Daily Roundup: Under Bloomberg, Police and Educators, Same Fate

The institutional culture that once allowed police officers to use their judgment has dissipated.... Asked whether data are fudged, another officer, who prepares his captain for the daily CompStat briefings, says, “there is no way the command can possibly beat last year’s figures without doing so.”

-- John Eterno

Sound familiar to teachers?

Unlike Diane Ravitch, whose cat wakes her up at 5 AM so she can pump out 5 blogs, my cat just sleeps and I don't get up until 6:30, but brimming with blogging ideas. Then I check the NY Times, email and blog roll and hours later have still not blogged. Not only that, I forgot all those brimming ideas.

So I'm trying a morning roundup -- it is already 8:15 and I still have to get to the gym. And play with my cat. So here are some catchup items.

The privatizing of American society Does not stop with education. Aren't teachers being asked to produce quotas of sorts? "here are the test scores we need, go get 'em." The major difference is that the police data reports are not being made public. In fact if Bloomberg is going to argue for TDA's to be public why shouldn't the public getting a ticket or being stopped and frisked have access to the quota report of the cops they are dealing with?

Police face same bad deal as teachers: quotas
Ok, they're not privatizing the police -- yet. Though in Bloombergville the NYPD might as well be privatized, as he himself has bragged he has the NYPD as his own private force. Jamaica HS chapter leader James Eterno's brother John, a retired cop, had an opt-ed in Monday's NY Times, Policing by the Numbers.

THE pervasive use of stop-and-frisk tactics that have deeply alienated racial and ethnic minorities in New York City is only one symptom of a broader dysfunction in the Police Department. The overwhelming pressure on officers to write summonses, make arrests, stop pedestrians and motorists with little or no justification, and downgrade crime reports reflects the deterioration of effective management under Raymond W. Kelly

It is worth heeding what Detective Frank Serpico, testifying on police corruption, told the Knapp Commission in 1971: “The department must realize that an effective, continuing relationship between the police and the public is more important than an impressive arrest record.” 

Eterno's book, “The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation,” has received good notices. Michael Powell in the Times also did a piece featuring John.

Stop and frisk is becoming a hot item and give credit to Mulgrew and other unions for being part of the silent march on Sunday (Thousands March Silently to Protest Stop-and-Frisk Policies).

One sign of the failure of the ed deform movement has been their own silence on issues like stop and frisk. Ask people in Educators 4 Excellence why they have been silent on stop and frisk. It is fine to support Bloomberg in every single racist policy.

Just about every teen male of color will testify to being stopped for no reason. I know that from my best former students. Would white middle class parents accept what black middle class parents fear every day about their children?

ICE's Jeff Kaufman, a former cop, is very aware of the intersection of policing and education and has straddled both worlds. He and John Eterno have been doing workshops for youths around the city on how to handle themselves during a stop and frisk.

Prison privatization too
NY Times slams beyond sleaze Christie on prison privatization in 3 major articles about his ties to people who run half-way houses in Jersey that look like horror factories. Almost too disgusting to read.

Part three: A Volatile Mix Fuels a Murder

As financial pressures grow, officials are using vast halfway houses as dumping grounds, The New York Times found. At Delaney Hall in Newark, low-level offenders are thrown together with violent ones.

• Part Two: At a Halfway House, Bedlam Reigns
• Part One: As Escapees Stream Out, a Penal Business Thrives

Christie just shocked:  Gov. Christie calls for better inspections of halfway houses in wake of newspaper report


Privatization: Testing industry and common core too
Yes, just about every aspect of the ed deform agenda calls for privatization.

Yong Zhao was our guest speaker and I have some great video of him (here and here).

Here he deals with the common core which I wrote about yesterday (Common Core Ills).

The wonder drug has been invented, manufactured, packaged, and shipped. Doctors and nurses are being trained to administer the drug properly. Companies and consultants are offering products and services to help with the proper administering of this wonder drug. A national effort is underway to develop tools to monitor the improvement of the patients. The media are flooded with enthusiastic endorsement and euphoric predictions.
This cure-all wonder drug is the Common Core...

Common Sense Vs. Common Core: How to Minimize the Damages of the Common Core

OK. Gotta go play with cat, plant some plants, get ready to head into the city for lunch with 2 of my favorite retirees who were active in the union opposing Unity -- a great chance to catch up --- and we're going to the Triangle Shirt Fire exhibit at FIT afterwards and then onto the MORE steering committee meeting. Did I forget something? Oh, the gym. Drat.

======================

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 Trayvon Trigger and Educational Stop and Frisk: The Wave

Published in The Wave, Friday, April 13, 2012 (www.rockawave.com)

By Norm Scott

It was a late weekday summer night on the sweltering streets of Philadelphia – early summer, around 2004. I was attending an educational technology conference and had touched base with an old acquaintance who had just gotten her Masters from Wharton, one of the top grad schools in the nation. I was escorting her back to her apartment after dinner. She It was her last night in town and she had to be out of the apartment the next day.

I had been told that Wharton is located in an iffy neighborhood but then again people told me all of Philly is in an iffy neighborhood, so my antennae were up. But my friend, in her late-twenties, very blond and very white did not seem concerned. As we turned the corner to her block I noticed a group of black men down at the other end. As we got closer I could see they were drinking beer and seemed to be celebrating something. They appeared to be in their 20’s and my level of concern went up 2 notches. But my friend just kept walking and I followed. As we approached they all broke into smiles, as she went up and hugged them all, congratulating them on having gotten their Wharton Masters or PhD degrees that day. Well, I learned an important lesson about checking my own racial attitudes at the door. Too bad George Zimmerman did not check his own racial attitudes at the door.

While I do think people have to exercise caution in certain situations, there has to be a balance. I had some interesting interactions with black teens in the late 80’s-early 90s when I was hanging out with the Van Arsdale HS basketball team for the four years one of my former 6th grade students was a star on the team. What a mix of kids. The experience was generally so positive and affected my views of black teens.

Many people are having Trayvon Martin moments, some honest attempts to understand the implications of what happened in Florida despite the Rupert Murdoch media (NY Post and FOX) attempts to smear him. Any info coming out of them should be termed as FOX FACTS. In an example of this bias, the NY Post ran a front-page photo of three black lawmakers in Albany who had worn hoodies, depicting them as “race hustlers” despite the fact that there were also white lawmakers who had worn hoodies in support of the Trayvon Martin family. Fair and balanced FOX FACTS.

Though Zimmerman was not officially part of law enforcement, the stop and frisk blitz here in NYC has led to some thoughts on the subject, with a particularly noteworthy NY Times April 10, 2012 column by Michael Powell who points out the growth in S&F from 2002 when police stopped and questioned 97,296 to the 685,724 New Yorkers stopped in 2011, a vast majority black or Latino men, sometimes at gunpoint and with their faces pressed to the pavement with 88 percent of them innocent. Powell points out more New Yorkers were stopped than the entire population of Boston. Some may think the 2% gun recovery makes it all worth it. I don’t agree. If it were young white men being stopped time and again there would be an outcry.

Powell says “the unbridled use of stops leaves a deep bruise of unfairness, particularly around the issue of race.”

He asked eight black male students who attend the Borough of Manhattan Community College how many times they have been stopped. “Cumulatively, they said they had been stopped 92 times. They spoke with surprisingly little rancor. But they wonder at the casual humiliations.

The police stopped Mario Brown, who dreams of a career in theater arts, and forced him to take off his sneakers in the subway. (“It’s kind of ridiculous; I don’t see any Caucasian kids doing this.”) They forced Jamel Gordon-Mayfield, 18, the son of a police detective and a doctor, out of his parents’ S.U.V. one afternoon and demanded he take a Breathalyzer. (He passed.) Then they searched him and the car. Jasheem Smiley, 19, sweet and soft-spoken with a neat goatee, lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with his uncle. Two months ago, he says, a van drove up on the sidewalk and a man jumped out. “I’m a cop!” the man yelled. “Get down on the sidewalk!” Mr. Smiley complied but feared he was being robbed and asked to see a badge. The officer, he said, responded by putting his shoe to his face and pressing it to the pavement. Mr. Smiley’s tone is matter of fact. He speaks mainly of his humiliation at lying on the sidewalk as hipsters gawked. What, I ask, is his aspiration? He smiles, rueful. “I’m a first-year criminal justice major,” he says. “I’d like to be an investigator, but sometimes I wonder about that.”

Do your own poll. Ask 8 white college kids how many times they have been stopped.

Former police captain and Molloy College professor John A. Eterno, whose brother James fought a valiant battle as chapter leader of the soon to be closed Jamaica HS which came under assault by the DOE, “sees a place for stop-and-frisk tactics. Gangbangers dominate the courtyard of public houses? Put them through the wringer. But to apply the tactic so broadly is a disaster in a democratic society,” Eterno says, pointing out that “Crime has dropped 80 percent…. yet there are 700,000 suspects in the streets?” He charged that the police is viewed as “an army of occupation” within some of the very communities they are there to protect.

Throughout the years I taught elementary school, I was not really conscious of what my male students would be going through as they grew into adulthood. As someone who believed in teaching the whole child, I should have been. This failure was starkly brought home to me when I went to see a one man play performed by actor/comedian Ernie Silva, my former 4th grade student (1983). Ernie was one of the really good kids and top students, so in my mind, compared to other students I had who I expected might get into trouble, I didn’t think he would face stop and frisk situations. Ernie would laugh at my naivete.

Ernie’s play, “Heavy Like the Weight of a Flame” depicts his years growing up in the projects in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and his journey through his young adult years, culminating in a masters degree from USC. In one of the most vivid scenes, Ernie and his friends are coming home from an audition when the scene described by Jasheem Smiley is enacted: a police van pulls up and 5 cops come out with guns drawn. Twelve year old Ernie had just been handed an ice cream cone brought at the bodega and startled, dropped it. He acts out the profound disrespect, verbal abuse and dripping sarcasm pointed at he and his friends. It ends with the cop giving him a littering citation for dropping the cone. Whether it happened exactly that way or is allegorical is beside the point. It demonstrates the state of mind that exists even in our finest black and latino students.

While I don’t have room in this column to expand on the idea, I published an essay on my blog (April 8) titled “Educational Stop and Frisk Infects School”, where the author extended the idea of S and F into the corporate school culture established by Bloomberg. Here are just a few points made:

Corporatism is the new racism. The common theme among the corporatists is that minority communities have nothing to offer, should have no voice in their educations and need direction from outsiders in order to live properly. This fact is proven every day in all of New York City’s schools. The battle against corporate school reform does not stop at standardized testing and school closings. It must also include the fight against a top-down, dictatorial manner of running each school building.

Norm blogs at: http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com