA, comes out publicly.

Teaching in NYC has always attracted a number of gay people. There were many openly gay teachers in my small elementary school and there was a great community of people working together, disproving the insane craziness of the right over the impact of gay teachers.

While Education Notes and others opposed to Randi have been extremely critical over many positions taken in the UFT, I am sure there is total support for her on this issue. Any attempt by the anti-Randi right wing in the UFT (yes, it's minuscule, but it does exist) will be met with resounding denunciations by all of us. She should know that we understand this was not an easy thing to do, even in these times, and we feel real good for her.

Of course I can't resist getting in one little dig. How can the UFT ever support vicious anti-gay candidates like Noach Dear? I'm sure the UFT PR machine will explain it. Discount that there is a factor involved that Randi did not want to allow her personal situation to influence UFT endorsements because the UFT under Sandy Feldman also supported right wing anti gay candidates.


UFT Endorsements
"They [right wing candidates] may want gays removed from the classroom, but were strong on the eyeglass plan," my buddy Gene Prisco always likes to say about the UFT's weird endorsement strategy. Gene should know. When he ran against right wing, anti-union Vito Fosella for Congress, the UFT didn't endorse Gene, who was associated with the opposition.

You know the UFT philosophy since Shanker times -- better in bed with right wing anti-union people than dead with lefty 100% pro-union people like Gene.


Former Teacher/Chapter Leader for Obama
Diane Smith has been in touch. Good luck if she thinks the UFT will not go for Hillary. I personally have not decided, but in the UFT world of fait accompli, it's worth a look at Obama.
Diane writes:

We are canvassing for change on Saturday in Long Beach-please do join us,let me know if you can make it-it would be great to see you, and of course bring friends.We need this guy and this guy needs US-- and really that's all we need is-each other!!!
Peace

Students for Barack Obama

Diane can be reached at: nofaltanada3@hotmail.com

Video:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid901176777/bclid900740939/bctid1183193192