Mugabe Hires UFT as Consultant

UPDATED
Ed Notes News reports:
Robert Mugabe, suffering in the wake of bad publicity over his recent election where he was the only candidate, has hired the UFT/Unity Caucus publicty machine to clean up his image.

A Mugabe spokesperson said:

We were very impressed with their operation and how they almost pulled off running Randi Weingarten for President of the UFT in 2004 unopposed by offering New Action, the opposition party at the time, a deal where they would run a slate to give the appearance there was an opposition but leave the presidential spot open so Weingarten could run without opposition, just as Mugabe did, but with lousy PR.

It was a brilliant concept, that was only foiled when TJC decided to run and ICE came into existence to do the same. But did that stop them? In the 2007 election, they went even further by cross-endorsing candidates with New Action and though only 22% of the active teaching staff voted, they proclaimed it a great victory even though only 15% of the working teacher corps voted for Unity Caucus.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. We expect the UFT/Unity PR campaign to lead to Robert Mugabe being proclaimed one of the great democrats of our time.

His backup plan in case things go wrong is to become chancellor of the NYC school system.

Guess What? "Bonuses Are Us" Tweed/UFT Plan Lead to Cheating

...DOE alchemists turn a 4 into a 1.

Elizabeth Green's piece in the NY Sun on how South Bronx principal John Hughes got great scores by urging teachers to give a little bit of help, is more prevalent than is imagined. That was the modus operendi in my school for 25 years. Just as in this article, teachers at the school we fed into used to laugh themselves silly when they saw the scores. That the school just happens to be a bonus/merit pay school is gravy, but the bonuses are a new thing and will only exacerbate a problem that has existed for a long time.

The covert and overt cheating - and I look at the artificial pump of test prep as part of this - goes a long way to explaining how kids' scores drop dramatically from the 4th to the 8th grade.

Hughes tried to solve the problem by moving up from the feeder to the fed school - IS 301, where he immediately alienated teachers, including a TFA who refused to "help" the kids in the way Hughes wanted and was driven from the system while TFA supported the principal - naturally. TFA apparently believes in closing the achievement gap by hook or crook.

The big problem facing all the Regressive Ed Reformers is to figure out a way to get the same level of cheating in the 8th grade, where kids will blab more freely than younger kids.

If you want a reality check, have teams go into randomly selected schools in mid-September to give tests. Assume a summer loss drop but I bet it will go way beyond that.

The perfect example, as Green wrote:

"These kids didn't know how to write, they didn't know how to add," a math teacher at M.S. 201 who is leaving the school, Elizabeth Cano, said. "How could they be getting level 4?" Ms. Cano said the discrepancy would be clearest when the teachers gave pre-tests in the first week of school. "They used to all get a level 1," she said.

AFT Denies Press Credentials to the NY Teacher

Ed Notes News (ENN) is reporting that the AFT's Janet Blair, in charge of press credentials for the upcoming AFT convention in Chicago (July 9-14), has denied credentials to the UFT's house organ, the NY Teacher. Citing the fact that the paper slavishly parrots the policies of the UFT leadership and the Unity Caucus without allowing any dissent or opposing points of view, the AFT has classified the NY Teacher as illegitimate press.

The press pass on the right has been issued instead and the NY Teacher will be covering the convention from Algeria.

Tweedies Choose Leadership Academy in Competetive - ahem - Bidding

As the press releases from Tweed get more and more bizarre, this one announcing the Gestapo-inspired Leadership Academy as the winner of a $50 million 5 year contract to train principals is one of the best.

"The NYC Leadership Academy was selected from among multiple vendors through a competitive procurement process and will begin providing services to the Department of Education (DOE) on July 1, 2008."

The rejected bidders included the CIA - water boarding division and a consortium led by Osama bin Laden. "The didn't demonstrate the kinds of advanced techniques in the treatment of teachers we were looking for," said a Tweed spokesperson.

Leonie Haimson said:
This is perhaps the most absurd press release I've ever seen come out of the land of Tweed-- DOE's version of competitive bidding! Gary (Babad) are you sure you didn't take a job at Tweed after all?

Gary responds:
If you'll remember, GBN News has the sole distributorship rights to DOE
press releases. I don't know who these impostors are, but not to worry - if it doesn't say "GBN News" on the press release, it's not authentic.

Can School Administrators Be Accused of Murder...

....if a teacher dies and stress from harrassment can be shown to be a factor?

A guidance councellor who has been under severe attack by administrators at Bayard Rustin Educational Complex in Manhattan collapsed and died of a heart attack at the school's end term party. If you are going to go, what a way to go. Make some people think about rotting in hell.

A union with a bit of aggression would put together a portfolio of what has been done to her and charge adminstrators involved with homicide, if just to make a point.

WANTED!!!

Joel Klein Also Speaks Out of Both Sides...

On race: More segregation under Klein

On not treating teachers as "fungible" - survey says teachers feel more fungible* than ever.

On school choice: there's less

Dan Jacoby in The Daily Gotham.

*(esp. of goods) being of such nature or kind as to be freely exchangeable or replaceable, in whole or in part, for another of like nature or kind.

Weingarten Gives Credence to the BloomKlein Testing Myth

12PM UPDATE

Ed Notes has been pointing out for over 10 years that the UFT/AFT is for the testing craze and it extends back to Al Shanker's jumping on board the Nation At Risk Report in 1983. That is why they speak empty words about NCLB which they supported. Ed Notes brought resolutions to the Delegate Assembly and wrote extensively on this issue from 1996 on. At one DA I spoke about the evisceration of the curriculum in elementary schools, especially in science and social studies and the place broke into applause - and that was a year or more (my memory sucks) before BloomKlein came on the scene.

From the June 27 NY Times article on the teacher surveys:

Ms. Weingarten conceded that it had been “a good year in terms of academic success for kids.” Indeed, on Monday, she stood by the chancellor’s side to celebrate the striking gains the city’s students had posted on state math and reading exams. But on Thursday, Ms. Weingarten used the survey to suggest that climbing test scores were not enough. “Let’s focus on educating the whole child, not simply on test results,” she said.

Was Weingarten focused on educating the whole child when she supported and lobbied for a merit pay plan than does the exact opposite by funneling money to teachers based on test scores?

You do see the game she plays. Say one thing and do another. Stand next to Klein when he gets the bogus Broad prize or brags about phony test scores and try to claim some credit, but then turn around the next minute and say, "oh my, all those tests." Weingarten says one thing to teachers and parents - "too much testing, too much time practicing, it is the curriculum, "etc. but stands next to Klein to help legitimize the sham.

It's all about obfuscating the issues to confuse people.

Call this playing both sides against the middle - which is where the interests of teachers who see first hand the testing sham that is going on. Why didn't the UFT survey ask whether teachers believed the test scores were real? Did they think it was easy? Relaxed rubrics? Full-time practice that could pump up scores? How about giving a random sampling surprise test the 2nd week of September to check on what was retained?

Expect more of this obfuscation on the national level - she will use carefully parsed language to give the impression she agrees with you but then do something to totally contradict herself. Watch the role she plays and what she ultimately accepts when NCLB gets discussed again. As long-time Randi watchers, the Ed Notes crew can pretty much write the speech now.

What will never take place is a democratic discussion in any official body of the UFT as to what the position of the UFT/AFT should be.

Substance Response to AFT's Janet Bass

Previous posts on AFT censorship here and here.
Read Alexander Russo's take at the Chicago District299 blog.

Watch the sidebar where we will keep a running account of the story.

In a message dated 6/26/08 8:41:40 AM, jbass@aft.org writes:
AFT will not be able to give your organization press credentials. We only provide credentials to legitimate news organizations.

6/28/08

Janet:

The American Federation of Teachers has not been authorized to determine in the United States today what does or does not constitute "legitimate news organizations."

It's been more than two days since you sent me the silly and unprofessional response to my request for Substance press credentials quoted above.

I asked you to tell me how you (or AFT) determines what constitutes a "legitimate news organization" and to date I have not received your response.

Until you provide me with that information, I can't even begin to know how to respond to those two Orwellian sentences you e-mailed to me on June 26 at 8:41 AM. Please do so immediately, so that we can provide you with any information necessary to assuage your prejudices and assure that our staff can cover the upcoming AFT convention in Chicago with the same rights as all other members of the press.

My preference will be to have this matter resolved quickly, so that I could send you the list of the names of the people we will have covering the convention. However, if you have chosen an alternate route (as seems to be the case), we will have to discuss this further, in any number of contexts.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net

My school applauded itself last week

A Brooklyn elementary school teacher writes:

My school applauded itself last week when we got back the ela and math scores. I even felt somewhat proud of one of my 5th grade SETSS kids who has an extreme math disability. For the first time in her school testing career, she received a Level 2 on the math test. Maybe all of her (and my) hard work paid off. Hours of practicing counting by 2's and 5's. Great Leaps for math facts, manipulative's for number work, mnemonics to remember when to regroup and how to round numbers to the nearest 10's and 100's, etc.etc.

So I asked her to do some review work and gave her a few subtraction problems. Guess what. She forgot when to regroup.Then she did some number rounding. She could do it after I reminded her how.

I still am proud of my student because she tried very hard and has learned a lot this year. She knows the importance of doing what you believe is right and not falling prey to peer pressure when it will have a negative outcome. She is beginning to think about what it means to "grow-up" from a little girl to a 'teenager". Her taste in reading has widened and she enjoys spending time with books more then ever before.

But she still can't subtract with regrouping even if she got a Level 2.

A Very Gneiss Blog

There's no blog out there that gives a better feel for how schools really function - the loves, the hatreds, the joys, the sorrows, the daily, hourly idiocies of the NYC school system than Have a Gneiss Day. A tough gal with a tender heart, Gneiss expresses all the frustrations and excitement of teaching. She's the kind of teacher most NYC principals look askance at because she sees through the bullshit. As a critic of BloomWeinKlein, she falls into the small camp of voices that see the world the way it really is. She would be called a status quoer by the Joel Kleins, Al Sharptons and their band of merry makers, but if I were going to start a school she would be at the top of my list. Actually, I would sit back, put my feet up and let her run it. No Ms. Wannabees here. Yesterday she said goodbye to her favorite kids.

Protest AFT Censorship: Tries to Exclude Substance

Is this how Randi Weingarten will allow her stewardship of the AFT to begin?
I'm betting she won't. But I'm not betting a large amount.

To Janet Bass, (jbass@aft.org) AFT:

I was informed of your attempt to keep Substance from covering the AFT convention, claiming it is not legitimate press. You seem to have shifting rules about what constitutes press coverage.

I find that ironic since I was issued press credentials in 2004 for my work for The Wave, a local paper in New York and Education Notes, which is similar to Substance. I sat next to Mike Antonucci from the Educational Intelligence Agency, which the AFT considers legitimate press.

Substance has covered education in Chicago - ask Mayor Daley and CTU chief Marilyn Stewart. Even the White House issued press credentials to Substance when George Bush came to Chicago.

How sad that the AFT is more restrictive than George Bush.

Substance will have a presence at the convention in some way and it will not serve the AFT in a positive manner if the question of how the AFT issues press credentials becomes an issue.

I am CC'ing Randi Weingarten, the next president of the AFT, who despite enormous disagreements with Education Notes, has always been open and supportive of my attempts to cover events in the UFT.

Norman Scott
Editor and Publisher
Education Notes
http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/

Education Editor
The Wave
www.rockawave.com

If you agree that Substance should be given press credentials to the AFT convention, email Janet Bass (jbass@aft.org) and cc Randi Weingarten.

Read George Schmidt's full explanation and scads of examples on how Substance is legit press at Norms's Notes.

Here is George's email exchanges and more examples of the work Substance does.

Colleagues and Friends:

As I suspected, the bureaucracy of the American Federation of Teachers under president Ed McElroy is trying, again, to exclude Substance from the AFT convention. The last time they did this was at the New Orleans convention in 1999, when Sharon and I went to New Orleans only to be told by Mr. McElroy, personally, that we were not a "legitimate news organization." As I told you when we began working to get press credentials, I suspected they may try to exclude us again, and now they are doing so.

Below is my exchange with Janet Bass, who is handling media set up for the AFT convention (which convenes in Chicago in two weeks). Please protest yourself and utilize any contacts you have -- especially AFT members -- to protest on behalf of Substance as well.

By this morning, we had seven people who were going to be covering the AFT convention, and Danny was working so that we could provide daily Web updates on the convention during the convention. We will not let them get away with this (after all, I'm still carrying that "White House Press Pool" pass Joe, Jackson and I were issued in January; who is AFT to say what a "legitimate news organization" is?), but it would be useful if the outcry causes them to simply
correct this mistake before we have to go to court about it.

Those with a sense of humor might also contact CTU President Marilyn Stewart and ask her to confirm to AFT that we are a "legitimate news organization."

Thanks for taking your time to begin responding to this promptly. Please cc all materials you send to AFT (and any AFT responses) to me here at Substance.

Sincerely,

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

BELOW IS THE EMAIL EXCHANGE THAT IS TAKING PLACE THIS MORNING WITH AFT

In a message dated 6/26/08 8:41:40 AM, jbass@aft.org writes:

<<>>

June 26, 2008

To: Janet Bass, American Federation of Teachers, Washington, D.C.

From: George N. Schmidt, Editor, Substance

Re: AFT attempt to censor coverage of the 2008 AFT convention in Chicago by excluding Substance reporters and videographers.

Dear Ms. Bass:

Before this goes any further, please inform me what a "legitimate news organization" is according -- to the AFT definition. I'm afraid we've been down this road before, and it's time that AFT stopped trying to censor Substance. Now.

Although I had once had a discussion of this matter with Mr. McElroy (years ago, in New Orleans), I thought AFT had matured since then. If you can quickly correct the misinformation under which you are currently laboring, this matter
can be resolved quickly.

Hopefully, the following information will help you in your pursuit of the facts so that your policy and praxis in this matter improves, although my staff and I resent even having to discuss it with you.

Please note the following:

1. Our staff has covered professional events involving members of the teaching profession for decades. During the past five years, we have covered conference and conventions of educators including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the National Council for the Social Studies and others. We have also covered other major political events both for print and new media. For example, last summer I covered "Yearly Kos" here in Chicago and during that time we interviewed or questioned several of the (then) Democratic Party presidential candidates.

2. Locally here in Chicago, we regularly cover the news pertaining to education, including the monthly meetings of the Chicago Board of Education (one of which I covered yesterday). We have also covered labor union news on a regular
basis going back decades.

3. This summer, we will have reporters covering the major conventions, including the National Education Association. We intend to cover AFT in the same manner, albeit with more staff so that we can better serve our growing
readership, both in print and on line.

4. As I've noted to you, our publication appears in print monthly and has been publishing continuously for 33 years. You can locate PDFs of our back issues from 2002 onward at www.substancenews.net (or linked to
www.substancenews.com).

5. We regularly publish Web updates on the Web at www.substancenews.net. We are currently updating and enhancing our web site so that we can provide daily updates from the NEA and AFT conventions. Any attempt by you or others in power at AFT will cause us to suffer loss to our business and will certainly qualify as a violation of our First Amendment rights.

6. Our staff regularly blogs at www.district 299.com.

7. We have covered news in Chicago for more than 30 years (education primarily, also other) and all of our regular staff carry press passes issued by the Chicago Police Department, which issues such passes for those covering regular news and "spot news."

8. In January 2008, we were cleared to cover the White House visit of George W. Bush to celebrate the anniversary of "No Child Left Behind" here in Chicago. Although we were not part of the "Pool" (which only included the regular
traveling pool and four local reporters), we were part of the larger press corps that covered the activities of President George W. Bush during his Chicago visit. This included the landing of Air Force One at O'Hare Field, the external
coverage of the visit of the President to Chicago's Greeley Elementary School, and the President's speech on the economy at the Union League Club.

I could add to this list, but I hope this will suffice to clear up any ambiguity so that we don't have to discuss the misinformation that you are laboring under further. Please RSVP me satisfactorily on this matter so we can proceed
with the arrangements.

Since I have to continue making arrangements for both our coverage of AFT and for our Web presence at various events this summer, I will need to hear from you promptly once you have reconsidered this matter and resolved it to the satisfaction of the Bill of Rights and our mutual interests.

If you have further questions for me, please feel free to call me at 773-725-7502 so that we can resolve this before it goes much further. By your response you have forced me, as you can see, that I now have to take a few additional
steps in defense of our right to cover the news on our beat without censorship from the bureaucrats of AFT or any other entity. We have defended these rights in the past and, I promise you, we will continue to do so into the future.

Thanks for your kind consideration in this matter,

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net

Congrats to NYC Teachers....

... on completing the longest school year in the history of the universe.

The last day of school, is one of the glorious days and one of the things I miss about teaching - the sense of completion, the free feeling that lasts until you wake up the next morning and say, "Damn, 65 days and I have to go back."

Enjoy!