Movement of Rank & File Educators
The social justice caucus of the UFT
“Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions”
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Weekly Update #16 - 07.18.12
more@morecaucusnyc.org
Written and edited by Norm Scott: EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!! MOBILIZE!!! Three pillars of The Resistance – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We link up with bands of resisters. Nothing will change unless WE ALL GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!
Movement of Rank & File Educators
The social justice caucus of the UFT
“Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions”
| MORE |
Just once, it would be nice to walk into a classroom and see a teacher who has a real, honest-to-God degree in education and not a twentysomething English graduate trying to bolster a middling GPA and a sparse law school application. I don't think it's too much to ask for a qualified educator who has experience standing up in front of a classroom and isn't desperately trying to prove to herself that she's a good person.More signs the tide is turning in this hilarious send up of TFA
My Year Volunteering As A Teacher Helped Educate A New Generation Of Underprivileged Kids
By Megan Richmond, Volunteer Teacher
When I graduated college last year, I was certain I wanted to make a real difference in the world. After 17 years of education, I felt an obligation to share my knowledge and skills with those who needed it most.
After this past year, I believe I did just that. Working as a volunteer teacher helped me reach out to a new generation of underprivileged children in dire need of real guidance and care. Most of these kids had been abandoned by the system and, in some cases, even by their families, making me the only person who could really lead them through the turmoil.
Was it always easy? Of course not. But with my spirit and determination, we were all able to move forward.
Those first few months were the most difficult of my life. Still, I pushed through each day knowing that these kids really needed the knowledge and life experience I had to offer them. In the end, it changed all of our lives.
In some ways, it's almost like I was more than just a teacher to those children. I was a real mentor who was able to connect with them and fully understand their backgrounds and help them become the leaders of tomorrow.
Ultimately, I suppose I can never know exactly how much of an impact I had on my students, but I do know that for me it was a fundamentally eye-opening experience and one I will never forget.
Can We Please, Just Once, Have A Real Teacher?
By Brandon Mendez, James Miller Elementary School Student
You've got to be kidding me. How does this keep happening? I realize that as a fourth-grader I probably don't have the best handle on the financial situation of my school district, but dealing with a new fresh-faced college graduate who doesn't know what he or she is doing year after year is growing just a little bit tiresome. Seriously, can we get an actual teacher in here sometime in the next decade, please? That would be terrific.
Just once, it would be nice to walk into a classroom and see a teacher who has a real, honest-to-God degree in education and not a twentysomething English graduate trying to bolster a middling GPA and a sparse law school application. I don't think it's too much to ask for a qualified educator who has experience standing up in front of a classroom and isn't desperately trying to prove to herself that she's a good person.
I'm not some sort of stepping stone to a larger career, okay? I'm an actual child with a single working mother, and I need to be educated by someone who actually wants to be a teacher, actually comprehends the mechanics of teaching, and won't get completely eaten alive by a classroom full of 10-year-olds within the first two months on the job.
How about a person who can actually teach me math for a change? Boy, wouldn't that be a novel concept!
I fully understand that our nation is currently facing an extreme shortage of teachers and that we all have to make do with what we can get. But does that really mean we have to be stuck with some privileged college grad who completed a five-week training program and now wants to document every single moment of her life-changing year on a Tumblr?
For crying out loud, we're not adopted puppies you can show off to your friends.
Look, we all get it. Underprivileged children occasionally say some really sad things that open your eyes and make you feel as though you've grown as a person, but this is my actual education we're talking about here. Graduating high school is the only way for me to get out of the malignant cycle of poverty endemic to my neighborhood and to many other impoverished neighborhoods throughout the United States. I can't afford to spend these vital few years of my cognitive development becoming a small thread in someone's inspirational narrative.
But hey, how much can I really know, anyway? I haven't had an actual teacher in three years.
The whispering is that there are 5,000 nubile young "idealists" From Teach for America ready to roll into town for Rahm. --- George Schmidt, SubstanceI'm heading to Detroit next week for the AFT convention and will be checking out the Chicago crew, many of whom I know. Here are some articles worth reading on the battles in Chicago. The CORE caucus has inspired the new MORE caucus here in NYC which was profiled on Gotham in a great piece by Rachel Cromidas (Teachers union faction wants to shake up electoral status quo). Rachel gave up an entire evening to hang out and listen to Michael's and my presentations followed by an hour of Q and A (not posted yet).
Teach for America doesn't do "boot camp" for this reality. Mercenaries are mercenaries, and scabs are scabs. A mercenary has to have a hole in his soul — but also a little guts. The jobs is not just for a kid with a fancy university degree, a vapid ignorance about reality, and a perfect score on the quiz that followed the most recent airing of "Waiting for Superman". Six viewings of "Waiting for Superman" and a couple of Attaboys from Jonah Edelman, Becky Carroll and Wendy Kopp aren't going to get your through one day scabbing in Chicago. Reality here is as close as the difference between a Latin King and a Latin Dragon, a false flag — crown up or crown down? — that can get you a year in therapy if you are lucky. They don't teach that at Princeton, and by the time Rahm's scabs wake up it will be sadly too late for them.The full piece it at: SCAB TEACHERS NOT WELCOME: Rahm's Scab Army will be a debacle... Rahm's disinformation campaigns will lead to chaos for a couple of days in scab classrooms until the last TFA or New Teacher Project mercenaries are driven out of our classrooms
When we last saw Christine Rubino, the New York State Supreme Court vacated the Department of Education’s penalty for comments she made on her private Facebook page. The penalty was termination. The arbitrator who came up with the penalty, Randi Lowitt, knew that this was the outcome the DOE wanted. She was probably the only arbitrator ever to have the head of the DOE’s Administrative Trials Unit, Theresa Europe, stare daggers at her throughout the hearing to ensure she came to the right decision. -- The Assailed Teacher
After Rubino appealed the decision, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe overturned the termination as too harsh. While “offensive” and “repulsive,” Jaffe concluded, Rubino’s remarks were made outside the school building, after hours, and were only circulated among adult Facebook friends. Jaffe found no evidence that Rubino meant the kids any actual harm or that her outburst “affected her ability to teach” — and sent the matter back to Lowitt.---- NY Post
Did Edelman EVER question how much the DOE is spending to get rid of a quality teacher? --- Ed NotesGood for Judge Barbara Jaffe. Remember how Walcott and Bloomberg thought the arbitrator in the turnaround case was wrong or how the arbitrators who did not fire teachers were wrong. And how Bloomberg lamented how rare it is for the courts to overturn the rulings of arbitrators?
The DOE lawyers will introduce the charges, then they will introduce more charges that they never showed you or your lawyer beforehand. They will then ask the arbitrator, and receive from the arbitrator, permission to add more charges, evidence and witnesses as the hearing progresses. They literally make it up as they go along. Many of these DOE lawyers would be selling apples in the subway if this 3020a process did not exist. They call themselves lawyers, but they are more like law school dropouts and graduates of online JD courses, where all one needs for a degree is a printer and mouse that clicks. And why not? The DOE does not need good lawyers when the process is so skewed in its favor. --The Assailed TeacherTalk to Francesco Porteles about his charges, a list of which will make you roll on the floor. Something like he used voodoo to spook some computers. Theresa Europe will have her ace lawyers find some chicken bones to cinch the voodoo charge.
A Brooklyn teacher fired for posting “repulsive’’ Facebook comments suggesting her misbehaving students should drown now faces only a two-year suspension without pay.Gee, ONLY a 2-year suspension without pay. Just a little bit of editorializing there Sue. How about a 2-year suspension without pay for Edelman for distorted reporting? Her crime is way more serious than Christine's as Edelman violates basic rules of professional reporting and public responsibility given the ability of the press to influence public opinion. That is why juries are so hard to pick in the real world instead of the make believe justice in the DOE.
Edelman brought a photographer with a telescopic lens to stalk 51 Chambers Street in order to catch a "candid" photograph of Christine Rubino.Make sure to tell the photographer to get the very worst photo they can get to make the teacher look guilty.
Villain 3: Randi Lowitt
Throughout her entire hearing, Christine was remorseful about what she had said. At no point did she stand by her words or try to defend them. She owned up to her actions for what they were: a mistake, a lapse of judgment, a regrettable action. This was not enough for the DOE or Randi Lowitt or the media or the lynch mob of public opinion. Terminate her, ensure her children starve and never allow her around children again. Meanwhile, the accused child molester who ratted her out gets to work another year in a public school building. Way to go, all of you.
.... the DOE releases information to Sue Edelman so she can do one of her trademark hatchet jobs...Sue Edelman of the Post wrote another article about the case today[about] the two-year suspension. The arbitrator's new ruling really harped on Christine's supposed "lying" to investigators, even though it was her friend who did the "lying" on her own without the blessing, knowledge or collaboration with Christine. Edelman mentions this "obstruction" charge in her article.In other words, the entire basis of the original charge seemed to disappear in the ruling to suspend Christine without pay by arbitrator Randi Lowitt who was so burned by the overturning of her decision to have Christine fired that Lowitt decided to make her lose her house, bankrupt her and maybe cause her kids to starve.
Randi Lowitt’s new decision reads like something written by a woman scorned, an arbitrator who had her ridiculous ruling overturned, a primal scream of vindictive pettiness. She makes very little mention of Christine’s Facebook comment and, instead, bases her two-year suspension on the fact that one of Christine’s friends lied during the investigation.-- Assailed TeacherVillain 4: The principal
who is this coworker who informed on Christine Rubino? A man who is currently awaiting his own 3020a hearing for abuse charges that could wind him up in prison. This is one of the seedy underbellies of school politics. There are informants in every building. Usually, the informants are those with lots to hide: either they are creeps or incompetent. They play the role of informant because that is what gets them through another year. It is the only role that they are able to play, one that shines the spotlight on others in order to take it off themselves. It is a system conducive to destroying good teachers while protecting the worst our profession has to offer.One interesting sidenote here is that the long-time now retired principal of PS 203K was the late Sidney Aronson who was married to Woody Allen's sister Letty Aronson who now produces his movies. I know of a case of a teacher at the school many years ago who was accused of some nonsense that took place outside the school hours and we were outraged that he put a letter in the teacher's file. But basically Aronson, being old school, had a decent rep, unlike the little monster principals running around today.
Of course, these informants would not have any power if not for a principal who feeds into their informing. In my experience, most administrators are happy to have a few glad-handers and back-slappers on their staffs, ones who share gossip in hushed tones in the principal’s office.
And then there is the matter of what the principal did with this information. Despite the lines that principals run that they do not have a choice but to call in complaints to the DOE, there is always a choice. A human being with people skills might have called Rubino into her office, asked about the post and gave her a reminder of professional conduct outside of school hours. At the very worst, the principal could have given her a letter in the file. The transgression did not warrant anything more than some sort of in-house disciplinary action.
judges generally do not like vacating decisions of labor arbitrators, since doing so reduces the integrity of the arbitration process. The fact that so many judges are doing so proves that NYC’s 3020a process is broken.
--- The Assailed Teacher-----------
But even Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was not optimistic about the city’s chances in court. On WOR radio on Friday, he continued to rail against the arbitrator’s decision, saying it was “playing with kids’ lives.” But, the mayor acknowledged, “it is very hard to get courts to overturn arbitrator’s decisions.” -------Schoolbook on the turnaround schools illegally closed---------------
There might have been a time when the 3020a process had some integrity. Under the reign of Pharaoh Bloomberg, however, whatever integrity it once had has come into question.
When a teacher does not agree with a ruling of the independent arbitrator, their only recourse is to appeal to an actual court of law. For many teachers, the cost of lawyering up and the inordinate amount of time it takes to go through the court system makes appealing the arbitrator’s decision out of the question.
Yet, more and more, teachers who go to the court system see some form of justice served. It must be pointed out that judges generally do not like vacating decisions of labor arbitrators, since doing so reduces the integrity of the arbitration process. The fact that so many judges are doing so proves that NYC’s 3020a process is broken.
Take the case of Nicole Moreno-Lieberman. The NY State Supreme Court vacated the independent arbitrator’s ruling of a $7,000 fine. Judge Lucy Billings’ recent decision says a mouthful about the pitfalls of the 3020a process.
The Assailed Teacher More Tales “Shocking to the Conscience”