It's remarkable to read about how you get all your seniors admitted to college. If you're a charter school, of course, you simply dump every student who isn't making it back into the public schools. If you're a public school it's a little more difficult. Fortunately, it's more or less the Wild West over in DC.

First of all, you have this ridiculous evaluation system. You can rate teachers ineffective and get rid of them. Anyone who doesn't play ball is thrown out of the game. In NYC, we worry about vindictive administrators. In DC, that's probably true too. But if you factor in Campbell's Law, which basically says the more pressure there is, the more corruption there is, it's easy to understand how admin bows to pressure and allows any damn thing to happen.

NYC has been a little more progressive on this, though Sue Edelman at the Post is always turning over rocks to find sleazy principals who cheat to juke the stats. For those who bother following rules, it's a little more difficult to paint failure as success. I recall online nonsense being substituted for class time, including PE. I marvel at how you can answer a bunch of questions, or get your smart girlfriend to answer them for you, and earn credit.

I'm sure there are still makeup rules, and they're still nonsense. But they aren't anything compared to this DC scam, in which everyone passed no matter what. Basically, you didn't have to go to school until they threatened to take you to court. Pretty sweet deal if all you want to do is come in now and then to say hello. In fact, it's a pretty sweet deal even if you don't. Just drop in once in a while, graduate, and somehow get accepted to college.

I'm not sure how well you'd do in college if your work ethic entailed showing up only when the alternative was going to court. I'm pretty sure you just flunk out and lose your tuition if you can't be bothered to show up and do work. There aren't any worksheets or online programs to help with that.

Actually, over the years I've had some remarkably low-performing students who did better than I'd have expected in middle school. I teach ESL, and I usually teach beginners. I've had students who knew virtually no English (and absolutely no Spanish) who received 65 in ESL, ELA and Spanish. I sometimes wonder whether the NYC middle school teachers are pressured as intensely as those DC teachers. It's incredible for me to see kids who clearly know nothing about these subjects passing them.

I've been called in to administrators over the years to explain why I failed students. Usually it's not so hard for me. This one was absent 200 times in one month. That one failed every test. I don't fail students just for fun. I'd actually like to see them pass. It's tough, though, when the students  only come in two or three times a week, or month, or whatever. When you look at their grades and see that this is what they do in every class, it's even tougher.

You can call homes. I'm a great believer in calling homes. But once you do this four or five times with no change in behavior, it becomes an empty exercise. It's ridiculous to rate teachers for student performance. We are all humans. We do what we want. If what a student wants does not entail going to school, it's not the teacher's fault.

This lunacy was largely fostered under the Obama administration with all that Race to the Top nonsense. Arne Duncan and John King bought every reformy notion under the sun. Now you see them on Twitter, mustering the audacity to criticize Betsy DeVos simply because she's as incompetent and unqualified as they were.

I certainly play a part in what goes on in my classroom. I take responsibility for that. But until my job entails going to student homes, waking them up, getting them out of bed and dragging them to school, it's ridiculous to blame me for their grades. I can wake them up when they nod off in my classroom. But I still can't make them go to sleep before 3 AM.

There are a lot of factors in education. The American movement to blame the teacher for absolutely everything is short-sighted. While it satisfies the blood thirst of those who hate us and everything we stand for, while it makes some people feel good to punish us for the offense of devoting our lives to the welfare of America's children, letting kids and families completely off the hook for this behavior is not productive. When mom and dad have to work round the clock to make ends meet, it's hard for them to look after their kids.

As far as I can tell, we're moving farther away from offering help where help is needed. Just look at the insane GOP tax bill that rewards those who least need it, kicks children off of health care, and makes it even harder for working Americans to reach or maintain middle class.

But hey, let's forget all that and blame the teachers. It's the American Way.

I've had great respect for Neil deGrasse Tyson ever since the first time I saw him on Bill Maher's show. I mean, here's a guy, smarter than me, smarter than you, an astrophysicist, an acknowledged expert in his field, speaking the unvarnished truth. Climate change is science, and science is real. Disagreeing with it is like disagreeing with gravity. Then one day, he posts this:

The rise of flat-Earthers in society provides some of the best evidence for the failure of our educational system.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) July 19, 2017

Now there are certainly better interpretations of this statement. After all, there's no context here whatsoever. Is he targeting teachers? Is he targeting the system? Is he questioning Common Core, which claims to create critical thinkers but actually gets kids so accustomed to tedium they might spend several decades working at Walmart without killing themselves?

Frankly, those aren't the first thoughts that came into my mind.

The rise of non-education experts pontificating on education pretty closely parallels the rise of flat-earthers. https://t.co/VUESgglvnB

— Arthur Goldstein (@TeacherArthurG) July 23, 2017

How long have we been reading nonsense from Bill Gates? Does it precede the nonsense from Donald Trump? It's hard to say, but for me it's like stereo. Gates nonsense in the right ear and Trump in the left. A frustrating cacophony of garbage, spread through the entire United States. And not by teachers, but rather by a strangely incurious press. In a country where Fox passes as news and millions view it voluntarily, we have issues. But were they taught that in schools? Aren't teachers regularly vilified for being too "liberal?"

Massive unaddressed poverty cannot be addressed by the educational system, despite the best efforts of flat-earthers like @FakeBetsyDeVos. https://t.co/VUESgglvnB

— Arthur Goldstein (@TeacherArthurG) July 23, 2017

Teachers in the United States are expected to singlehandedly overcome impossible home issues. Gates pretty much gave up on poverty, saying he couldn't fix that, but rather he could fix education. Of course he couldn't do that either. And what he's left us with is a junk science system under which we are judged by standardized test scores, a system deemed invalid by Tyson-level experts like Diane Ravitch and the American Statistical Association. Of course, Tyson himself doesn't seem to know that.

Flat-earthers ignore science just as educational reformies ignore research. But fine, blame the schools. Just like Trump and Trump Jr. https://t.co/VUESgglvnB

— Arthur Goldstein (@TeacherArthurG) July 23, 2017

Hey, everyone else does. Go ahead. Put out that statement, offer no context, and let everyone see it. You're an expert so you must be right. Never mind that it's well out of your field of expertise. Who could possibly take it the wrong way?

Glad to have you on board! Do you need a job? https://t.co/Rrj8FLPUi9

— Fake Betsy DeVos (@FakeBetsyDeVos) July 23, 2017

Really, Dr. Tyson, when you write things like that, you may as well be part of Team Trump. They're going to bend or break union so that working people can't organize. Do you seriously expect quelling teacher voice to ultimately benfit education? And just in case it's escaped your attention, teachers are pretty much the last bastion of vibrant unionism in these United States.

I can't read your mind, but a whole lot of people read your tweets. If you don't provide context, people will fill it in for themselves. In fact, poverty accounts for a whole lot of America's educational standing. Despite the nonsense propagated by Gates, and blindly promoted by Obama in the form of Race to the Top, education alone will not solve the issue.

And with all due respect, Dr. Tyson, if you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Now I may have spoken a word or two against presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. After all, she's got some rich history. But I'm surprised at the reaction I've gotten. I've been told that I hate Hillary, that I hate women, that I'm stupid, that I'm a "Bernie Bro," and that I don't understand high school civics. I've been told I support Donald Trump. I've been told that I have to vote for Hillary. I have to! I've been called a fanatic. (This writer is hearing pretty much the same.)

What is a fanatic, exactly? I think a fanatic is someone who has one point of view that supersedes all others. But that's not enough. A fanatic is someone who says, "This is the way I do this thing. Everyone else must do this thing this way too." So I'm gonna defend myself against the charge of fanaticism by saying I don't insist everyone else do as I do. I mean, it would be great if everyone voted for Bernie. It would be great if he'd won more contests. You vote for whom you like. I won't insult you. But whatever happens, I'm not planning to vote for Hillary.

I may have mentioned, somewhere or other, that I'm a teacher. I may have also mentioned that I'm a UFT Chapter Leader. In my capacity as chapter leader, I get to hear what anyone wishes to tell me about what they go through. I'm not hearing the love for Race to the Top, which imposed junk science ratings on me and everyone with whom I work. The lone exception is when I go to UFT meetings. In these meetings, people from the President on down, none of whom have ever been rated by Danielson, toss out statistics and easily proclaim that things are incontrovertibly better.

And yet, each day at work, people tell me how unhappy they are. Young, brilliant teachers tell me they can't take it any more. The most relentlessly positive people I've ever seen in my life get up and walk out. And let me add, I work in one of the best schools in the city (in my highly prejudiced opinion).

But in my school, like in every school, there are all kinds of pressures. Sometimes the pressures ease. No more letter grades. But you cut off one head, and another grows in its place. Test scores no good? Close the school. Fire everyone. Put it into receivership and give it to Moskowitz. Test scores good? First overload the school to triple capacity. Then yeah OK, the scores are good but you're not asking the right questions. What's the point of having 97% of the kids passing the math tests if they can't have profound and reflective discussions about whether or not one plus one is really two? I mean, why is it two?  You can't reserve these discussions for works of literature, and anyway we don't do those anymore. We close read pieces of them with no context, and analyze them until we're blue in the face.

And if you do get those good scores, they're not really good unless you have teams of teachers discussing the work. They have to sit every day and analyze it just like the students analyze out of context fragments of literature. If it's perfect, then they have to figure out how to make it more perfect. And for God's sake there has to be PD. Who cares if 99% of the PD you've sat through for thirty years has been useless? You never know. This might be the one. This might be the one percent. And anyway, since the support networks have been broken up, there are all these companies that charge tens of thousands of dollars for PD. How the hell are they supposed to make tens of thousands of dollars if no one pays them for PD? Have you even considered that?

I've considered it. I've considered it in great detail. Every day when another thirty-year-old teacher tells me how lucky I am that I can retire, I consider it even more. I consider that Barack Obama's children attended the Sidwell Friends School, a place that subscribes to absolutely none of the Common Core tests or junk science ratings that so torture my young colleagues. I consider that Hillary Clinton sent her kid to Sidwell too, yet thinks Common Core is good enough for the rest of us peasants and our children. I consider my beginning kids taking the NYSESLAT exam, answering ridiculous and redundant questions about Hammurabi's Code and whatever other Common-Corey Crap the geniuses over at Questar have dreamed up for them.

I'm not voting for people who enable this crap. Not anymore. I've had enough.

Hey, if you want to vote for Hillary, be my guest. But when you come at me with ad hominem nonsense, when you tell me I have no choice, I'm not the one who's fanatic.

I ask Santa to stop closing schools for Christmas. It's among the worst policies ever. Sure I have selfish reasons. I don't want any of my colleagues to become ATRs, and I don't want to be one myself. Despite all the noise and nonsense that swirls around this job, I still love it. While politicians talk smack about what needs to be done, I know what I do is very important. I know a smile from a kid is a more hopeful sign than a good grade on a standardized test, or rigor and grit, or whatever it is the reformies are selling.

A kid's smile shows an openness, a willingness to be there, and a willingness to learn. It's something you treasure, something you can't force, and something you don't tamper with. A kid will follow a teacher who elicits a smile. Wouldn't you? And for all I know, that teacher who makes the kid smile could be in a so-called failing school. What if we have a whole community with low test scores? Does that mean we take the public school, the heart of the community, and replace it with a Moskowitz test-prep factory where kids pee their pants rather than stop filling in bubbles?

Should we trust a politician who says with one breath she wants to help struggling schools, and with the next that she will close them? That's a hard sell, for me at least, because I cannot determine which side of her mouth is credible. Is it a slip when she says she will close all schools that aren't above average? Probably yes. If average is a midpoint, that would mean closing half of all schools, and as Mercedes Schneider pointed out, it would necessitate perpetually recalculating to close even more.

So yes, Hillary misspoke. But that doesn't mean she won't be closing schools. And for those who say the feds can't close schools, I point you to President Barack Obama's Race to the Top, which mandated all sorts of school closures. Sure, it gave states a choice on how to do it, but it became virtual national policy when cash-starved states had to agree or be frozen out. (They don't call it the bully pulpit for nothing.)

So here's the thing--I'm finished voting for Democrats just because they make me puke a little less than their GOP opponents. Would Hillary make better Supreme Court appointments than Donald Trump? Probably. Would she be a better President than him? Certainly. But that's a low bar.

If Hillary wants me to consider voting for her, she will walk back that comment. She will not simply say that she didn't mean to say she'd close schools that weren't "above average." She will not simply says she meant she'd close schools that weren't "good." What does "good" even mean? In reformy, it means high standardized test scores. Anyone taking a good look at the situation knows that test scores are precisely aligned with income. If we were to cure poverty, something politicians assiduously avoid, this would not be an issue.

I ask Santa to support schools rather than close them. I ask Hillary to support Santa.

Because honestly, who can vote for a politician who opposes Santa? Not me.

I've been giving a lot of thought to the Freidrichs case, which, if we were to lose, would render dues optional for public union members. Basically, if you don't feel like paying your dues, you won't have to. And not only could you keep your precious 1300 bucks, but you could also retain pretty much whatever services the union offers. Why should I pay 1300 bucks for eyeglasses and representation when I could just let some other fool lay out the money?

That, of course, is not the basis of the argument. The argument is that union engages in political activity of which you may not approve. For example, your union might support less work for more pay while you are passionate about more work for less pay. Or maybe they support candidates who don't believe people should work seven days a week. Who knows what awful things the union might support, and how the hell are you supposed to know that your money isn't supporting it? The only fair thing is to let you freeload while everyone else pays.

Well, if that's the rationale, and SCOTUS thinks it's unethical to mix politics with dues, I'm good with it. But they need to be consistent. If, for example, one does not believe in war, one ought not to be compelled to pay for it. I'm not a huge fan of war, and certainly haven't supported the last few I've seen. In fact, there are education programs, like Common Core and Race to the Top, which I oppose fairly vehemently.

One of my biggest issues with the government is taxes. Federal taxes pay for Arne Duncan, and I gotta say, I find him pretty repugnant. For one thing, he's the highest ranking educator in the country, but he isn't even a teacher. For another, though he spends a lot of time imposing policies about public education, he has decided public schools, after years of his stewardship, are no longer good enough for his children.

So, if union dues are optional because I might not believe in what union does, taxes should also be optional.

If I don't have to pay union dues because I don't agree with what the union does, why should I pay taxes when I don't agree with what the government does? It's all about me, isn't it? It's all about persona liberty. If I'm opposed to NCLB, if I'm opposed to Common Core, and if I'm opposed to Arne Duncan representing education, why should I have to support these things?

I'd also like to determine whether or not I support military actions before my tax dollars go to pay for them. As far as I can tell, our last excursion into Iraq was incredibly costly, and not particularly effective in stabilizing the region. Why should I pay for GW's mistakes? In fact, I approved of almost nothing GW did. Can I get a refund?

Because the premise is the same. To tell you the truth, I disagree with a whole lot of things my union leadership does. But I don't see withholding my dues as a solution. This notwithstanding, if the law of the land says I don't have to pay for things I may not support, I don't want to pay federal taxes. And given His Majesty Andrew Cuomo, I don't want to pay state taxes either. I'll continue to pay local taxes because I believe in public education.

Maybe the money I save will make up in some small way for the destruction of my union. Ultimately, though, I doubt it will be enough.

Since the advent of Common Core, well before Mike Mulgrew offered to punch us in the face for opposing it, I've been getting complaints about it. They don't just come from the teachers, but from the supervisors and pretty much any parent who catches my ear.

I've heard stories of people surreptitiously sneaking into classrooms to photograph textbooks, and people with very young children who had to read about genocide. Not precisely sure 7 is the optimal age to introduce such concepts, but there you go.

The other day I was in earshot of someone whose kid was bringing Magic School Bus books into school, but the school found them unacceptable. Why? Because they weren't non-fiction. Too bad for the kids who love those books, because loving books is no longer rigorous or gritty enough. If you want them to be full of grit, second graders should be reading The History of Cement, from ancient Babylonian times right up to Roosevelt Island. That's the only way they'll be college ready, and Arne Duncan says we need to look second graders right in the eye and tell them whether or not they're college ready.

Most parents who are not insane don't worry much about whether or not their second graders are college ready. Of course Arne Duncan doesn't represent them, but rather Bill Gates and whatever education programs he's able to produce from his abundant and fertile hind quarters. That's why we're racing to the top, common coring, judging teachers by junk science, and Danielsoning our blues away. And not to put too fine a point on it, but who among us has ever seen Arne speak while Bill Gates drank a glass of water?

We are teaching children to hate reading, doing precisely the opposite of what we should be. We are relying on standardized tests and training our kids to pass them rather than to think. Thinking children choose their own books. Discouraging that at a young age is borderline criminal. What is the message we give children when we tell them what they love is prohibited? What will happen to kids who are told to read things in which they have no interest? 

Is that how we reach the proverbial Top we're Racing to? Or will it produce a bumper crop of disenchanted, disinterested, unimaginative drones ready to populate Walmart as associates? I'm grateful my daughter graduated last year, avoiding quite a bit of this stuff. I'd certainly be opting her out if she were still in high school. 

Just for laughs, here's a list of the groups that have passed the I Refuse resolution, as opposed to the watered down nonsense from UFT that endorses "multiple measures," meaning junk science, to evaluate working teachers.

Amityville Teachers' Association
Associated Teachers of Huntington
Baldwin Teachers Association
Bay Shore Classroom Teachers Association
Bellmore-Merrick United Secondary Teachers
Bellport Teachers Association
Bethpage Congress of Teachers
Brentwood Teachers Association
Brockport Teachers Association
Camden Teachers Association
Carmel Teachers' Association
Center Moriches Teachers' Association
Central Islip Teachers Association
Clarkstown Teachers Association
Commack Teachers Association
Connetquot Teachers Association
Deer Park Teachers' Association
Farmingdale Federation of Teachers
Freeport Teachers Association
Fulton Teachers Association
Garden City Teachers' Association
Glen Cove Teachers' Association
Half Hollow Hills Teachers' Association
Hamburg Teachers Association
Hastings Teachers Association
Hewlett-Woodmere Faculty Association
Ichabod Crane Teachers Association
Islip Teachers Association
Kingston Teachers Federation
Lancaster Central Teachers Association
Lake Shore Central Teachers' Association
Lakeland Federation of Teachers
Lawrence Teachers' Association
Levittown Teachers Union
Lindenhurst Teachers Association
Little Flower Teachers Association
Locust Valley School Employees Association
Lynbrook Teachers Association
Merrick Faculty Association
Middle Country Teachers Association
Miller Place Teachers Association
MORE Caucus (NYC)
New Hartford Teachers Association
New Paltz United Teachers
New Rochelle Federation of United School Employees
New York Mills Teachers' Association
North Babylon Teachers' Organization
North Bellmore Teachers Association
North Rockland Teachers Association
North Shore Schools Federated Employees
North Syracuse Education Association
Oneonta Teachers' Association
Orchard Park Teachers Association
Patchogue-Medford Congress of Teachers
Plainedge Federation of Teachers
Plainview-Old Beth Page Congress of Teachers
Port Jefferson Teachers Association
Port Jefferson Station Teachers Association
Ramapo Teachers Association
Rocky Point Teachers Association
Rockville Centre Teachers' Association
Rome Teachers Association
Sherburne-Earlville Teachers' Association
Smithtown Teachers Association
Spencerport Teachers Association
Springville Faculty Association
Shoreham Wading River Teachers Association

I'm grateful for all the union leaders who stand up for public school teachers, parents and children. One day I, too, hope to have one.

In this video, you can see a thoughtful young woman testing a concept. She's trying to settle the age-old question of whether or not one can drink cereal crumbs. Had Bill Gates been thinking about this, there would either be no experiment, or an experiment the results of which meant nothing whatsoever. Once Bill decides he wants something, he tosses some cash at it, and then municipalities are stuck paying for it for decades to come, whether or not it has the remotest validity.

There would simply be a decree from the White House that all teachers must drink cereal crumbs, and that those who didn't drink sufficiently copious amounts would be subject to dismissal. The unions would bicker over how much teachers had to drink, but eventually settle on about half what Bill Gates demanded. Rank and file would get no vote on it, Diane Ravitch would write many blog posts against it, and union leaders would declare we needed to focus on more important issues, like making sure we didn't test the crumbs too much.

Mayor Bloomberg would spend 80 million bucks on a computer program to sort data about the crumbs. The NY papers would run editorials and Meryl Tisch would write op-eds declaring we must enact this immediately because we have no time to waste. Extra time would be added to the school day for cereal crumb drinking, and Pearson would develop mandatory manuals on how and where they must be drunk. And that, perhaps, summarizes the state of all things educational in today's America.

They must be drunk.

And yet here, you can see someone calmly trying to determine whether or not something actually works. She doesn't seem overly concerned with whether or not she needs to impose her findings on the entire country. I have to think, though, that she'd at least wait to discover what said findings were before doing so, had she been thus inclined.

This is pretty much a new and novel concept in today's America.

When I read articles like this one about Race to the Top, I see red. What's communicated here is the urgent need for money. After all, I'm broke, you're broke, the state is broke, education funds are cut, and we desperately need every break we can get. But New York may not get the funds, because the awful selfish unions insist on following the deal they brokered with the state. Why can't they just shut the hell up, do what they're told, and take the goshdarn money, for goodness sake?

That's what you might take away from this article and many like it. What you might not know is that the RttT funds cannot be used to, say, reduce class size. They can't be used to provide better materials for your kid. They can't be used to bump up teacher salaries and attract more candidates. In fact, they can only be used to promote more untested, unsubstantiated "reforms" like the very teacher evaluation system that's discussed in the article.

The agreement hammered out between the state and the union was that 20% will be based on statewide value-added measures, which are total crap. However, the state decided it needed 40% total crap, and if we can't have double the crap we could lose the funds, and thus preclude even more expensive crap from being introduced to our educational system. How are we going to whore ourselves out to the the Waltons and the Koch brothers if we don't adequately finance these measures?

On the bright side, municipalities are supposed to negotiate another 20% of local measurements, and if they are lucky, they can arrange for this to be as crappy as the first 20%. Of course, those evil unions might push for something reasonable, thus crushing the ambitions of the zillionaires who introduced this nonsense so as to get rid of unionized teachers. After all, the fewer job protections working people have, the more money rich people can take, and the middle class can be wiped out ever more quickly.

It's discouraging that the public is fed such nonsense about RttT, which is simply a program to impose Bill Gates' druthers on a gullible and incurious public. It's a disgrace that our President, a Democrat, is so eager to impose the will of billionaires onto the entire country. "Hope and change" indeed. This is the same nonsense we might have expected from his predecessor.

In 2012, I hope we get a real choice. Because Barack Obama and Arne Duncan clearly work for Bill Gates and the Wal-Mart family.  If this is to be a genuine democracy, we're gonna need someone to represent you and me.

Who might that be?

It looks like NYC will be using the highly-important Race to the Top funds to create more managers and educrats, just what the city needs. It's amazing that we jumped through hoops to get this money, agreed to all sorts of "reforms" to get this money, and made such a big deal out of it when it turns out kids are the last to actually benefit from it.

It's not just that they won't benefit from the data collectors or whatever the city is creating, but actually they had no chance of benefiting from it under any circumstance. The money was never to reduce class sizes, to promote innovation, to improve instruction, but rather a chance to utilize a wishing well of Gates Foundation ideas hoisted upon the country. Here's a country that adores innovation in education, and no one cares whether or not it works as long as teachers can be held accountable for whatever ends up happening.

The important thing, apparently is to figure out what to do with the data. My guess is it will need to be examined ever so carefully, and interpreted in favor of Mayor Bloomberg one way or the other. Because the Race is not about how well children do. It is, rather, about making clueless billionaires appear to be taking positive action on education.

Well, when they told Jed Clampett Cali-for-nee-ah's the place you oughta be, they weren't kidding. Movie star/ politician Arnold Schwarzenegger's got a deal for parents in La-La Land, giving them all sorts of options to "improve" their schools:

Some of the options parents would have to choose from include: replacing the existing administration with a charter school, closing schools and replacing some or all of the existing staff.

What the other options may be I have no idea, as the article didn't deem them worthy of mention. I can't help but notice that there's nothing there about supporting or improving the schools. Apparently they must either be closed, replaced, or the staff must be gotten rid of. I have to also assume that when the schools are closed or replaced with charters, it's bye-bye staff. There is no possibility, therefore, that the school's problems could emanate from anywhere but the schools unionized employees.

So this makes being a parent much easier. If my kid flunks out, there's clearly something wrong with the school and it must be closed or replaced by a charter. At the very least, we need to fire all the staff.

Last year I covered a class for an absent AP. One kid was listening to an Ipod. I told him to put it away, and he did. The second time, I told him it would be my Ipod if I saw it again. The third time, I sent it to the dean's office. When I went to check up on what happened, I ran into the kid's mom. She told me it was his "enjoyment," and that I had no right to have taken it. She said she wanted to make sure he was never in my class.

I thought about what would happen if it were my kid. In fact, if it were my kid, it would be a long time before she saw that Ipod again. Now I'm thinking what it would be like if a mom like the one I ran into got to choose what happens with our school after her son flunks out for listening to the Ipod instead of studying.

And why is this program being started? Why, to qualify California for the Race to the Top funds. It seems like a race to see how fast we can replace union jobs with non-union jobs.

Thanks a lot, President Obama!