MORE Analysis of Non-Deal and Commentary on Yesterday

The future of school reform is here. It is the democratic voice of the true stakeholders in the education system...

Unfortunately, the same forces that have given rise to dictatorial mayoral control schemes around the country are also responsible for our own union’s lack of democracy. Since these education reform policies are wholly unpopular, and since our union leaders do not want to be seen as obstacles to “progress”, they have been forced to take a “conciliation” approach with “reformer” mayors who run school districts. In turn, they have been required to turn to increasingly un-democratic means to silence their members who understand that these reforms are harmful to our schools... Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE)

I didn't get home until 10:30 last night after a few hours at a bar with some MOREs where I had a pastrami rueben and beer - urp! - and then getting lost in the dark downtown -- which way is Broadway? --- and then B and Q train problems which was a problem since my car was at Newkirk and forced me to take a long walk after taking the IRT to Brooklyn College - something I haven't done since c. 1965 when I was still living in East NY and taking the New Lots train to Franklin Ave and change to the Flatbush line, a trip that made getting a driving license the single most important thing in my life when I was 18. Oh, did I digress?

I actually did some processing of video I took of the great MORE led rally outside the DA before falling asleep at the keyboard. So I had a lot of catching up to do this morning and in the midst of taking my daily trips to various Home Depots, working on electrifying part of my basement (I heard Mulgrew was putting sheet rock up in his home and he is welcome to stop buy and help) and maybe catching a movie at the Sheepshead (Django Unchained) and being home for my wife's return later this afternoon from her big mahjong gig at Mother Kelly's restaurant, I may actually do some work updating -- but the blogroll is full of stuff anyway.

Below is the MORE official statement, written by a chapter leader who was stuck in school and couldn't make the DA. This was being written on the fly as soon we heard the NO DEAL news while another MORE stuck at home with childcare handled the input from tweets and email, while other MORES did countless things yesterday, like the chapter leader in the Bronx who wrote up an instant leaflet taking into account the new info, to the MORE who took his cell phone to Staples down the block and started printing copies, to the MOREs who took concerted action at the DA in the most effective manner for any opposition group to Unity that I've seen (or heard in this case) since the 1970's.

I will blog more about how proud I was of MORE, which to me had its coming out party yesterday as people came from all over to join in the rally which was aimed originally at a VOTE NO and then managed to shift gears to urge opposition to the use of testing as part of the corporate agenda to privatize schools and destroy teacher unions.  People kept coming up to me to ask what we should do and I was so happy to be able to tell them that I am just a cog and a good soldier. What a relief! I don't have to be accountable for anything, unlike the position the teachers have been put in.

Here is the statement from MORE even though I disagree with applauding a UFT leadership that was ready to cave the night before, even willing to give Bloomberg an extra year more than other districts were doing and were saved by Bloomberg's idiocy, especially given that Ernie Logan has backed up the UFT and I will give Mulgrew credit for calling Bloomberg an out and out liar, which even the press is seeing is true.

But for Mulgrew to spend the entire meeting defending voodoo science outraged many non-Unity delegates. Mulgrew's stand should help solidify his standing in the election -- and for conspiracy theorists - really, would Bloomberg prefer a CORE-like group like MORE and having to deal with a real teacher like Julie Cavanagh or the current UFT leadership which until yesterday was the gift to ed deform that just kept giving?

Yes, there are some cultural differences within MORE between the older ICEers with years of battling the Unity machine --- see James Eterno at ICE --- MULGREW TELLS DELEGATES SCUTTLED NEW EVALUATION SYSTEM WOULD BE GREATEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD
and the newer MORE activists who have to go through this process themselves. 

One thing you should note -- the full-time UFT employee Unity trolls are out commenting on the blogs while getting their 150k plus salaries and double pensions to leave snarky comments. Lucky there are no teachers in trouble due to their policies of neglect to deflect them from their true occupation.

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From MORE - http://morecaucusnyc.org/

Post-Mortem: The Non-Deal Between the UFT and DOE

18 Jan The passing of the January 17 deadline for a new evaluation agreement is not an ending but a beginning. Now the DOE will work overtime to spin doctor the failure to reach an agreement on new teacher evaluations, mandated by New York State’s version of Race to the Top, as the fault of Michael Mulgrew and union leadership. This despite the fact that every indication shows it was Bloomberg who failed to negotiate in good faith.

While we applaud the UFT leadership for standing their ground, the MORE Caucus has no intention of giving up the fight to prevent our teachers and students from being given over to the standardized testing regime. We know there will be efforts in the future to convert our schools into low-level thinking factories and our teachers into low-skilled, low-paid bureaucratic functionaries.

So, why did the evaluation deal fall through? We believe there is no one particular reason. Instead, there were a variety of reasons all working in concert to torpedo this deal. Understanding these reasons will help us understand what the post-non-evaluation DOE will look like:

Reason #1: Race to the Top is Bad Policy
Probably the most fundamental reason why there was no deal is because Race to the Top is bad policy. This goes beyond anything the UFT, city or state did. This has to do with the Obama Administration’s embrace of standardized testing as a way to measure teacher effectiveness. Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, often describe themselves as leaders bent on rolling back the Bush-era No Child Left Behind system of testing. However, their RTTT program merely means more testing and, in many ways, an expansion of the NCLB system. Students, parents and teachers have been steadily crushed by high-stakes tests over the past 12 years that are turning education into a stultifying affair. Both NCLB and RTTT erode creativity, free-thinking and openness in our public schools. This fact leads into the second reason why the deal fell through:

Reason #2: A Growing Backlash against Education Reform
PBS recently ran an hour Frontline special on Michelle Rhee. Despite the fact that Frontline barely scratched the surface on criticizing Rhee’s tenure as D.C.’s school chancellor, the fact that a major national media outlet was critical of her to any degree is quite a development. We have come a long way from the days of when she graced the cover of Time Magazine as the hero education reformer.

At the start of the current school year, the Chicago Teacher’s Union went out on strike against Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s Obama-inspired school reform agenda. They took to the streets to call for a better school day for children and work day for staff. By all indications, the parents of Chicago stood on the side of the teachers and against Emmanuel’s leadership of the Chicago school system. Again, this represented a change in previous actions by the CTU, whose previous leadership stressed compromise and conciliation with so-called reformers like Emmanuel.

Most recently, the teachers of several Seattle schools opted out of that state’s MAP exam to protest the high-stakes testing regime that has rolled over every school system in the land. Just like the Frontline story and the CTU strike, any type of organized opt-out of an exam would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

People across the country are beginning to realize that the so-called education “reformers” are really the status quo. They have had their way for over a decade and the backlash seems to be afoot.

Reason #3: High-Handed and Un-Democratic School Leadership
Both Michael Mulgrew and Leo Casey have stated that the evaluation deal fell through because of Mayor Bloomberg’s “my way or the highway” approach. This is the type of approach Bloomberg used when he demolished the Board of Education which, for all of its faults, was at least subject to a democratic process. In place of the BOE, Bloomberg created a Panel for Educational Policy whose votes he largely controls. The PEP has been the body that has decided to close over 100 city schools at the behest of the mayor. They have done so over massive protests of parents and community leaders who know how devastating school closures can be to a community. When UFT leaders say the mayor has a “my way or the highway” approach at the negotiating table, we are inclined to believe them.

Unfortunately, the same forces that have given rise to dictatorial mayoral control schemes around the country are also responsible for our own union’s lack of democracy. Since these education reform policies are wholly unpopular, and since our union leaders do not want to be seen as obstacles to “progress”, they have been forced to take a “conciliation” approach with “reformer” mayors who run school districts. In turn, they have been required to turn to increasingly un-democratic means to silence their members who understand that these reforms are harmful to our schools.

Therefore, while we applaud and stick by our union leaders in their resistance to the RTTT evaluation deal, we also understand that most of the work lies ahead of us. This rejection of school “reform” is part and parcel of a wider nationwide backlash against what has passed as “improvement” in education over the past 10 years. This is a backlash that has taken place as a popular movement, not a top-down one.

MORE is on the frontlines of this popular backlash. Our goal is to appropriate the title of “reformer” from those that have it now: Rhee, Bloomberg, Duncan, Emmanuel. The people are beginning to see that these reformers are actually some of the most retrograde and centralizing forces in education today.

The future of school reform is here. It is the democratic voice of the true stakeholders in the education system.

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The opinions expressed on EdNotesOnline are solely those of Norm Scott and are not to be taken as official positions (though Unity Caucus/New Action slugs will try to paint them that way) of any of the groups or organizations Norm works with: ICE, GEM, MORE, Change the Stakes, NYCORE, FIRST Lego League NYC, Rockaway Theatre Co., Active Aging, The Wave, Aliens on Earth, etc.

The Cost of Accountability

Leonie Haimson has a great wrapup on the costs of accountability, money drained from use in the classroom. Yes, the accountability movement - let's spend gobs of money to measure kids, teachers, schools, principals - for exactly what purpose? Leonie will probably put it up on the NYC parent blog but right now I have it at Norms Notes and it is a must read.

The idea of bottom line accountability makes sense in the business world. Measure success and failure by the numbers. Applying the idea to the education world however, has created an immense dislocation of resources out of the classroom, while at the same time diverting teachers from their real teaching mission. Many people have pointed out that every minute spent evaluating is a minute lost to instruction. You know, that "using data to inform instruction" crap.

See Steve Krashen We Must Be a NUT (No Unnecessary Testing) at Ed Notes.

Teachers have always used data they accumulated from testing and observation to inform their instruction.

The obscenity here is that teachers are not to be trusted - the anti-educator, no nothing mood currently dominating the educational debate in this country, as exemplified by Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee.

So let's hire people at enormous expense to provide data to teachers, data they often have little time to address. But so what if the reality of the daily teaching grind leaves little room to use this data? Just use the data to punish and reward and close down entire sections of school systems instead of trying to fix what's wrong. See CLASS SIZE MATTERS at Leonie's site.


Related:
Also see another one of Leonie's posts Would national testing really improve our schools?

And if you have some time, chack out another post at Norms Notes that expose the destructive policies of BloomKlein. Is there anything these guys get right?

LANGUAGE COMPANIES SHUT BY NEW DEPT. OF ED POLICY

Common Sense, Rational Education Reform

REVISED & UPDATED

What lies between the Joel Klein/Al Sharpton Education Equality Project (market based, narrow outcome oriented, punish schools and teachers) and the Bigger Bolder approach (schools can't do it alone without significant investment in support services)?

Does "Common Sense Educational Reforms" led by New York based Class Size Matters' Leonie Haimson and Julie Woestehoff's Chicago-based "Parents United for Responsible Education" (PURE) offer a 3rd way? (See the Common Sense blog.)

(Read Leonie Haimson's post at NYC Public School Parents, which fine tunes the CS position.)

Elizabeth Green of the NY Sun reports:

The parents criticize both groups. They dismiss Mr. Klein's as offering only a beefed-up version of President Bush's unpopular No Child Left Behind law. Mr. Klein's prescriptions are "NCLB on steroids," the parents' letter says.

They also reject charter schools, which are embraced by Mr. Klein and his supporters as a means of giving opportunities to poor children. The Common Sense group says charter schools actually further exacerbate income disparities by admitting only children who can do well at their schools and leaving the rest to flounder.

Admission at charter schools is regulated by strict lotteries in New York, but the parents argue that only the savvy students apply to them, and they say that the schools encourage more troubled students to leave.

The parents' statement also criticizes the Broader, Bolder Agenda's argument that schools alone cannot end the achievement gap.

"We cannot and we should not give up on schools being able to make a really transformational differencee in kids' lives," Ms. Haimson said.

Read Green's full story here. See the letter CSER has written to Obama and McCain here (after Green's piece.)


Will CSER become the third person between EEP and BB? (Okay, it's a stretch - Orson Welles forgive me.)

Is this part of a movement for rational educational reform that will unite parents with progressive teachers who have seen their union drift into limbo between competing reform movements? (NYC Educator promoted it as did Ed Notes - I think I signed it.)

The UFT will jump on board - why not? It won't cost them anything but in terms of actually doing something about reform, don't expect much. After all, in addition to the BB, they also signed on to many of the aspects of the EEP - longer days, evaluations of schools based on narrow agendas, various merit pay schemes, charter schools and whatever crap is thrown against the wall and shows signs of sticking. Most of these concepts are criticized by CSER.

Bigger, Bolder does not claim schools cannot be improved at all and also seems to sign on to some of the accountability themes of EEP, though calling for an expansion beyond narrow test scores of how schools are held accountable. Bigger, Bolder's main themes are:

• Continue to pursue school improvement efforts (with a big component being reducing class size.
• Increase investment in developmentally appropriate and high-quality early childhood, pre-school, and kindergarten education.

So it is not clear exactly how different Common Sense is from Bigger, Bolder?

Philissa and Kelly at Gotham Schools called the school wars between EEP and BB a "false choice." Kelly raised the common sense concept:

As a policymaker evaluating schools, it makes no sense to ignore context. Set a high bar for everyone, of course - but recognize that it will take a lot more resources for some schools to achieve that than for others. If you don’t provide those resources - I’m talking small classes, rigorous, proven curriculum, recruitment, development, and retention of the best teachers, and it’s all going to take money - then you’re just setting up schools to fail.

And as a society, it makes no sense to put the whole burden on schools. I will know that our nation really wants to leave no child behind when I see a complete package of funded legislation that takes on health care (physical and mental), housing, environmental justice, early childhood education, and a host of other issues that affect the development and opportunities of our kids. “Our schools are failing,” is nothing but an excuse when the rest is left unaddressed.

To me, it looks like common sense: no excuses schools in a no excuses society.

I believe that most teachers who see the full consequences of how education in urban areas is given short shrift compared to places they send their own children to school do not take an approach to their jobs that things are hopeless. Teachers see real progress in many kids every day and put out their best. The real accountability they feel is to their students.

What they do see is the shame of what could be. What could be if only they didn't have 5 classes with over 30 kids in each, etc. (You know the drill.) There are kids who just don't make progress and they don't know what to do about it in the context of the resources they have at hand. Frustration, yes. But give up? No. The job becomes just too much heavy lifting when you do that. But when you add this market based competitive accountability thing to the equation then a job that was manageable to live with can become oppressive as the years go by.

What many, if not most, teachers who don't leave end up doing is finding ways to get out of doing a full schedule (comp time, dean, etc) or a gig that is less intensive teaching wise - there are a hell of a lot of non-classroom or part-time stuff that could be used to reduce class size. (We'll get into this aspect another time.) Finding teachers who do the blood and guts full schedule teaching for a very long time will be an increasingly rare thing.

My problem with one way accountability - hold teachers, schools, kids responsible while the people who hold the keys to the money escape - is that the fight for proper allocation of resources to close the equality gap between wealthy and poor schools gets lost in distraction over issues like teacher quality and accountability. Spend a fortune on monitoring, weeding out (isn't it cheaper to just find other useful things for people to do if there's a feeling they are not the best teachers), etc. instead of funneling all money into the classroom.

More from Kelly

How could two-way accountability actually work? If a school fails, but other services aren’t in place, schools are underfunded, and so forth, should the school still be held accountable? How could parents and educators in that school hold the government accountable for doing its part?

Let’s move beyond the “false choice” and explore what two-way accountability could look like in practice. Anyone?

I've been wrestling with Kelly's challenge and cannot see how 2-way accountability can work without a mass movement. Such a mass movement can never get moving with a progressive teachers union that bridges the gap between various elements and organizes and mobilizes its membership. That is why I have put a lot of my energies over the past 40 years into trying to spark a movement for progressive change in the UFT (with little success, I might add.) The UFT has bought into one way accountability and only pays lip service to holding political forces accountable - just look at their endorsement list (Pataki and worse.)

Class size is the bell weather issue that defines the separation of quality schools and the work Leonie has done for the past decade has been a focal point in the call for 2 way accountability. She has become one of the most vocal parent leaders in the city and beyond while attracting a lot of support from progressive teachers (as opposed to the UFT which also supports her - but you know the view from the anti-union right wing- they are only interested in class size so they can add members and dues.)

Parents organizations are difficult to sustain as they are mostly in the struggle for the years their kids spend in schools. Can create a movement without allying very strongly with teachers, who unless they are the new "peace corps" temporary teachers, are in it for decades and even if looked at from narrow self-interest, still have enormous incentives to see schools work well? That is why class size is such a unifying issue for all.

Gary Stager in his article in Good Magazine "School Wars" says, "Politicians, billionaires, and mavericks all want to fix public schools. They won’t. Parents will." Okay, I don't agree that parents will - alone. But these points focuses on the lack of accountability when it comes to the funders of the EEP approach are worth closing with:

Traditionally, corporate philanthropy in education consisted of a speaker on career day or sponsorship of a softball team. I’m all for generosity, but I’m also for accountability. And I wonder, to whom are the Gateses and the Broads of the world accountable? They were not elected or even appointed, but their money is changing the ways public schools operate. They may do this for altruistic reasons, but what is a citizen’s recourse if their ideology harms children? And, worse, what happens if a billionaire finally throws up his or her hands and publicly exclaims, “Even I can’t fix the public schools”? Our schools may not be able to survive the sudden cash withdrawal—or the backlash.

One way to navigate this new era of “giving” is by asking a simple question: Would these folks send their own children or grandchildren to their “reinvented” schools? Is a steady diet of memorization, work sheets, and testing the sort of education the children they love receive? Of course not. If affluent children enjoy beautiful campuses, arts programs, interesting literature, modern technology, field trips, carefree recess, and teachers who know them, I suggest that we create such schools for all children. What’s good for the sons and daughters of the billionaires should be good enough the rest of the children, too.

No Excuses for Schools...

....but for the rest of government, A-OK!

Accountability? Go find it

UPDATED 12:30 PM

See NYC Educator's excellent related post on conditions No Excuses BloomKlein allow to exist in schools. Readers of Pissed off teacher's blog know all about her lovely trailor. (I hope NYC doesn't mind that I stole his picture.)

An item in today's NY Times "Emergency Radio Network Fails Tests" is a prime example why I reject the No Excuses theme applied to schools. You know the mantra - "Since there's no funding for education, we have to fix schools the best we can and not use things like kids' lives, high class size, etc. as an excuse."

Gotham Schools' Phylissa Cramer likes the "no excuses schools" expression in a reasoned piece on what KIPP offers. But I disagree with the one-way accountability argument.

Here are just a few points on how this emergency radio failure strikes a chord. Like the $2 billion in the contract Gov. Pataki gave to M/A-COM (a subsidiary of Tyco Electronics) whose credentials were questioned at the time. But Pataki's close ally former Senator Alfonse D'Amato represented the company, so why quibble over potential lost lives because the emergency radio network doesn't work?

In my narrow reasoning, multiply this deal by hundreds. Thousands? Millions? Billions of dollars that no one is held accountable for.

So don't talk accountability and no excuses for underfunded schools.

No excuses allow the acceptance of this crap and allows politicians and the business community off the hook while defusing the struggle to do what's right for the urban school children of this nation.

One of the biggest failures of the UFT/AFT has been the acceptance of the accountability trap which has distracted the prime force that should be out there fighting for full funding into defending an increasingly narrowing turf.

That's the real civil rights struggle of our time.

UPDATE: An article on medicare fraud in the NY Times on Aug. 20 was pointed out to me as another example of No Accountability. But when you choose auditors who are themselves part of the game, what do you expect? I expect they all should be taken out of their offices with bags on their heads.

Medicare’s top officials said in 2006 that they had reduced the number of fraudulent and improper claims paid by the agency, keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of people trying to game the system.

But according to a confidential draft of a federal inspector general’s report, those claims of success, which earned Medicare wide praise from lawmakers, were misleading.

In calculating the agency’s rate of improper payments, Medicare officials told outside auditors to ignore government policies that would have accurately measured fraud, according to the report. For example, auditors were told not to compare invoices from salespeople against doctors’ records, as required by law, to make sure that medical equipment went to actual patients.

As a result, Medicare did not detect that more than one-third of spending for wheelchairs, oxygen supplies and other medical equipment in its 2006 fiscal year was improper, according to the report. Based on data in other Medicare reports, that would be about $2.8 billion in improper spending.

“This report doesn’t surprise me,” said Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California and a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee. He has pushed to cut improper Medicare spending. “To look better to the public, you cook the books,” he said. “This agency is incompetent.”

Think $3 billion would help close the class size gap? If the agency were a school they would close it.

Candidates for Sale - Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Updated: Aug. 20, 8am

See Obama do the same old, same old "corporations before the rest of us."
Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone on donors to McCain and Obama.
Guess what? They're the same.
A scary must read.

Guess who owns America no matter who wins?

Jose Vilson has some on the money comments at his blog.

"It’s not enough to just vote. We need to organize in our communities and educate in whatever capacity possible. Because if our own elected officials won’t look out for our interests, we’ll need to fend for self."

You see. It's all about one way accountability. The business and government community (one and the same) blames schools, teachers, students but expect to escape any real scrutiny while attacking those who want full funding of education as liberal big spenders.

Check out this from Susan Ohanian on corporate accountability. Or the lack thereof. Susan comments: "Teachers, start fighting back. Pass on this commentary."

Teachers and schools are being held accountable. It's time to start holding corporations accountable, too. We must demand that they contribute to the health and well-being of the country by paying their fair share.

Accountability Meets the Corporate Achievement Gap

By Peter Campbell

from the blog Transforming Education, Aug. 15, 2008.


The Associated Press ran a story on August 12, 2008, citing a report from the Government Accountability Office that revealed that two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts. And, according to the report, about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes altogether over the same period.

How ironic in the age of No Child Left Behind that the GAO - the Government Accountability Office - would be the one that would point out corporate America's lack of accountability when it came time to paying the bills in this country.

In his amazing book Class and Schools, Richard Rothstein wrote:

All told, adding the price of health, early childhood, after-school, and summer programs, (the) down payment on closing the achievement gap would probably increase the annual cost of education, for children who attend schools where at least 40% of the enrolled children have low incomes, by about $12,500 per pupil, over and above the $8,000 already being spent. In total, this means about a $156 billion added annual national cost to provide these programs to low-income children.

These are 2003 - 2004 data, and they're probably not completely accurate. But these numbers at least give you an idea of what it might take to actually close the educational achievement gap. They give you the sense that closing the educational achievement gap might actually be something that could be done.

But before we can close the educational achievement gap, we must first close the Corporate Achievement Gap.

Read the entire piece at Peter Campbell's blog.

Accountability?

Think it costs too much to reduce class size and provide other services to kids and parents in urban school systems? Create a phony one way accountability and standards movement to ignore and disparage small class size while putting the burden of accountability on teachers, schools, students and parents.

Susan Ohanian points to this article by William Greider in The Nation, Aug. 18, 2008:

Read this important article in the context of what the corporate politicos--Republicans and Democrats--have done to attack, demean, and deprofessionalize teachers--in the name of accountability.

Greider writes:

Talk about warped priorities! The government puts up $29 billion as a "sweetener" for JP Morgan but can only come up with $4 billion for Cleveland, Detroit and other urban ruins. Even the mortgage-relief bill is a tepid gesture. It basically asks, but does not compel, the bankers to act kindlier toward millions of defaulting families.

A generation of conservative propaganda, arguing that markets make wiser decisions than government, has been destroyed by these events. The interventions amount to socialism, American style, in which the government decides which private enterprises are "too big to fail." Trouble is, it was the government itself that created most of these mastodons--including the all-purpose banking conglomerates. The mega-banks arose in the 1990s, when a Democratic President and Republican Congress repealed the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which prevented commercial banks from blending their business with investment banking. That combination was the source of incestuous self-dealing and fraudulent stock valuations that led directly to the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.

The central bank tipped its monetary policy hard in one direction--favoring capital over labor, creditors over debtors, finance over the real economy--and held it there for roughly twenty-five years. On one side, it targeted wages and restrained economic growth to make sure workers could not bargain for higher compensation in slack labor markets. On the other side, it stripped away or refused to enforce prudential regulations that restrained the excesses of banking and finance.

The only force capable of making a stand were the unions. Yet we have seen in our own UFT and AFT that they are part and parcel of this process. Have you heard one word from Randi Weingarten pointing to the disparity of the money spent for wars and bailouts compared to a true package of urban education reform? Thus, her calls for community schools without making the money connections, are just words.

But there is a long-time precedent in predecessor Al Shanker, who in 1975 used teacher pension funds to bail out the city as 15,000 teachers were laid off in a devastated the school system for over a decade with schools being left in disrepair with some closed and sold on the cheap (think they would be useful in today's overcrowded situation.) And the Tier 3 and 4 pension systems too.

Shanker followed up with Act II in the 80's when he allied with a very anti-labor business community to create the very phony accountability and standards movement that has led to today's devastation of urban public schools.

I expect capitalists in the business community to function the way they do. Just as I expect Joel Klein and Mike Bloomberg to go after teachers and the union. But the "cooperative" and "collaborative" role unions, in particular the AFT/UFT tough liberals, have played when they should have been the last line of resistance, is what has helped make all their dreams come true.

Shameless Plug:
Read Vera Pavone's and my New Politics review of Albert Shanker: Tough Liberal

Albert Shanker: Ruthless Neocon - Review by Vera Pavone and Norman Scott in New Politics

New Politics web site
The review has not been posted at the NP site yet but you can get it at the Indepent Community of Educators web site.
Get the pdf
http://www.ice-uft.org/ruthlessneocon.pdf

Accountability

Eduwonkette has a post today on the Richard Rothstein appearance at Teachers College which we wrote about here and here. I made this comment.

The idea of accountability for everything needs to be challenged (I know, we teachers just want to avoid responsibility). The climate of over-accountability can poison the atmosphere between teachers and students. When you teach kids who are struggling academically and have become used to feeling like failures there's a need to build a lot of trust and teachers walk a delicate balance of encouragement and building self-esteem – I know how some disparage this - see the attitudes of Al Shanker in the Kahlenberg book – as somehow being destructive.

I had an MA in reading and went through all the rigmarole of diagnosis and correction of reading problems. The biggest leap is made when you convince a child to want to read. Then the skills problems (other than dyslexia) fall by the wayside. It them may take years to catch up but it is possible. Can you measure me as a teacher in my ability to "sell" reading? Maybe give me merit pay? Give people reasonable class sizes, resources and support and then think about measuring results.