Ed Notes Online: petitions

Showing posts with label petitions. Show all posts

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Petitionology - UFT Elections/#MORE2016: Today is Final Day to File Petitions to get on Ballot

Gloria and me getting ready to eat

What me worry? We are done. Gloria Brandman, Michael Shulman and I handed thousands of pages of petitions to Amy Arundel and Ray Frankel at the UFT yesterday afternoon.We've been seeing Ray for over 40 years at these things and seeing her still doing this work even if she is on the other side is still a treat. Ray has to be pushing - I better not even try to guess her age but I hope she is still there in 2019.

I am free, free at last from the burden of organizing and managing the MORE/New Action petition campaign.

Call me a petitionologist. One of the few things I am an expert at.

We needed 900 for our officer slate. We got 1800. For the

divisional Ex Bd positions - elem (11), middle (5), high schools (7) and functionals (19) - we needed 100 for each of the 42 candidates and we were getting so many signatures we told people to stop gathering signatures. Look at the petition. It only holds around 40 signatures and to get to 1800 you can imagine how big a stack that is.

The UFT Executive Board is made up of these 42 plus 48 Ex bd at large (any UFT member can sign) plus the 12 officers.

We had so many great candidates we had to prune our list. All our other 200 candidates are running for the AFT/NYSUT RA delegates. Thus we have roughly 300 people on the slate.

We monitored the numbers every week so we knew where we stood. The amount of coordination, especially since we were working with New Action, was at times intense. Having NAC's experienced Jonathan Halabi as a partner on this made a big difference as we gathered and coordinated the information from 300 hundred candidates. And we could have had many more if we wanted but given the time frame and work involved we decided to save an entire forest by cutting things off at 300.

The only way I can get a project like this done is to obsess about it obsessively. So my mind has been cluttered over the planning and execution and now I can rest.

We were actually done on Saturday. They came by planes, trains and automobiles - and by foot to deliver piles of petitions all day.
We brought in a great team, including the always awesome Julie Woodward who used to write the Under Assault blog who comes out of retirement every 3 years to help us review and organize the petitions. Julie, Pat and David Dobosz, Gloria, Dan Doyle, Kit Wainer, Ashraya Gupta, Michael Shulman, Jonathan Halabi and others did yeoman work. Every one of our AFT delegate were put in folders in alphabetical order.

And our team did an amazing job, working from 10AM to 4PM. Still, I am always concerned until we actually turn over the petitions. Fires, floods and who knows what else can wipe you off a slate. I made sure not to leave the petitions in Rockaway in case a sudden Sandy hurricane or tsunami hit. (Yes I am that crazy.) I had to shlep a suitcase full down to 52 Broadway.
I feel I have become an expert at organizing an effective petition campaign for UFT elections, which began Feb. 3. I wrote about it then: #MORE2016 - UFT Election Season is At Hand - Petitioning begins today through end of May. With the mid-winter break in the middle of the campaign our people had to hustle to get it all done with time to spare. Special thanks to Roseanne McCosh at PS 8X for chipping in with a good number of signatures. And to one of our own heroes Dan Lupkin at PS 58 for getting 14 people in his school to run and for coming in with a major batch of sigs. Also to Kevin Prosen at IS 230Q for delivering BIG numbers. Julie Cavanagh at PS 15k and Kit Wainer/Mike Schirtzer at Leon Goldstein and Arthur Goldstein at Francis Lewis HS plus our crew at Fort Hamilton HS also came up HUGE.

This is the 4th straight petitioning campaign I have organized since 2007, 10 (ICE) and 2013, 2016 (MORE).

I honed my strategy based on these experiences - what went right, what went wrong - see, experience does count.

This time, rather than view petitioning as a burden, we asked people to use their time as an organizing tool to tell people about the election and why MORE is running. We hope that in our schools where people actively petitioned that will translate into votes in May. But who knows? If our people don't engage their colleagues from now through the end of May to get them to vote it won't make much difference.

One thing we know. Unity will pull out all stops to win everything and you will see your teacher mailboxes flooded with Mulgrew literature. In addition you will be getting visits from Unity slugs under the guise of union business, which to me is a violation of some sort but other than complain, what can we do about it?

Another angle Unity has is that they get all the petitions and can see which schools we have strength in and they can then focus their people on targeting these schools for visits and extra literature.

But thus is the nature of the Unity machine and why they are so hard to make a dent in. But MORE will continue to challenge them throughout this election and beyond. It ain't over till it's over.

After we were done we went down to the 3rd floor cafeteria with Michael Shulman to enjoy a celebratory meal. Now it's on the the election campaign and a massive distribution of literature to the schools which we have the right to go into to put lit in the mail boxes. If you want lit contact MORE or me.

I am a happy guy getting this mess off my hands

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

"A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

What media call "philanthropy" for the public schools are actually seed monies to establish a private "market" in publicly-financed education - an enterprise worth trillions if successfully penetrated by corporate America. Cory Booker, one of the "New Black Leaders" financed by the filthy rich, is key to creating a "nationwide corporate-managed schools network paid for by public funds but run by private managers.

"Ed Reformers" want to cash in on public education and to control its content and outcome, not improve it. Provide great education? Baby boomers had as close as this country has ever gotten to it when we were growing up. The Ed Reform Movement has no interest in seeing such a well-educated, democratically astute population ever again.

http://blackagendareport.com/content/cory-booker-clear-and-present-threat-public-education

History of the UFT Pre-Weingarten Years

This award-winning series of articles by Jack Schierenbeck originally appeared in the New York Teacher in 1996 and 1997.

Naturally, from a certain point of view. But, despite certain biases, Schierenbeck, a great guy, was one of the best NY Teacher reporters so this is worth reading. Jack suffered a debilitating stroke many years ago (I used to get secret donations to ed notes from him through a 3rd source.)

This chapter looks interesting:

Class struggles: The UFT story, part 3

“The schism in the union over radical politics [is] a major reason for stalling the growth of a teacher union for decades.” Revolutionary politics and ideology take center stage, as the original Teachers Union becomes a battlefield, pitting leftist against leftist and splitting the union.

Clarence Taylor's "Reds at the Blackboard" focused on the old Teachers Union which disbanded in 1964 after suffering from anti-left attacks.

Of course for another view, check out the review at New Politics of the Kahlenberg Bio on Shanker by Vera Pavone and me: Albert Shanker: Ruthless Neocon

Effective Union Organizing

A video series put together by Jason Mann from the British Columbia Federation of Teachers about social media and how to use it for effective union organizing.

The first series was called New Media For Union Activists Roadmap and it's still available on-line at:
http://www.newmediabootcamp.ca/welcome/
I watched some of them and need to rewatch as they are loaded with information.

The second series started last week and it's called "Online Campaigning for Union Activists"

You can sign up for this free series at :
http://act.bcfed.ca/online-campaigning-for-union-activists/

You Don't Have A Choice - Join the Revolt

Ex-Harlem Success Teacher Comments on Eva the Diva

Ex-HSA Teacher has left a new comment on your post "Fear and Loathing at Evil's Harlem Success Empire ...":

I am a former Harlem Success teacher. Not many people who work/worked for her like her very much. I once made the comment that she is very nice when I first was hired. Two of her closest colleague responded immediately almost in unison, "Eve is not nice!" Over time I realized that there was a lot of political games going on. Another colleague once said to me that he was tired of "being part of a political campaign." Sending out 15,000 applications for only 400 seats in a school is reprehensible. The money that paid for those mass mailings could have paid the yearly salary of another teacher not to mention the heartache of all those parents who applied but did not get a spot. She does good work trying to give disadvantaged students a quality public school education but at a great cost to staff AND the school's educational budget! school budget.

Davis Guggenheim Compared to Riefenstahl

“Waiting for Superman" is the second most intellectually dishonest piece of documentary work I have seen. It is surpassed only by Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," the pro-Hitler propaganda classic, in that regard. Uses personal narratives of adorable children to create narrative suspense that overrides public policy discussion with pure emotion in unscrupulous attack on teachers and their unions, among others

Timothy Tyson
Professor of African American Studies and History
Duke University

How Teaching Experience Makes a Difference

Even as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee and others around the nation are arguing for experienced teachers to be laid off regardless of seniority, every single study shows teaching experience matters. In fact, the only two observable factors that have been found consistently to lead to higher student achievement are class size and teacher experience, so that it’s ironic that these same individuals are trying to undermine both.
- Leonie Haimson on Parents Across America web site

Full article with charts here.

Weingarten/Gates Foundation announce drone-driven teacher evaluation

According to a press release issued by the Gates Foundation, the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, these three have entered a ground-breaking partnership to evaluate teachers utilizing the drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A bird-size device floats up to 400 feet above a classroom and instantly beams live video of teachers in action to agents at desks at Teacher Quality Inspection Stations established by the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

When asked if the drones were authorized to drop bombs on teachers who exhibit inadequacy, Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, replied, "Don't be ridiculous. Gates money puts other methods at our disposal."

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5-million-member American Federation of Teachers said the powerful union has signed on to the drone project...

More at Substance

The Real Reason Behind Push for Standardized Tests: It's All About the Adults

On standardized testing in our schools

A must read article about the standardized test industry.
Written by an insider who has worked as a test scorer, the article outlines a multinational industry based on an army of temporary workers paid by the piece at $0.30 to $0.70 per test, translated in the need to grade 40 tests per hour to make a $12 salary. The article goes on to show how the companies gauge the grading "results" based on the need to ensure new contracts to continue profiting off of our youth. The original article is from Monthly Review. Here it is on Schools Matter blog.

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/12/on-growing-use-of-corporate-test.html

Parallels between America today and Germany in the 1920's and early 30's

"Resentment and obstruction are all the right wing in America have to peddle. Their policies are utterly discredited. Their ideology - even by its own standards - is a sham. They are so bereft of leaders, their de facto leader is a former drug addicted, thrice-divorced radio talk show host. That is literally the best they can muster. But they have built a national franchise inciting the downwardly mobile to blame the government, not the right, for their problems, exactly as Hitler did in the 1920s."

The US Is Facing a Weimar Moment

Published on Sunday, March 15, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Chicago View of Unity/UFT on Charters

After many meetings and debates, the Chicago delegation succeeded in working with the New York United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 (UFT) to push the AFT to take stronger stands on charter school accountability and school closings — though many delegates from Chicago would have liked the language to have been even stronger.

Generally speaking, the New York delegation represented organizing charters as the best model for handling their role in reshaping unions, despite the fact that according to many reports few charter schools in New York have been organized as is the case in Chicago. This logic is the same touted by the Progressive Caucus of the AFT. The few that have been organized are a part of the UFT local though they have separate contracts negotiated with the help of UFT. The Chicago delegation reflection the mindset that allowing new charters to continue to proliferate while attempting to organize existing charters is an end game in which public schools and the union lose.

Jen Johnson, CTU, Local 1 in Substance

Ed Notes Greatest Hits: HSA Rally and Founding of GEM

SEE MY VIDEO ON HARLEM SUCCESS RALLY 2009:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEp7rg_L5JI

Angel Gonzalez and I attended that rally and used the footage to promote our conference on Mar. 28, 2009, which is where the concept of a group like GEM emerged. Until then we had basically been a committee of ICE working with the NYCORE high stakes testing group. The actions of Eva and crew helped spawn GEM. Mommie Dearest!!

I have more video somewhere. I was hoping to get Leni Riefenstahl to edit it but she died. We would have called it "Triumph of the Hedge Fund Operators."

Ed Notes Extended

Thursday, March 10, 2016