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| Weekly Update #70 |
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The rhetoric was starkly different from what was on display last November, when the contract was signed. Mr. Christie and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten hailed the contract as a model for cooperation that teachers union locals across the country should emulate. The contract was a risky proposition for Mr. Del Grosso, who had been more open to trying out merit pay and other types of changes than many teachers union leaders in New Jersey and surrounding areas. He won re-election by a slim margin.Why come out to the MORE Day of Action at the UFT Delegate Assembly this Weds at 4PM? I'm not saying it will happen this time but the day we have hundreds of people pushing Mulgrew with a serious threat like in Newark the UFT will continue pushing its Vichy-like policies. See what happens when an insurgent social justice union movement gets strong enough to challenge the status quo leadership?
teachers union President Joe Del Grosso said the application was full of "stupid things that are just wasteful spending," such as a proposal to use earbuds to give teachers live feedback during classes.YES. RTTT does nothing for kids or teachers or schools other than feed into an ed deform program that degrades the profession and the union. Yet Vichy unions like the UFT never point this stuff out. Earbuds indeed. But poor Joe couldn't --or wouldn't -- point out the real crap oozing out of every pore of RTTT.
The new contract, approved 62% to 38% in November 2012, ushered in a new structure that pegged some pay to teachers' evaluations. For example, low-rated teachers aren't eligible for annual raises based on their years of service. Some teachers are eligible for bonuses if they receive high ratings.I wish I could share more, but Ed Notes has a great contact with an experienced teacher in Newark who sends me regular reports on the outrages going on there. When I can I will share --- but the management under the misdirection of Cami Anderson, who was despised here in NYC, makes Joel Klein look competent. One thing Anderson, following in the steps of her mentor, is good at is misdirection and lying -- the real agenda is to destroy the union and privatize as much of the school system as possible. That she has been mentioned as a possible Chancellor here (these people hop around like bed bugs) is a scary thought -- one reason to make sure Joe Lhota doesn't win.
Joe Del Grosso still has one foot in Vichydom. We've seen this Randi sell-out act in Washington DC, Detroit, Hartford, and even elements here in NYC. And Joe just doesn't want to break the apron ties to the fact that the Randi-led AFT/UFT will not turn on their masters.Mr. Del Grosso on Thursday reiterated his support for the contract but said he disagreed with this grant application. "I put myself out there because I believe that this was a good contract, and I still believe it," he said. "If I see something I think is not correct I'm not going to hide or anything."
The city will spend a whopping $29 million in 2013 on the salaries and benefits of outcast educators who are deemed too dangerous or incompetent to work in public school classrooms but cannot be immediately fired, the Daily News has learned...
Chapman and Monahan get quotes from both a DOE spokesman and a union official to press their respective sides of the issue, but the language in the article leaves little doubt that these 326 teachers languishing in the 2013 version of the rubber room are pervs, incompetents, malcontents and freaks and they should be fired... Perdido St. SchoolGee, I guess the DOE was not in the room when this was negotiated.
These retired judges start getting paid $1,400 a day for an arbitration case. They go on a long time, and they're making a lot of money.Hands off Tweed's responsibilities.
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| Jack Channels Daddy the musician |
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| Happy B-Day Diana |
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| Jia and son |
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| Megan and Peter: MULTI-GEN MOREistas |
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| Megan: New MORE leaders emerge |
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| Patrick and Fred |
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| Master chef Sean |
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…Loretta Prisco is a retired NYC elementary school teacher who also served in the District 31 (Staten Island) local office and at the Central Board.
In one of the richest cities in the world, live two children, though a few miles apart, they might as well live in two different worlds.
Miranda lives with her college graduated Mom and Dad and two siblings in a home flush with magazines, newspapers and a library full of books. Her mother is a free-lance writer which gives her time to attend school functions and her dad is in finance.
Not quite a white picket fence, but they live in a full service condo with a concierge for package deliveries, pick up and drop off dry cleaning, and a pool and gym on the 12th floor. They employ baby sitters when needed and cleaning help. Fresh-Direct groceries and take out food are delivered regularly.
Miranda was in a play group until age 1½ and then went to a private competitive nursery school. A family illness is a trip to a private doctor with costs paid for by medical insurance. Miranda’s grandmother is not well and lives in a nearby private nursing home.
Sometimes on long school vacations, Miranda’s homework is not done as the family dashes off to some Caribbean island.
Joelle lives with her working parents and two siblings. Her mother has a GED and works as a nurse’s aide, and her father dropped out of school when his dad died, is a custodial worker in a public school.
The family lives in a 4th floor walkup. The water that puddles on the floor from the leaky roof cannot to be compared with Miranda’s 12th floor swimming pool. And who needs a gym when there are four flights to carry up groceries? All the daily chores are done after work or on the weekend leaving little time for recreation.
Joelle’s family is tight knit and supportive. Their grandmother cared for the children until they began kindergarten. Without medical insurance, an illness is a trip to the emergency room. All three children are taken out of school when one is ill because there is no guarantee that they will be home by 3 to pick up the well children.
Joelle’s grandfather is not well and lives with the family. Aunts, uncles, and cousins take care of him during the day when Joelle’s family is at work. When one doesn’t show up, one of Joelle’s parents must stay home and lose pay. Her mom’s boss is threatening to fire her because of her attendance.
They enter school and we use the same measuring stick to evaluate their teacher’s effectiveness.
Let’s go to the research.
With knowledge that vocabulary experience is the building block of reading, it is no surprise that children with low vocabulary struggle with reading.
On their first day of kindergarten, average achievement scores for young children in the most impoverished families are 60% lower than scores for children in the highest income families. Inequality at the Starting Gate, News Conference. September 2002
After a 2 ½ year longitudinal study, researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley found that “the average child in the professional families with 215,000 words of language experience, the average child in a working-class family provided with 125,000 words, and the average child in a welfare family with 62,000 words of language experience. In a 5,200-hour year, the amount would be 11.2 million words for a child in a professional family, 6.5 million words for a child in a working-class family, and 3.2 million words for a child in a welfare family. In four years of such experience, an average child in a professional family would have accumulated experience with almost 45 million words, an average child in a working-class family would have accumulated experience with 26 million words, and an average child in a welfare family would have accumulated experience with 13 million words.”
Is poverty an excuse for non-achievement? – absolutely not. But don’t ask teachers or students to perform without the necessary resources and support services to make achievement even a possibility.
Two experienced NYC chef/educators, Michael Lynch and Sean Ahern will be preparing a delicious and affordable Brunch (vegetarian and vegan options included) all homemade and from the highest quality ingredients and professionally prepared. We have trained many of NYC most talented students who are now working in some of the top restaurants in the city.  |
| Alex - 2nd from rght |
Dear Friends,I hope this letter finds you well. Please take a few minutes to read this, and I hope you'll be inspired to contribute. In collaboration with a broad, diverse group of leaders, I've decided to run for president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), with the goal of helping to build the kind of movement for social justice we need. I need your financial support and, in addition, I hope you will reach out to your networks for additional financial contributions.As we know, public education is under attack. Schools are more segregated by race and class than at any time since the late 1960s. Schools across the United States are chronically under-funded, with vital student programs, services, and personnel cut dramatically in the last 5 years. The "run schools like businesses" approach is ascendant, even in the White House, with test scores being viewed as the bottom line. Corporate-turnaround-style school restructurings proliferate even though they, and the dramatic over-reliance on testing, are not supported by research.With test scores treated like the bottom line, the arts, music, physical education, civic training, and cultural, ethnic, gender, and environmental studies are driven out of the curriculum, particularly in schools that serve students of color and low-income students. As public schools are ravaged, many problematic charter schools exist as radically de-regulated schools - serving only some students while keeping higher-needs children out, operating under private management using public money, and destabilizing the educational climate with a revolving door of educators. Despite the remarkable efforts of many people at school sites and in communities, far too many of our students are not getting what they need and deserve.Amidst these attacks, most teacher unions have been, at best, ineffective in building a fight-back, and at worst, silent and complicit - despite courageous efforts on the parts of some leaders. This failure has created fertile ground for a second, correlated attack to accelerate - the attack on unions. Political forces that advocate market-driven approaches attack unions so that "things can run more efficiently," while they simultaneously call for broader cuts. These forces know that teacher unions - as potentially progressive and influential entities - must be weakened in order for the market-driven agenda to move forward.As teacher unions have been weakened, quality of education for our students has suffered. We are losing experienced career teachers, the folks who bring classrooms to life and mentor newer teachers. We see many educators fearful to advocate for their students, communities, and colleagues. We see fewer educators expecting to set down roots at schools, to build the kind of relationships with families and communities that are essential for real education to occur.In Los Angeles, we are drawing a line in the sand. We've been inspired by colleagues from Chicago, Milwaukee, Newark, and other places who have run for union office as parts of movements, and won - around a vision for quality public education and a strategy to build with parents and community to fight for that vision.I am honored to be a part of a slate for office in United Teachers Los Angeles called Union Power. I am running for UTLA president with a fantastic team of candidates for officer positions - a team that brings tremendous experience in sustainable school improvement, innovative curriculum and instruction, deep parent involvement, powerful community organizing, strategic labor contract campaigns, and more. It is a team with representatives from across Los Angeles and across caucuses. I am running with Cecily Myart-Cruz (candidate for NEA Vice President), Betty Forrester (current, and candidate for, AFT Vice President), Colleen Schwab (candidate for Secondary Vice President), Juan Ramirez (current, and candidate for, Elementary Vice President), Arlene Inouye (current, and candidate for, Treasurer), and Daniel Barnhart (candidate for Secretary).Some key experiences have brought me to this place. I started teaching through Teach for America - and am now in my 22nd year in the classroom. I have been lucky enough to have been mentored by remarkable, experienced teachers - and I have many classroom teaching awards that recognize my commitment to social justice, and to teaching that is culturally-relevant, literacy-immersed, inter-disciplinary, and community-connected. I have been lucky enough to have been mentored by powerful civil rights, labor, and community organizers - and have years of building organizations and being part of winning policy victories, with the Bus Riders Union, Coalition for Educational Justice, the Crenshaw Cougar Coalition, UTLA West Area, and more. I have also been lucky enough to have worked with a broad group of parents, students, educators, union leaders, researchers, community organizers, and progressive foundations to build a nationally-recognized curriculum and instruction model at Crenshaw High School - the Extended Learning Cultural Model, which connects students' cultures and in-classroom learning to internships and leadership experiences in social justice, community business development, and environmental justice.I've learned from these experiences that a teacher union, especially the second largest teacher union local in the country (UTLA), embedded within the second largest school district in the country (LAUSD), can be - and must be - an essential component of a social movement for educational justice, and can have significant ripple effects across the country.Our Union Power slate is committed to:· Collectively developing, with educators, parents, youth, and community, a vision for the schools our students deserve;· Basing that vision on values that promote educational excellence, equity, access, civil rights, and public management - the values that market-based "reformers" contradict;· Transforming UTLA into an organizing union that works with parents and community to fight for this vision at the grassroots and in board rooms;· Reclaiming educators' role as curriculum and instruction experts, and leaders in sustainable school improvement;· Winning more funding for schools to reduce class size, improve working and learning conditions, expand student programs and class offerings, and provide wrap-around counseling, emotional, and health support for students so that their needs are met in school, rather than students being suspended or expelled;· Fighting for pay and benefits that respect educators and encourage them to remain in the profession;· Developing a real, research-based teacher support and development program;· Becoming integrally involved in community-, parent-, and youth-led struggles that are inextricably linked to children's education, those around housing, environmental justice, access to healthy food, access to gardens and parks, living wage jobs, transportation, civil rights, humane urban development, immigrant rights, police accountability, etc.The Union Power slate has the kind of broad-based support that gives us a real opportunity to win this election. It is, however, going to take major funding to do it. We need to raise close to $100,000 by January, well before the election in February. Contributions will go toward city-wide mailings to 35,000 members, toward materials and food for regular city-wide campaign activist and leadership development meetings, toward publication and distribution of policy papers, towards visiting as many as possible of our over 650 schools in LAUSD, and toward logistical support for grassroots actions that we are building around a variety of issues that reflect our values, and more.While many of you are not UTLA members, some of you don't live in LA, and some of you are enjoying retirement after years of teaching, we know that you are aware of how positive it would be - for public education, for the labor movement, for LA, and for the country beyond LA - to have UTLA under a progressive leadership. We will be honored to receive any contribution from you, and we encourage you to think as generously as you possibly can. Some individual donors, inside and outside UTLA and LA, give us $25. Other individual donors, inside and outside UTLA and LA, have given us over $1,000.Still others have given us a few hundred dollars individually, with the promise to organize concretely to have several other individuals within their networks match those donations. In this regard, please think about your networks carefully, and forward this letter as far as you would like - to teacher networks, union networks, community organizing networks, college networks, friend networks, TFA networks, family networks, whatever it is. We would love for you to actively organize in that way.We will have a Pay Pal account up soon for this to be done over the internet, and we will be having local LA fundraising parties. But, please don't wait for those. Please give as soon as you can through the mail in response to this letter - the sooner we have a sense of what we're able to raise, which we think will be substantial, the better our strategy can roll out. For the moment, you can send checks made out to "Union Power" to the following address -- Union Power, c/o David Rapkin, 837 W. 11th Street, San Pedro, CA 90731.Of course, feel free to call or email with ideas and suggestions you have for this campaign.A Union Power slate victory would represent a major step forward for the work that many of us have devoted our lives to, and that we all support deeply. Please support us as generously as you can, so together we can accomplish this goal.Warmest regards, and thank you very much,Alex Caputo-PearlTeacher, Frida Kahlo High SchoolTeacher Supporter of Student Organizations, Crenshaw High SchoolBoard of Directors Member, UTLA West AreaCore Leader, Coalition for Educational JusticeCell - 310-871-7348
For your reference, as you consider contributing to our union transformation work, here is the Union Power team's facebook page -- www.facebook.com/unionpowerforutla
After the Department announced the closing of Thomas Jefferson a request for proposal (RFP) resulted, about two dozen organizations attended a series of workshops assisting the applicants... Peter Goodman. Ed in the AppleWhat Goodman leaves out is that he was a member of the state commission and voted to close Jefferson (my alma mata) -- the replacement schools have also been a disaster in most cases.
Every closing public engagement meeting is crowded with angry parents objecting to the latest school closing or co-location. Rejecting neighborhoods and establishing a system that abjures neighborhood schools is arrogant. I would hope the new guys/gals will be sensitive to communities, will establish policies to build communities, to coordinate services.This made MORE's Lisa North practically gag:
Here is a link to Goodman's post:
Peter Goodman, retired Unity spokesperson writes a letter to Walcott below. He infuriates me. WHERE was the UFT when all this was happening? ...Paying for a few buses for teachers and parents to attend the PEP meetings so that they could let off some steam that their school was being closed? a PEP that the UFT agreed should be the mayoral control body to make those decisions? Oh yeah.....the UFT filed a few law suits.....that of course mostly just delayed the closings. At the September chapter leader meeting Mulgrew had the nerve to say that it was the union and members sitting at the meeting who had helped make the DOE polices so unpopular (I can't remember his exact words). It was GEM and then Occupy DOE that attended just about every school closing hearing (as well as charter colocations) at the school level and organized the fight back at the PEPs....the UFT was missing in action. NOW that Bloomberg is on the way out, the UFT wants to speak up???....Lisa
This item was in consideration until the final edit of the pre-test that will be given in Kindergarten this month:
Cartoonists often make a statement through caricature, which is defined as a representation, especially pictorial or literary, in which the subject's distinctive features or peculiarities are deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect.
Fred Smith, Change the StakesPlease study these two depictions and write a short essay (approximately 500 words) identifying the subjects. Compare and contrast them in terms of their empathy for children and willingness to listen to other people's viewpoints. Indicate which one you would rather have for a friend and give reasons for your choice. You will have 30 minutes to give critical thought to your response. Write clearly, concisely and correctly.If you have any time left after completing this task, you may finger paint quietly or start to read your book on Newtonian physics.
SCI investigators have visited my father-in-law at his job during the summer and more recently visited my mother-in-law the day before my termination hearing started. Well, apparently SCI Investigators Mr. Romano and Mr. Martucci are still going around visiting my family, including my wife today at her school.... Francesco Portelos @ Protect PortelosThe DOE is DESPERATE to fire Portelos and will stop at nothing.
Dear Friends,
As many of you are aware, I am a teacher in a NYC Public School. My school is in a fight to protect itself from a devastating and inappropriate co-location of a third school into our building. I would be most appreciative if you would take a minute to sign our online petition and consider forwarding it to others, posting it on your Facebook wall and any other social media that you wish. We need all the help we can get to try to stop Mr. Bloomberg's last acts of pedagogical madness from hurting our students!
Thanks so much for your help--it's really appreciated!!
I just signed the petition "Stop The Damaging Third School Co-Location at P.S. 196 and M.S. 582!" on Change.org.
It's important. Will you sign it too? Here's the link:
http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-the-damaging- third-school-co-location-at-p- s-196-and-m-s-582?share_id= pVUizqnuGu&utm_campaign= signature_receipt&utm_medium= email&utm_source=share_ petition
Thanks!
Rob
Take 3 beautiful stewardesses, mix them with a debonair boyfriend they all share, add in his nebishy best friend from Wisconsin and a live-in French maid - naturally since they are in Paris - and a sumptuous apartment with lots of doors - and for very good reason - and you end up with "Boeing, Boeing", the latest side-splitting comedy produced by the Rockaway Theatre Company. The show is in its final weekend at the Post Theater in Fort Tilden. Don't miss the final opportunity to see our amazing local and imported talent (from Brooklyn). The production follows a long-line of fine plays directed by Peggy Page and Michael Wotypka, who also have the distinction of providing me with my acting debut – and denouement – in the Odd Couple two years ago.
Panelists included journalists Ben Max (Decide NYC), Lindsey Christ (NY1), Sarah Garland (Hechinger Report) and Sarah Darville (GothamSchools).What does this say about these journalists? Teachers who do not agree with the E4E position are banned. We know that E4E supports every Bloomberg ed deform position and those allowed to attend must agree with the E4E position. So what are people who call themselves journalists doing there? I don't care about the others but I am disappointed in Lindsey Christ.
