Oy Vey for Randi: CORE votes to endorse Bernie Sanders... Caucus leading the Chicago Teachers Union rejects earlier Clinton 'endorsement' by the American Federation of Teachers leadership...

The [CORE] endorsement vote came in part in response to the fact that for more than six months, the Chicago Teachers Union (and hence all CORE members) had been forced to support the Clinton candidacy....The AFT endorsement of Clinton enabled Randi Weingarten and a faction in the AFT leadership to devote AFT resources, including money and people, to Hillary Clinton's campaign....George Schmidt, Substance,
http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=6143

The endorsement of Bernie Sanders by the CORE Caucus of the Chicago Teachers Union, the 2nd largest union in the AFT, may have some repercussions for the CTU leadership. George Schmidt points out that Chicago teachers by virtue of the dues they pay to the AFT have been dragged into the Randi/Hillary orbit by hook or crook.

Note: This is not a Bernie endorsement by the CTU itself but only by the caucus of the leadership. And it looks from what George says that a Bernie endorsement may not be forthcoming before the March 12 Illinois primary.

What was not taken was a vote, that had earlier been discussed by not decided, to call for a special meeting of the union's 800-member House of Delegates prior to the March 15 Illinois voting.

The CTU leadership has had to walk on eggshells since they took power in relation to Randi because their struggle against Rahm Emanuel requires some level of support from Randi and the AFT in their battle.

George continues:

Because millions of dollars from the CTU budget goes annually to the AFT, CTU members had in fact been providing support -- in dollars and in other ways -- to the Clinton candidacy for more than six months.

I can only imagine the reactions of CTU leadership supporters at the CORE meeting, as George points out:

Contrary to what a small faction within CORE tried to claim while they tried to filibuster the debate over the CORE endorsement of Bernie Sanders, Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, had already let Chicago know where he stood. There were some attempts by people at the CORE meeting to stall the vote on Bernie (or adjourn the meeting early). Nevertheless, the debate was thorough, and Bernie won cleanly. 
One of those trying to deny the Bernie endorsement claimed was that Bernie had not been active in Chicago on "our issues." In fact, the opposite was true. As the photo at the top of this article shows, Bernie Sanders was the national candidate who came to Chicago and supported "our issues." Hillary Clinton, the former Wal Mart director, was at the time avoiding Chicago, apparently counting on the manipulation of the tiny AFT leadership clique to bring her money and "support." 

"A small, [unnamed] faction of CORE tried to stop this from happening. I can just imagine the phone call from Randi. [Speaking of which - RUMOR: when Randi found out the progressive, social justice national caucuses were meeting in Newark last August, she made a phone call to some unnamed person to bitch.]

There should be some concern over the impact of the Bernie/Hillary-Randi split in Chicago and how that will impact other issues. Read the comments on the Substance site.

Randi/AFT manipulation of Hillary endorsement will have negative repercusions for Hillary

With so many teachers being involved in the Bernie/Hillary war of words, putting the endorsements on the table of a caucus or union invites some heavy lifting, which is something I am allergic too and why I urge my compadres in MORE to stay away from this battle as a caucus, especially in a UFT election year. It can only distract people. Fact is, in a small group like MORE it is not easy to find many Hillary supporters, but there are some practicalists - fear of Trump/Rubio/Cruz or whatever slug they put up. People can't wrap their heads around Bernie winning the presidency even if he wins the nomination.

The well-respected all too infrequent blogger, Accountable Talk,
just posted Yes, I'm Voting for Hillary. And No, I'm Not Sorry.

I know I am voting for Bernie in the NY Primary but after that we will see. I hear so much bad Hillary history stuff - a neo-liberal to her core and they were the ones who gave us ed deform. There is no way teachers do any better under her than under Obama. I think a surprising number of teachers will vote for Trump while another sizable number will refuse to vote for Hillary even if faced with Trump - with hatred of Randi playing a role - there is a Green Jill Stein pushed from the left to send a message. As for the left/left, Bernie is attacked for not being a real socialist - but a social democrat - he wants to preserve capitalism and maybe save it ala Roosevelt and to the far left that is taboo.

Here is the entire Substance article.

CORE votes to endorse Bernie Sanders... Caucus leading the Chicago Teachers Union rejects earlier Clinton 'endorsement' by the American Federation of Teachers leadership...

George N. Schmidt - February 22, 2016
After a heated debate, the Caucus Of Rank-and-file Educators (CORE) of the Chicago Teachers Union voted at its February 22, 2016 regular meeting to endorse the candidacy of Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the March 15, 2015 Democratic Party primary in Illinois. The vote was overwhelming in support of Sanders (this reporter is a member of CORE and was present and voting at the meeting). 

Contrary to what a small faction within CORE tried to claim while they tried to filibuster the debate over the CORE endorsement of Bernie Sanders, Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, had already let Chicago know where he stood. Above, Sanders, right, spoke to a rally in South Chicago in support of the candidacy of Sue Sadlowski Garza (left) against incumbent John Pope for alderman of Chicago's 10th Ward. Joining Garza and Sanders on stage during the event was mayoral candidate Jesus "Chuy" Garcia (center), who ran unsuccessfully for mayor against Rahm Emanuel. In The Times photo. The endorsement came at the end of a lengthy meeting which also considered issues ranging from the ongoing contract negotiations to the threat by Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Forrest Claypool to institute a seven percent pay cut against CTU members in late March by rescinding the so-called "pension pickup." 

The endorsement vote came in part in response to the fact that for more than six months, the Chicago Teachers Union (and hence all CORE members) had been forced to support the Clinton candidacy. The Executive Council of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) had endorsed the Clinton candidacy after a controversial "push poll," which AFT President Randi Weingarten tried to characterize as a "survey" of the union's members, hence justifying the early Clinton endorsement. 

Because millions of dollars from the CTU budget goes annually to the AFT, CTU members had in fact been providing support -- in dollars and in other ways -- to the Clinton candidacy for more than six months. Despite attempts by some speakers during the debate to end the meeting early, the debate continued until a final vote was taken. What was not taken was a vote, that had earlier been discussed by not decided, to call for a special meeting of the union's 800-member House of Delegates prior to the March 15 Illinois voting.

The CORE meeting of February 22, 2016 was one of the biggest meetings in the history of the caucus, with more than 80 people in attendance. At the meeting, the caucus, which has run the CTU since July 1, 2010, began the circulation of its nominating petitions for the May 20 union election, discussed in detail the contract negotiations currently underway between the CTU and the Chicago Board of Education, and voted to support the struggle of fellow unionists in the Chicago Transit Authority. Photo by John Kugler. The

February 22 meeting included more than 80 people, making it one of the largest meetings in CORE history. 

Although the debate was heated, the vote was clear, with a significant majority of the CORE members voting for the Bernie Sanders endorsement. The big news from the February 22 CORE meeting -- that CORE has endorsed Bernie Sanders, in opposition to the AFT's endorsement of the former Wal Mart director, Hillary Clinton, needs to be repeated widely. 

There were some attempts by people at the CORE meeting to stall the vote on Bernie (or adjourn the meeting early). Nevertheless, the debate was thorough, and Bernie won cleanly. 

One of those trying to deny the Bernie endorsement claimed was that Bernie had not been active in Chicago on "our issues." In fact, the opposite was true. As the photo at the top of this article shows, Bernie Sanders was the national candidate who came to Chicago and supported "our issues." Hillary Clinton, the former Wal Mart director, was at the time avoiding Chicago, apparently counting on the manipulation of the tiny AFT leadership clique to bring her money and "support." 

The AFT endorsement of Clinton enabled Randi Weingarten and a faction in the AFT leadership to devote AFT resources, including money and people, to Hillary Clinton's campaign. As the struggle for the Democratic Party nomination became more and more intense, Hillary Clinton's record in support of racist attacks on working people (the three "reforms" promoted during the Clinton administration -- welfare reform, housing reform, and school reform) and actual support for some of the most odious union busting entities on Earth -- Wal Mart. 

The AFT leadership has never been challenged to explain how with these records, anyone supposedly representing the working class can still back the Clinton candidacy.

David Cantor Sells Out (Again) - Beware Faux Ed News Campbell Brown-run The74Million.org

Some of you may remember David Cantor head flack at DOE press office during most of the Klein/ Bloomberg years.  he is now working as an editor at the corp reform "news" outlet run by Campbell Brown, funded by Bloomberg, Walton, DeVos and a bunch of wealthy charter supporters like  Daniel Loeb and Jon Sackler.  Roots of a revolution? Really now.... Leonie Haimson

A "reporter" from this operation, The74Million.org, called the MORE hotline. She said she was doing a story on UFT union dues. I had never heard of the operation or knew its connections and put her in touch with some people. Then we began to investigate who was backing them and pulled back. When I checked the site about 10 days ago it was clear it was a Campbell Brown op but they seem to have buried some of that info.

Now they have recruited my old pal, David Cantor, who we used to spar with when he was Joel Klein's flack.

From: david cantor <cantorrac@gmail.com>
Date: February 24, 2016 at 8:16:22 AM EST
Subject: Roots of A Revolution

Hi folks:

I've started as Executive Editor at The 74, an education news site launched last year by Campbell Brown. My job is to help the site produce great journalism across different media and influence opinion and policy, which bear influencing. 

Thanks for your support. Check out The74Million.org -- and let me know any time you have ideas about what we should cover. 

David

david@the74million.org

@cantorrac 

347.421.3863

Breaking: Eva Moskowitz Files for Co-Location Space in Guantanamo

EdNotesNews report:
Soon after President Obama's announcement today that he would make one final attempt to vacate Guantanamo, Eva Moskowitz made her move to put a Success Charter into the base in Cuba before they dismantle the torture equipment. Charlotte Dial is expected to be the principal of the school.

"Fiddly dee", was Moskowitz' response when questioned why Guantanamo was an attractive space for a YASSIC (Yet Another Success School Interrogation Chamber). "We believe in striking while the iron is hot.
Too many children are being coddled," she said. "We expect test scores to go through the roof at SAG( Success Academy Guantanamo) as we try out new techniques to wring the most out of our children."

WE Caucus Report: Philly Union Election Results Will be Announced Tomorrow

From WE Caucus, MORE's sister group in Philly. Their first election attempt was enough to scare Randi to intervene to prop up the old leadership. I remember sitting around a table in a bar in Chicago with some of these folks a few years ago and they were basically asking what is a caucus and how do you form one. This past summer we got to meet with them and other progressive caucuses in Newark.

No matter what the results, Working  Educators will be a force in Philly and the AFT.

http://www.workingeducators.org/about_those_election_results

About Those Election Results

Posted by The Caucus Blog 5sc on February 23, 2016 

 

Here’s a question we have been asked more than once since this election started:

Why did we decide to run for PFT leadership?  

We didn’t do it for the money, or the recognition, or the office on Chestnut street.  We did it because we want the PFT to be stronger, and this work was the best way to make that happen.

To be clear, we organized to win this election -- and we're excited to get the results. But our campaign was about so much more than just asking for votes. We believe that the true power of our union lies with the rank and file, so we seized this unprecedented opportunity to connect with educators across the district. Whether it was in schools, on the phone, or online, we got people talking and we listened to what they had to say. Here’s just a few things we learned:

• Teachers want direct influence at the bargaining table. Educators told us that they want to fight for back pay owed to them after years of frozen salaries. We included that in our platform, which jump started an overdue citywide conversation about what the rank and file wants our leadership to fight for.
• Schools are like islands -- but they don’t have to be. We visited every school in the district, and hosted events at half of them. Educators who had never met before suddenly got a chance to sit down, share ideas, and build a common vision for Philadelphia’s schools.
• Our union infrastructure can be so much stronger. We visited an alarming number of buildings that had no active building committee, and sometimes not even a building representative. This can easily be turned around with basic union training and support.

These lessons directly influenced our election campaign as well as our plans for the future. Here’s a preview of the next phases of our work:

• A One PFT Campaign to help increase unity among members both within and across buildings.
• A series of Building Power Trainings that will help rank and file members chart a course to activate and strengthen their school building committees.
• A Summer Organizing Institute to provide educators with a crash course version of everything we have learned over the last year, in Philadelphia and from unions around the country. And the return of our Summer Reading Groups as well!

So where’s the election results? We will share them as soon as they are made official on Wednesday, 2/24. After that, the Caucus of Working Educators will be moving forward with our work -- no matter the results of the vote.

If you’re not yet a member, join us today and support the work. Watch your inbox for announcements about upcoming events. And by all means, come celebrate with us on Saturday, February 27th at our Election Party -- for everything we have accomplished together, and everything that we will achieve in the future.

Exercise in Democracy: MORE New Steering Takes Office March 1

MORE has a new steering committee! The current steering committee gathered nominations of eligible members after the announcement went to our listerve between January 22­January 20th. Because exactly nine nominees accepted it is not necessary for there to be an election. The new committee will take over from current steering on March 1 for a six month term that will run through August 2016.... John Antush for MORE steering to MORE membership.

I was going to post this a few days ago. So I'm glad to see some thinking along the same lines from The Doenuts Blog,
MORE's New Steering Committee:

Strike a chord for a democratic way of doing things. As of March 1, The MORE candidate for UFT president, Jia Lee (whom I wholeheartedly support), is not part of the leadership Steering Committee of the caucus. This means the caucus' decision making processes aren't directly connected with the candidate who we would all like to preside over the UFT. 'How can that be?' you may ask. 'Doesn't a presidential candidate call all of the shots?'Not exactly. Democracy doesn't always require a cult of personality type in order to function. Hearing all voices means that it doesn't really matter who steers the caucus: The caucus members steer it. We all know what the caucus stands for because, well, we're the ones who are standing. That's a pretty cool way to do things and it's the kind of rank-and-file driven leadership that Jia will bring to the whole UFT.

DOENUTs is right. If you want to run the union one day damn well make sure you don't run your own caucus the way Unity does.

Call MORE one big experiment. For all my years I've been involved in unstructured organizations and caucuses in the UFT with not many rules or responsibilities. As a leftarian/semi-anarchist I view rules with suspicion. And in the early days of MORE I argued for a least restrictive environment. But as the group began to grow it was clear that some guidelines were needed. Certainly a steering committee of some sorts. But we know full well that a steering committee can become a permanent group of insiders who control the organization even if nominally democratic. Thus our 6-month terms and one year term limit.

In Chicago, CORE, the caucus in power, holds steering elections every 2 years and Karen Lewis, the president - or any successor, gets an automatic position on steering. I love Karen Lewis but if I were in CORE I would object to that automatic position. I think the people running the union at the top should not also be running the caucus. That is what happens in Unity.

MORE evolved a least restrictive ability of a standing steering committee by holding elections every 6 months and having a one-year term limits rule (one can run again after 6 months off). If you get a bad apple, as we've had in the past, the damage can be limited.

I also believe that how the caucus operates internally is a blueprint for how it would run the union if it should one day win. I love the revolving steering committee and this new one is a fascinating in the number of people not only new to MORE but new to the DOE. There is a good blend of people to address bread and butter and social justice issues as MORE moves forward toward melding what is viewed by some as contradictory concepts into a unified field force.

With this steering committee after 3 years and 6 terms I estimate over 30 people have spent time on steering. Some come back, some didn't find it their cup of tea at this time (like me).

As you meet the new MORE steering committee taking over March 1 - in the midst of a UFT election campaign, which is quite daring, I want to make a special mention of Cayden Betzig, a first year teacher who is running on the MORE slate. I know Cayden since his freshman year at NYU when he got involved in some of our activities and was quite impressive. Cayden is an experienced facilitator and organizer and brings a lot to the table for MORE, especially in terms of helping plan and facilitate meetings.

Mike and Peter are the only returnees from the current steering. Janice, Kevin and Mindy are returning from a hiatus. I don't see much of Janice but every conversation we've had has been enlightening. Her background and knowledge are fascinating.

Kevin is one of the great chapter leaders in this city and managed to put himself out there as CL at a time when his principal was a known menace. His political skills and popularity were too much for her and she retired.

Mindy of course is very busy working in the Bernie Sanders campaign. The rest are new. I'm glad Roberta Reid has signed on since she is a long-time teacher who has retired and brings her wisdom and experience to the committee.

Ashraya, who is fairly newly active in MORE and has impressed people, has volunteered to be one of MORE's candidates for high school executive board, a possible winnable position, which means she would have to attend meetings every 2 weeks at the UFT and listen to more Mulgrew spoutings. She and the other candidates for those positions -- Schirtzer and Arthur Goldstein are others - deserve medals.

Meet the new MORE­UFT Steering Committee:

Cayden Betzig ​is a first year teacher at Eagle Academy in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Prior to beginning his lead teaching career this school year he spent five years working in NYC and DC public schools as a teacher’s aid. As a student at NYU he campaigned vigorously for educational justice. He coordinated a campaign demanding that the university prioritize financial aid over real estate expansion. He also founded the NYU Public Education Project­ a group of pre­service teachers dedicated to social justice. He is passionate about moving MORE and the UFT to be a truly democratic organization that represents all teachers­ especially teachers of color and the untenured.

Erik Forman ​is a second­ year ESL and Social Studies teacher and current Chapter Leader at the High School for Language and Innovation in the former Columbus High School building in the Bronx. He has worked as an educator for nearly a decade, teaching Adult ESL, substitute teaching, and teaching at a university in China. Before his life as an educator, Erik spent seven years participating in groundbreaking campaigns to unionize the US fast food industry with the Industrial Workers of the World. He wants to build the schools students deserve and the union teachers need.

Ashraya Gupta: UFT Delegate and Chemistry teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School, Manhattan. “We deserve a democratic union, representative of our members. For too long, teacher interests have been cast as oppositional to student interests. But our union should make it clear that our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions. Let’s be the union we wish to see.”

Peter Lamphere ​Teaches math and robotics at Gregorio Luperón HS in Manhattan. During four UFT elections since 2004, he has learned the need to prioritize building a strong base and organization through our campaign. Throughout the fall he has focused on developing literature, fundraising and outreach plans, including a strong fall conference and membership drive. Also, he will continue to develop MORE’s organizing committee and the database of thousands of contacts we maintain, and contribute to local organizing in Washington Heights. He has a long record as a MORE/UFT activist, Chapter Leader and Delegate. But more important is a commitment to MORE’s social justice unionism model. This means that we can’t win against the deformers without broader support from families, communities and working people generally. We need not only parent and community support of our demands but also to support wider working class fights against budget cuts, for #BlackLivesMatter, and so on.

Janice Manning​ is currently a fifth grade Special Education Teacher in an Integrated Co Teaching Classroom at P.S. 503 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. She started her teaching career as a fourth grade teacher in Fort Worth, Texas. After teaching in Fort Worth for a year, she taught English as a foreign language in Znamenka, Ukraine as a Peace Corps Volunteer. She is passionate about working with other educators to organize ways to improve education for ALL students. 

Kevin Prosen​ is chapter leader at I.S. 230 in Jackson Heights, Queens. He campaigned as part of MORE’s slate for the executive board in the 2013 UFT elections, and has organized mass grievance campaigns at his school involving up to 35 members of his chapter. He has been active in the MORE chapter organizing committee and has been organizing outreach to other chapter leaders in the city. His writings on UFT issues have appeared in Jacobin and Socialist Worker. 

Roberta Reid, a native New Yorker, presently resides in the Bronx. She made a mid-life career change, returning to study and complete her Bachelor of Art degree at Lehman College of the City of New York to go into the Education Profession. Her service with the Department of Education of the City of New York commenced in 1991 as a Common Branch teacher, first, at CS 198, then at the Mohegan School, both schools in District 12 in the Bronx. In 2008, she ran unsuccessfully for Chapter Leader at CS67, Bronx. Roberta's career covered a span of 22.5 years until her retirement in June 2014. In May 2015, she made a first time run for the Delegate Assembly of the UFT Retired Teacher Chapter as an independent, garnering an impressive 151 votes.  She has always viewed social justice and equity as vital components of what the profession represents. 

Mindy Rosier ​is a native New Yorker who graduated from Marymount Manhattan College with a B.A. in Psychology and Elementary Education and Fordham University with an M.S. Ed in Early Childhood Special Education. She has been a teacher for 17 years, including 3 years at the NY Foundling Hospital and currently 8 years with the Department of Education in a District 75 school. After seeing the hardships that her school has endured and after researching the education system itself, she became active to promote an improvement in the quality of education for all children. 

Mike Schirtzer:​ UFT Delegate and Social Studies teacher at Leon M. Goldstein High School, Brooklyn: “We Need New Leadership!” “Classroom teachers need a voice in our union and we will be that voice on the UFT Executive Board. Our leadership negotiated a poor contract, worse than other city unions. Micromanagement, Danielson, and 1% raises with delayed retro is not what teachers want or need.” 

The Guardian: Eva/Success Mainstream Press Critics Grow

Within testing years, the enrollment drop rate observed at Success Academy is greater than the enrollment drop rates at next door public schools 70% of the time. Furthermore, in 61% of these cases, this difference is so large that we can reject the hypothesis that it occurred due to random variation in attrition rates, at the 5% significance level.”...

Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter school network, loses more than 10% of its enrolled student population each year once testing starts, compared to 2.7% at nearby schools... The Guardian

Now we're getting to it as Eva gets more and more scrutiny and will have to engage in bigger coverups and maybe even back off some of its policies over time. It might even begin to affect their ability to grow, in addition to beginning to see some test scores go down as they are more sensitive to tossing kids out and thus have to suffer their test scores - unless they find a way to lock them away on test days of maybe slip in surrogate test takers. Who knows what they are capable of?

I admit I was surprised to see the well-respected Guardian take a good look at Eva. Hopefully, more to come.

'Got to Go': high-performing charter schools shed students quickly

Monique Jeffrey and her son, Brendin Smith. Photograph: Monique Jeffrey
George Joseph
Sunday 21 February 2016 13.16 EST

Brendin Smith was only four years old when his mother, Monique Jeffrey, realized her son was no longer wanted at Success Academy. Jeffrey says that administrators at one of the charter school’s Brooklyn locations told her the kindergartener “wasn’t going to make it”. Jeffrey later found out that Brendin was one of 16 students who been placed on the school’s “Got to Go” list, a list uncovered by the New York Times that singled out students that the school wanted to shed.

Success Academy, the largest charter school network in New York City, also has some of the highest test scores. Critics have alleged that the city achieves this in part by driving low performers out.

A Guardian analysis has found that the school system loses children between the third and fourth grade, the first two years of New York state testing, at a rate four times that of neighboring public schools. Success lost more than 10% of its enrolled student population from grade to grade, compared to the average rate of 2.7% at public schools in the same building or nearby during the same years.

The analysis compared Success and traditional public school populations in high poverty neighborhoods and therefore excluded data from one Success Academy site on the Upper West Side where only about 25% of students were classified as “economically disadvantaged”. This school’s relatively well-to-do student population features the only example of a Success Academy class that grew in size from second to fourth grade.

According to Jeff Jacobs, a researcher at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, chance alone cannot adequately account for these enrollment drop differences. “Within testing years, the enrollment drop rate observed at Success Academy is greater than the enrollment drop rates at next door public schools 70% of the time. Furthermore, in 61% of these cases, this difference is so large that we can reject the hypothesis that it occurred due to random variation in attrition rates, at the 5% significance level.”

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who focuses on education policy, said: “It could be that Success is counseling out weaker students, encouraging them to leave, or it could be that Success is not backfilling [replacing students] in the same way that traditional that Public Schools do, or it could be a combination of those two things.”

Whatever the cause, Kahlenberg said the decline “provides a tremendous advantage to Success that we have be aware of when we compare the test scores”. Not replacing lost students with new ones in later years could provide Success a significant test score advantage, since highly transient students tend to do worse in school.

Brian Whitley, a researcher at Success Academy, said some of this enrollment shrinkage is to be expected since, up until last year, Success did not accept new students after the third grade. In an email to the Guardian, Whitley also argued that enrollment numbers don’t take into account whether public schools are losing even more kids and taking in new ones to replace them. Last March, Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz told the Brian Lehrer Show that if Success added new students in older grades, the incoming students’ lower academic preparation would negatively affect the schools’ other students.

To make its calculations, the Guardian pulled data from 25 Success classes that had enrollment numbers from pre-testing grades up until the fourth, and pulled comparable data from public school classes that were either in the same building or one block away from Success Academy sites.

The analysis also found that at sites where the majority of Success Academy’s student populations are from low-income families, classes in the school’s later testing grades served far smaller proportions of students with disabilities (13.2% vs. 27.6% ), students with limited English proficiency (2.4% vs. 16.3%), and poor students (78.7% vs. 92.1%). Such demographic data from many of the earlier grades is not publicly available, and thus it is difficult to determine whether these types of students are dropping disproportionately within Success Academy’s shrinking classes as schools approach the testing years.

Whitley said the disparities in limited English proficiency students and those with disabilities are in part a result of the fact that these students are quickly “integrated” into the general population. “Regarding students in poverty, we have a random lottery that allows kids across the city to apply, so it’s possible that’s because the district as a whole would have fewer poverty students than one of the schools we are co-located with,” he said.

But some former Success parents argue that the high enrollment decline rates and lower high-needs populations are also driven, in part, by a concerted effort to push out students through tactics such as repeat suspensions.

In January, 13 parents filed a civil rights complaint with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that Success Academy discriminated against their children because of their learning disabilities and repeatedly suspended them without due process.

Fatima Geidi, one of the parents in the complaint, said the treatment her son received at Success was, in part, driven by his inability to quickly complete Success’ mock state exams, which ramp up in third grade, the first testing year.

“Third grade was the most serious year of testing ever and they were suspending Jamir like crazy,” said Geidi, who claims her son had received around five suspension by the middle of the school year. “One day on a practice exam, Jamir’s teacher yelled at him. She said she was going to fail him because he wasn’t writing fast enough. After that, Jamir had an anxiety attack and had to go to the hospital. That was it for me. I decided I couldn’t fight them anymore. My son was deteriorating right before my eyes.”

Over the past few years, Success Academy has had suspension rates four times the district average, and seven times the average for public schools.

Last week, footage released by the New York Times raised new controversy for Success when it showed a “model teacher” chewing out a student for being unable to solve a math problem and ripping up the first grader’s paper.

In the face of numerous allegations, Success Academy’s high-profile leader, Eva Moskowitz has remained defiant. After the video was released, Moskowitz, a former city council member, hired a new PR firm and held a press conference, denouncing the newspaper as biased.

In January, Moskowitz brushed off the importance of a federal investigation of the school fir discrimination, saying, “If someone makes a complaint, OCR [the Office for Civil Rights] investigates. It means nothing in and of itself other than that a complaint has been made.”

Documents obtained by the Guardian, however, indicate that the federal civil rights office had already decided to initiate its own investigation into Success Academy for disabilities discrimination, months before parents had filed civil rights complaints.

“I wouldn’t say an OCR investigation is something that should be taken lightly,” said John Jackson, a former senior policy advisor in OCR. “There are certain situations where without a complaint the Office for Civil Rights can do an investigation on their own. Typically they do that if they see some data if it looks a little awkward,” continued Jackson, noting that the Washington DC staff sometimes alerts regional offices when they find red flags in schools’ enrollment data.

“They may say, ‘Have you seen this data at Success?’ They’re in tune with the pulse of what’s happening across the country. They read newspapers.”

Mon Cri De Coeur

My rating for the Midyear Evaluation is INEFFECTIVE. I am a moron who can barely tie my shoes....
The two most challenging aspects of the demise of my so called career are the humiliation and the concomitant anxiety. I generally awake twice each night and my entire being is affected by the unremitting criticism. I look forward to life after elementary school teaching. I hope and I pray that my district in their infinite wisdom will discover teachers more dedicated and better prepared than I to guide our children into productive adult lives.... Newark teacher

Dropped into the ed notes inbox.

Mon Cri De Coeur

It has been confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt that I am not only an incompetent teacher, but an idiot to boot. Yesterday afternoon I met with my administrator for my Midyear Review. My areas of insufficiency include the following. It is unfortunately not a complete list because I do admit to experiencing brain freeze at certain crucial moments of the presentation.

First and foremost, my lessons lack direct instruction, which I was informed refers to my lack of modeling. My kindergarten and first grade ESL (English as a Second Language) student work folders, which I proudly shared, reflect a variety of assignments and rubric scores, but sadly they lack comments and evidence of revisions.

My administrator freely admitted that my charges would most likely not be able to read my comments so they would serve as reminders for me of what skills I need to target next. At present, I have forty four students. Although I was able to describe my students’ progress on the high end, I was unable to articulate an accurate portrayal of the low end of my groups. I am not to make critical remarks about my students such as, “He cannot do much.” Unbeknownst to me, the student work needs to be analyzed in reference to the Common Core Standards. Despite the fact that I am administering pre and post tests for each curricular unit, I am not utilizing the data to drive instruction. The next step will be instruction on planning lessons to reteach the skills in accordance with the data I am collecting. In my numerous conferences with parents, I am not sharing the data. My most egregious sin is I am not implementing a Balanced Literacy Program of Readers Workshop and Writers Workshop as developed by the infamous Lucy Calkins.

The coup de grace is my areas of proficiency. I am never tardy and my attendance record is satisfactory. I have built a good classroom culture with rules in place for my students. My lesson plan objectives are aligned with the appropriate Common Core Standards. I can hold the students’ attention and they exhibit enthusiasm for my lessons. I have attended numerous professional development workshops. I participate in grade level meetings and I collaborate with my grade level cohort to plan units. I cooperate with my ESL colleagues to screen students and provide information for district reports. I have completed my assigned readings of the acclaimed Teach Like a Champion (Lemov) and Launching the Writers Workshop (Calkins). Best of all, I do not give my administrator “attitude.” I attend the sessions as required by my CAP (Corrective Action Plan) and I am respectful. An illustration of my lack of “attitude” would be how I sit in the meetings like a good little girl, dutifully record everything in my trusty little notebook and ask pertinent questions.

My rating for the Midyear Evaluation is INEFFECTIVE. I am a moron who can barely tie my shoes. I am three quarters of the way down the road to being brought up on tenure charges. As I reflect on my practice, I have to entertain the possibility that this is the first time in my life that I have been accused of being inarticulate.

When I was about four years old, my older cousin David challenged me to shut up for a complete timed minute and I was unsuccessful. I was given the opportunity to observe two fellow teachers whose combined ages are roughly equivalent to my own. It is my role to emulate their practice. In my upbringing, respect for my elders was encouraged with the expectation that when I would be older, younger people would respect me. As a teacher, I was advised to seek out best practices that are evidence based. Lemov asserts that his methods were formulated by observing teachers primarily in charter schools. As for Calkins, I have yet to read any research on her recommendations. She does disparage ESL instruction nicely in one of her numerous volumes as Second Language Learners sitting around looking at flashcards when they would be better off participating in Writers Workshop.

My administrator held out hope of redemption to be accomplished by investing a lot more time. I responded that I am spending on average six hours every two weeks planning the lessons that are considered to be crappy and often in need of revision. In my view, it is unrealistic to expect that I could climb the mountain of proficiency in the little time remaining in the school year. The two most challenging aspects of the demise of my so called career are the humiliation and the concomitant anxiety. I generally awake twice each night and my entire being is affected by the unremitting criticism. I look forward to life after elementary school teaching. I hope and I pray that my district in their infinite wisdom will discover teachers more dedicated and better prepared than I to guide our children into productive adult lives.

Abigail Shure

Chicago Tribune Digs Up Photo of Bernie's Arrest in 1960's Protest

Some Hillary supporters has been mocking Bernie's participation in civil rights protests. The case for Hillary is that she went down south at one point to do some legal support work. Once. Not quite to the level of Bernie's commitment.

I must question his choice to wear white pants to a protest where you can get arrested. This can be a crucial issue in the next debate. Does Bernie have the judgement to be president if he would wear white pants? Hillary, get crack'n.

Daily Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/02/20/1488072/-Chicago-Tribune-Digs-Up-Photo-of-Bernie-s-Arrest-in-1960-s-Protest?detail=emaiclassic

Arrest photo of young activist Bernie Sanders emerges from Chicago Tribune archives http://trib.in/213VWAS  #Chicago

Here it is. Pretty badass. He was protesting housing segregation. 

This picture confirms what Shaun King reported the other day. There is a VIDEO of Bernie’s arrest: m.nydailynews.com/…
He's wearing the same clothes and crouched in the same position.
Somewhere, Jonathan Capehart and Joy Reid’s crack team of photo-detectives are huddling around a table, theorizing that this might actually be Sandy Koufax.

The ICEman and Woman Meeteth

Yesterday afternoon we had an ICE meeting and as usual some great conversation and analysis of current union events plus some heavy duty petition signing - like 300 of them. I felt like a slave driver keeping Mike Schirtzer from eating his bagel until he had signed a batch.

James and Camille Eterno called in from their car on the way home from Georgia. Too bad they couldn't sign the 300 petitions virtually.
But I'll get to them when they come home.

Once petitions were signed and we were fed we tackled a draft of an upcoming MORE leaflet and that is where the deep experience of ICEers shone brightly as paragraphs, sentences and words were parced and sliced and diced until more clarity emerged. We don't get the luxury of engaging in this process very often in MORE due to the larger numbers of people at meetings, so work is often done in committee on the phone. Having some time in a mixed group of working teachers and retirees was a real treat.

And then there was the gossip.
My lips are sealed.

Working with New Action
We talked about the relationships with New Action. There is no group that has been more critical of New Action over the last decade than ICE. And when the new arrangement between MORE and New Action was first being explored there was some raised eyebrows coming from some ICEers. But people seem to have accepted things and I didn't hear much in the way of criticism.

There was some discussion of the New Action leaflet going out to schools that talks about their arrangement with Unity over the years and what broke that and why they went with MORE. People did not agree with the case New Action is making for that having hd that arrangement. ICE has been more heavily critical of the UFT/Unity leadership and many in ICE consider the leadership as being lined up with the deformers and politicians who have gone after public education. Even in MORE, the ICE crew is more vehement about the MulGarten leadership than some of the younger recruits. But I think that is due to our relative age - we've been through the wars with Unity. On the other hand, most of New Action is in the same age range as the ICEers and they do not seem to have that same level of vehemence.

People did point out yesterday that ICE and MORE have been consistent in the position that once the New Action deal with Unity was over, we could work together. And so we have and as far as I can tell things have gone fairly smoothly, though there have been a few glitches here and there.

I believe the way ICE has dealt with MORE is a potential model for New Action going forward. ICE people had a choice: join MORE and work within MORE while also maintaining ICE as a group, though not an official caucus that would run in elections. A few ICE people did not join MORE or have any interest in working with MORE. They have not been involved with ICE very much if at all.

I feel after the elections, New Action has the opportunity to do something similar to ICE. MORE would welcome those in New Action who wanted to work within MORE while still being connected to New Action, which could take positions in support or even counter to MORE.

No loyalty oaths here.

The Case for Reparations Undermines the Ed Deform Argument That Schools and Teachers Matter Most

I've been listening to Brian Lehrer on NPR on the reparations for black people issue and lots of interesting ideas have been put on the table. One of the dominant points about historic and institutional racism is the long-term effects. Schools and education are symptoms, not causes. One fact I just heard this morning: black college graduates are worth $10,000 less than white high school grads. Pretty astounding when you hear Obama and the rest of the ed deform pack shift billions of dollars into a focus on everyone being a college grad as the solution.

Ed deformers focus on teachers and schools as a way to hide their real agenda - to undermine teacher unions and local community controls. By weakening these institutional forces they create the wedge to privatize schools and allow billions of  dollars to flow from public to private hands.

The reparations movement, whether you agree with it or not (note that holocaust victims got and still get reparations from Germnay), has opened up the door to a full debate. When anti-ed deformers brought many of these same ideas up (like the effects of poverty) they were charged with status quoism.

Tie the reparations discussions into the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton debates over this issue and race and there is a lot to chew on. I heard Bernie trying to skirt the issue by talking about poverty and class as an alternative to racial identity politics.

A certain segment of the left find the race/ class discussion often very divisive. Over my 45 years in organizations that tried to grapple with this issue, there has been no issue that has caused people to line up on different sides of the fence, even in the same organization. MORE has grappled with this almost from the beginning and at some point after the elections I hope there will be a fuller airing of views on the race/class analysis.

Here are 2 views on the issue:
Class vs. Race how the liberal elite just don’t get it

Bernie seems to be coming from this direction:
We should be talking about class in America as much as race issues
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/martin-luther-king-poverty-message

Originalism and Antonin Scalia, 1789-2016 -

Cogent commentary about the late conservative Supreme Court operative. His philosophical doctrine of originalism is ridiculous on its face, and hypocritical in the way he applied it. Those who praise him as a brilliant legal scholar and thinker need to explain that a lot more.... Pete Farruggio, PhD

Originalism in the constitution

Pete is an old colleague from PS 16 c. 1969-70 and one of the early members of Another View in District 14 before heading west. He sent this piece from Glen Newey, London Review of Books

As someone who studied the constitution in college the idea of originalism advocated by Scalia is so far fetched as to invite ridiculousarism by any one who looks at American history. To me originalism calls for the re-institution of slavery and counting every black person as 3/5 of a white.

Killing Unarmed Animals
Glen Newey 15 February 2016     London Review of Books
The US Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia is dead, and not before time. The co-author of some of the dodgiest court opinions since Judge Taney’s in Dred Scott v. Sandford, Scalia was duly hymned on Saturday night’s debate in South Carolina by the self-avowed psychopaths – Ted Cruz has vowed to make the Middle East ‘glow’ with US bombs; Donald Trump’s problem with waterboarding is that the torture doesn’t go far enough – slugging it out for the Republican presidential nomination. Scalia’s judicial opinions reveal a mind whose fixation with the jurisprudential genetic fallacy known as ‘originalism’ betrayed his embrace of legal ancestor worship in a peculiarly pure form. It seems fittingly bizarre that he died on a quail hunting trip (his Supreme Court crony Clarence Thomas noted that Scalia ‘loves killing unarmed animals’).
‘De mortuis nil nisi veritas’ is a useful rule of thumb for commentary when the mighty die, and Scalia was certainly one of those in his own mind. He unflinchingly opposed marriage equality. He was still at it last year, dissenting from the court’s decision to make same-sex marriage legal throughout the States on the ground that liberalising marriage law ‘robs the people of… the freedom to govern themselves’, posing a ‘threat to American democracy’ because ‘today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court’ – a role that he seemed content with when he was one of those in the majority.
Scalia repeatedly blocked federal action on climate change. There he found his jurisdiction ample enough to define the air. In a dissent in Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007, Scalia opposed the plaintiff’s claim that CO2 is a pollutant causing global warming. Scalia found that air, as mentioned in the 1963 Clean Air Act, includes only ‘air near the surface of the earth’, not ‘the upper reaches of the atmosphere’, where ‘the build-up of CO2 and other greenhouse gases… is alleged to be causing global climate change.’
Scalia helped deliver the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush by guillotining the Florida recount. Here, again, Scalia seems not to have been cowed by thoughts of limits on the court’s powers. More striking was his ad hoc invocation of the Fourteenth Amendment to argue that the recount should be stalled because Florida counties’ different methods of counting ballots would violate the equal protection clause – something that applied only to the recount, and not to the state’s elections generally. Dubya duly walked down Pennsylvania Avenue the following month.

In the 2008 case of DC v. Heller, Scalia applied originalism to offer a wide reading of assault-rifle owners’ Second Amendment rights. He decided the amendment’s prefatory clause about militias was irrelevant to the operative clause’s meaning as understood by the Founders, which turned out to include protecting the personal use of firearms such as semi-automatic rifles whose invention lay well in the future. Boldly eschewing engagement with what the Founders had actually written, Scalia decided that they were talking about weapons in ‘common use’, not that this phrase figures in the amendment (semi-automatic rifles comprise around 2 per cent of privately owned firearms). Presumably the revered Founders had guns like muskets in mind, but where as often they don’t say anything explicit, originalism comes into its own: they say whatever the medium who tongues their thoughts say they said.
Scalia’s most pernicious opinion may prove to be Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission from 2010. That declared that the First Amendment extends to corporations. Under the Citizens United decision, bungs from SuperPacs, the consortia formed to buy elections for private corporate interests, are protected ‘speech’. Last month Hank Greenberg, the former head of AIG, gave $10 million to the SuperPac supporting Jeb Bush. Greenberg crashed his firm with junk securities and then bleated that the $180 billion federal bailout was paltry (his AIG shares were ‘virtually worthless’, he complained in 2008, ‘about 100 million dollars’). So, thanks to Scalia, public money paid out by George W. Bush’s administration is now bankrolling his brother’s faltering White House bid.
Citizens United came to court when the lobbying group of that name appealed against a ban on airing Hillary: The Movie (an attack on Clinton) during the 2008 election campaign; its specific target was clause §203 of the ‘McCain-Feingold’ Act of 2002 which prohibited ‘electioneering communications’ in the sixty days before a general election. Earlier, in an indication of how it really valued free speech, Citizens United had tried to use §203 to gag the broadcast of a trailer for Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 during the 2004 election cycle. When it later decided to push for the Supreme Court to rule §203 unconstitutional, Citizens United found Scalia compliant. His legal case – that 18th-century Englishmen didn’t dislike corporations as much as some people think – was uninhibited by the Founders’ failure to say anything at all about corporations in the Constitution.
At the start of Saturday’s GOP brawl, soon after Scalia’s death became public, the candidates stood in righteous silence for a moment (presumably a whole minute would have been beyond Trump). And rightly: a friend of guns, pollution and big money buying elections, Scalia did the job for which Reagan installed him.

Big Win For Bernie: AFL-CIO Holds Off On Presidential Endorsement

How much egg is on Randi's face as Trumpka doesn't play ball for Hillary? They may still end up endorsing Hillary, but unlike Randi and the AFT they playing a waiting game.

The largest union federation in America won't be backing Hillary Clinton for now.

 Dave Jamieson Labor Reporter, The Huffington Post

Evan Vucci/ASSOCIATED PRESS

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka testifies in Washington on April 21, 2015. Trumka told the body's executive council that they wouldn't be holding a vote right away on who to endorse for president. 

The biggest prize in labor endorsements won't be doled out next week as many people expected, according to an email from the president of the AFL-CIO labor federation obtained by The Huffington Post.
In his email, Richard Trumka told members of the AFL-CIO executive council that the body won't be holding a vote on whether to endorse Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders at its annual winter meeting in San Diego.
"Following recent discussion at the AFL-CIO’s Executive Committee meeting and subsequent conversations with many of you, I have concluded that there is broad consensus for the AFL-CIO to remain neutral in the presidential primaries for the time being and refrain from endorsing any candidate at this moment," Trumka said.
The decision is a coup for Sanders' backers within organized labor. Clinton has managed to lock down endorsements from unions representing a majority of unionized workers in this country. But the AFL-CIO endorsement is the most potent of all, and it won't be going to Clinton -- at least, not yet.
Under AFL-CIO procedures, an endorsement by the executive council needs to be ratified by leaders of the federation's member unions. It's likely that Clinton doesn't yet have the required votes for an endorsement to be ratified.
"We're extremely happy" about the decision, said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, a union that has broken away from many other labor groups and endorsed Sanders.
In his email to members, Trumka said the council would "continue its ongoing discussion" about the 2016 campaign.
"[W]e encourage affiliated unions to pursue their own deliberations with their members and come to their own endorsement decisions, if any, through open and rigorous debate," he said.

Howard Schwach on Negative Impact of Moskowitz Charter on Rockaway Schools

To make room at MS 53, the city’s DOE is moving its district 27 Alternate Learning Center [ALC] to the Beach Channel Educational Campus... [a program] for really troubled kids who can’t be maintained in traditional schools and who have been serially suspended for things such as assaulting other students and staff, assaulting safety officers, bringing a weapon to school and selling drugs in the school building. And, they will be all ours by the beginning of the next school year in September.... Howard Schwach

Eva invades and they pull the most troubled kids from the building and dump them in a vast building like Beach Channel HS which already has 5 or 6 schools. My former editor at The Wave, retired NYC teacher Howie Schwach, now has a web-based Rockaway news service, http://onrockaway.com/. As always he's on the case.
Arverne by the Sea, a middle income area of homes that has stabilized the center of Rockaway is Eva's target, not the nearby projects. Eva must already have a massive got to go list for any of those kids that slip into the lottery.

Moskowitz charter coming to Rockaway, forcing problematic students to Beach Channel and revealing lie to ABTS parents

February 15, 2016 / rockaway / 0 Comments

Success Charter School, headed by CEO Eva Moskowitz, left, will soon be coming to MS  53 in Far Rockaway, forcing a program called “Alternate Learning Centers” to move from that school to Beach Channel Educational Campus. ALC is a program for disruptive students who have been suspended for a year and up because of Level 3 and Level 4 violations of the DOE’s discipline code.

The local ALC has been running at MS 53 in Far Rockaway, a school aptly sited right behind the 101 Precinct house.
By Howard Schwach
Commentary from onrockaway.com

Rockaway has been dumped on one more time and this time it especially impacts those Arverne by the Sea homeowners who were promised a charter elementary school and parents and students at the Beach Channel Educational Campus, as well as the rest of those who live in Rockaway.

Follow the bouncing ball.
Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of the Success Charter School network and earns more than $300,000 a year for running two dozen schools wants to come to a school in Rockaway.
After first stating that charter schools would no longer be granted co-location in crowded public school buildings, he relented and now regularly gives public school space to charters, allowing them to avoid paying rent in a private building.
The fact that Moskowitz, who was once the chair of the City Council’s Education Committee and is therefore well connected, wants to come to Rockaway should come as a surprise to homeowners who live in the 2,200-unit Arverne by the Sea. They were told last year by Gerri Romski, the CEO of the development that, despite the fact they had long been promised a K-8 school, they were going to get a middle school charter sponsored by the Rev. Les Mullings, whose assistant principal is City Councilman Donovan Richard’s wife.
When challenged, Romski said very clearly that they had to accept the middle school because nobody wanted to open a charter school in Rockaway. Then, comes Moskowitz with a K-1 school in Far Rockaway that will, if it follows the pattern of the other schools in the network, expand each year by one grade.

Where will her charter school, which has not yet been approved by the city, but most likely will be before the end of this school year, will be sited at what is now Middle School 53, at 1045 Nameoke Street in Far Rockaway, the school directly behind the 101 Precinct.
To make room at MS 53, the city’s DOE is moving its district 27 Alternate Learning Center to the Beach Channel Educational Campus, on Beach 100 and Beach Channel Drive.
What is an ALC?
You don’t want to know, because it will not be good either for the surrounding community or for those who ride public transportation during the time students are going to or from school.
According to the DOE’s own website, “ALCs provide an educational setting for students who are serving a Superintendent’s Suspension up to one year.  Each borough has a principal that oversees 5-9 sites. Each site has a site supervisor, four core content area teachers, one special education teacher, one counselor, one paraprofessional, and one school aide.  Our goal is to provide a continuity of education for ALC students. “ALCs cultivate pro-social beliefs, attitudes and behaviors in students, and provide a variety of positive behavioral programs such as Positive Behavior Support Systems (PBIS), Restorative Approaches, and Life Space Crisis Intervention (LSCI).  ALCs offer the same Core Curriculum materials schools have for consistency, and provide intervention measures that build students’ capacity to return to school better able to be productive and engaged members of their school communities.”
That’s all edu-speak for really troubled kids who can’t be maintained in traditional schools and who have been serially suspended for things such as assaulting other students and staff, assaulting safety officers, bringing a weapon to school and selling drugs in the school building. And, they will be all ours by the beginning of the next school year in September.
When I was teaching at then Intermediate School 53 in the 80’s and 90’s, the city had 600 schools, so named because they had designations such as PS 605 and Junior High School 630. Those schools were heavily monitored and school aides were off-duty or retired cops. The ALC program is the new iteration of that program.
People are already lining up to stop the ALC from coming to Rockaway Park, led by local politicians and civic leaders.
The questions do not stop there.
Why is Moskowitz getting an elementary school charter in the east end of Rockaway when homeowners at ABTS were told by Gerri Romski that he had personally contacted every charter group in the city and that none of them wanted to come to Rockaway?
He should be asked that question by the homeowners.
Ed Williams is the head of the Harbor Point II Homeowners Association, one of those who was promised an elementary school.
“We were lied to, and I feel betrayed,” he told onrockaway.com. “Now that [Moskowitz] is here, you have to wonder whether this whole thing was a fair process. We were told that no charters wanted to come to Rockaway and now it turns out that one of the largest did want to come here all along.”
Then there is a growing question about Moskowitz’s charter network.
There have been allegations in the New York Times and other daily papers that her Success Charters are not all they are cut out to be.
Recently, there was proof that at least one of her schools had a list of students who were not performing up to standards or who were disruptive. The list was called “The Got To Go” list internally and parents of those children were reportedly harassed by the schools and then told to take their child back to the local public school.
Published reports said that such lists were widespread in the Success network.
In another case, a video of an interaction between a Success teacher and one of her students has gone viral as a lesson in how not to treat children.
In the video, a first-grade class sits cross-legged in a circle on a brightly colored rug. One of the girls has been asked to explain to the class how she solved a math problem, but she has gotten confused
She begins to count: “One… two…” Then she pauses and looks at the teacher.
The teacher takes the girl’s paper and rips it in half. “Go to the calm-down chair and sit,” she orders the girl, her voice rising sharply.
“There’s nothing that infuriates me more than when you don’t do what’s on your paper,” she says, as the girl retreats.
The teacher in the video, Charlotte Dial, works at a Success Academy in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. She has been considered so effective that the network promoted her last year to being a model teacher, who helps train her colleagues.
After sending the girl out of the circle and having another child demonstrate how to solve the problem, Ms. Dial again chastises her, saying, “You’re confusing everybody.” She then
The video was recorded surreptitiously in the fall of 2014 by an assistant teacher who was concerned by what she described as Ms. Dial’s daily harsh treatment of the children. The assistant teacher, who insisted on anonymity because she feared endangering future job prospects, shared the video with The New York Times after she left Success in November.
After being shown the video last month, Ann Powell, a Success spokeswoman, described its contents as shocking and said Ms. Dial had been suspended pending an investigation. But a week and a half later, Ms. Dial returned to her classroom and her role as an exemplar within the network.
Moskowitz dismissed the video as an anomaly. Interviews by the New York Times with 20 current and former Success teachers suggest that while Ms. Dial’s behavior might be extreme, much of it is not uncommon within the network.
She did not address the other incidents detailed in the New York Times article, including threats to call 911 and repeated meetings designed to wear parents down until they withdrew their students.
According to the Times, Success is known for its students’ high standardized test scores, and it emphasizes getting — and keeping — scores up. Jessica Reid Sliwerski, 34, worked at Success Academy Harlem 1 and Success Academy Harlem 2 from 2008 to 2011, first as a teacher and then as an assistant principal. She said that, starting in third grade, when children begin taking the state exams, embarrassing or belittling children for work seen as slipshod was a regular occurrence, and in some cases encouraged by network leaders.
Following a report detailing Success Academy schools trying to remove unruly students, school founder Eva Moskowitz denied any systematic effort to push students out of her schools, took responsibility for the oversight of her school leaders, and elicited a tearful apology from the principal who created the list.
Success Academy is the largest charter-school network in New York City, serving 11,000 students, and its schools post impressive test results in traditionally hard to serve communities. Critics have long accused the network of posting high test scores by pressuring undisciplined students to leave.
Moskowitz and other Success Academy leaders have frequently compared the schools in their network to district schools, making the case that Success provides superior educational opportunities. At several press conferences and this year, Moskowitz has called on Mayor Bill de Blasio to treat charter schools as equals and provide them with better space and funding.
Yet on Friday, Moskowitz said that “a very small percentage of kids,” particularly those with special needs, might not find the right support at Success and should instead consider a district school.
“Success may not be the absolute best setting for every child,” she said.
The third question, of course, is why put a school full of problematic students in the midst of other schools that have a good reputation in the community, including the highly-rated Channel View School for Research, with which it will share the building, its cafeteria and gymnasium.
The answer: Because they can and because they have to find room for an elementary charter at MS 53.

The Indypendent Features MORE/New Action Presidential Candidate Jia Lee

“People are fed up,” said Jia Lee, a parent and special education teacher in Manhattan who opted her child out of the test and refused to administer it to her students. “We’ve been able to build a grassroots movement, and it is growing because parents and teachers, and even some administrators, are getting frustrated and angry.” --- The Indypendent,  https://indypendent.org/2016/02/02/chalk-victory-sort

CIVICS LESSON: Robert Bender, Principal of PS11 in Chelsea, left, and City Councilmember Corey Johnson, right, lead parents and students of the school in a chant to protest the use of high-stakes standardized tests in public schools. The groundswell of opposition from parents, students and teachers across New York state has forced Gov. Andrew Cuomo to backtrack on his support for standardized testing. Photo: Stephen Yang

LOCAL

Chalk Up a Victory (Sort of)

BY

PETER RUGH

FEBRUARY 2, 2016

ISSUE #

212

Education, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told lawmakers last year in his annual State of the State address, “is the area, my friends, where I think we need to do the most reform ... This is the year to roll up our sleeves and take on the dramatic challenge that has eluded us for so many years.” 

In March the governor introduced and the legislature passed the Education Transformation Act. Under the new law 50 percent of a teacher’s job performance rating was intended to be tied to statewide standardized tests. The tests are based on federal Common Core standards for third through 12th graders implemented by New York in 2013 that link grant money to scores. However, when it came time for the exams last spring, 240,000 students in grades three through eight, or 20 percent of test-eligible New York public school pupils, opted out. By the end of the year Cuomo was singing a different tune. 

“Simply put, the education system fails without parental trust,” Cuomo said in this year’s State of the State on January 13, acknowledging the growth of the opt-out movement. 

Following the recommendation of a task force the governor charged with reviewing implementation of the Common Core curriculum, Cuomo had already announced in December a four-year moratorium on putting the statewide tests toward teacher evaluations. 

“People are fed up,” said Jia Lee, a parent and special education teacher in Manhattan who opted her child out of the test and refused to administer it to her students. “We’ve been able to build a grassroots movement, and it is growing because parents and teachers, and even some administrators, are getting frustrated and angry.” 

Teachers and parents have widely complained that emphasizing the tests forces educators to teach to the tests and that the exams are not grade-level appropriate and are biased against students with special education needs and English language learners. One analogy testing opponents frequently use to explain the futility of the high-stakes exams is that of a hospital patient. Instead of treating what’s ailing New York’s public school system — a lack of funding and resources — students are perpetually subjected to tests.

“We already know which schools are struggling,” said Jeanette Deutermann, a leader of the opt-out movement in Long Island. “It’s the same schools year after year; New York City schools, Buffalo schools, inner-city schools that are desperate for money and resources. Why spend all that money on identifying them again and again? Instead let’s take that money and put it into schools that are struggling.”

On top of these criticisms, the tests are simply ineffective measures of student and teacher performance. The six-day exams only cover reading and math, yet the results have been used to evaluate teachers across the academic spectrum. 

“I am curious to hear how teachers can improve the scores of kids we don’t teach,” remarked Jake Jacobs, a New York City art teacher whose rating went from “effective” to “developing” last year based on his students’ math scores. 

The test results are measured using complex statistical algorithms, a method known as Value Added Modeling (VAM), that predict how well a student is expected to perform and then penalize teachers whose students fail to meet formulaic projections. A judge with the State Supreme Court in Albany is set to rule over whether to throw out the tests used to evaluate a fourth-grade teacher in Great Neck, New York, who was rated effective in 2013-2014 and ineffective the following year, despite her students’ test scores being virtually the same.

Big Data in the Classroom

Last March, lawmakers approved Cuomo’s Education Transformation Act. Under the law, student performance measures, i.e. standardized test results, account for 50 percent of teacher evaluations, up from 40 percent. Teachers rated ineffective at least three years in a row could be terminated. 

“The theory behind testing is that if you have more data, you’ll be able to figure out what works,” said Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, a parent-based group that advocates smaller classes and student privacy. 

Under pressure from Class Size Matters, New York withdrew from inBloom in 2014. Founded with $100 million in seed money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, the nonprofit start-up sought to collect not just test scores but a range of private student information — Social Security numbers, health and social service records, economic status, disciplinary records — and to store the data on cloud-based servers. The stated intention was to track students from kindergarten until graduation, but Haimson sees more nefarious motives.

The aim of all this data collection, she said, “is to push education into private hands and generate a thriving market in education software. The Department of Education and groups like the Gates Foundation seem to feel that technology is going to solve our education problems even though there is no evidence to support that.” 

Jia Lee admits that assessing student growth “is a key part of teaching” but says the results shouldn’t be used to penalize educators. “We’re constantly assessing our students to see how they’re making progress. But they’re using those tests to go after teachers and to close schools.”

Lee is running for president of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) as part of the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) caucus. Her supporters accuse the current union leadership of complicity in devising New York’s high-stakes testing regime. Despite public statements decrying high-stakes testing, the UFT’s current president Michael Mulgrew opened the door to the exam blitz in an agreement reached with Cuomo and Education Commissioner John King in 2012. It stipulated that test scores would account for 40 percent of teacher evaluations. 

“We need a different level of engagement from our union,” said Lee. “It’s going to take real organizing power.” 

A taste of that organizing power came during last spring’s opt-out actions, which included approximately 80,000 third through eighth graders opting out on Long Island, where Deutermann organizes, and some teachers, including Lee, refusing to administer the tests. However, Cuomo’s apparent retreat has turned out to be more ambiguous than it first appeared.

“Initially my reaction was positive,” Lee said. “In my mind I was thinking, is this really happening? But there’s still a state law in place that says we have to be evaluated by some kind of statistical metric. What that is, we don’t know.” 

Students will still take the Common Core tests and the Transformation Act remains in place, meaning that teacher evaluations will continue to be based on student performance data, making it likely that tests implemented by local school districts will take the place of the Common Core exams to assess educators. 

Still Opting Out

Deutermann plans on refusing to let her children take the tests again this year. “Opting out isn’t just done to change political policies or to get legislators to take notice,” she said. “It’s also about protecting kids from six days of testing that is completely inappropriate.” 

As New York stepped back from high-stakes testing, so did the federal government. Congress passed and President Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act, which allows states to devise their own education standards rather than follow Common Core and no longer mandates that states tie teacher evaluations to test scores in order to receive grant money.

Both developments are signs that grassroots efforts led by teachers and parents are making an impact. But a new trend in the education industry has some advocates shuddering. It’s been called “stealth assessment” or“competency-based” learning. Education companies like Dreambox, Scholastic and the Khan Academy have developed software that registers every answer students give as they learn reading and math. “The companies that develop this software argue that it presents the opportunity to eliminate the time, cost and anxiety of ‘stop and test’ in favor of passively collecting data on students’ knowledge over a semester, year or entire school career,” noted NPR education correspondent and author of The Test, Anya Kamenetz. 

In other words, in the future big standardized tests could be a thing of the past. Students, and by extension their teachers, would simply be tested all the time.

Instead of tweaking the current teacher evaluation system or moving towards ubiquitous data collection models, Deutermann believes it's time for a paradigm shift. “Why not start focusing on the things that really matter: parent input, student input. Creative lesson plans, mentoring programs for new teachers?”

Another key component to real education reform adds Leonie Haimson: increased funding. “We need to spend money on things we know work like smaller classes, more schools and more teachers.”

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