Naturally, I'm impressed that Chalkbeat went the extra mile, quoting not only Eva Moskowitz, but also the so-called Families for Excellent Schools, an astroturf org whose primary function appears to be supporting Moskowitz. Sometimes it's not enough to only get Eva's side, and it's important to also know how her professional cheering section feels. (In case you're wondering, they support her.) That way, we get a more thorough understanding of the pro-charter side of the issue.

What might you lose when you go out of your way to focus on both reformy sides? A commenter at Chalkbeat offers a taste:

This Chalkbeat article left out the information that Mayor de Blasio offered space to some of these charter schools and the charter schools rejected it because it was not in the expensive neighborhood where it would be much easier to market to the affluent students they prefer to teach.

Odd how the ace reporters at Gates-Walmart funded Chalkbeat forgot that part. Essentially, the story says that charters wish de Blasio to show his good will by giving up and surrendering space. Given the comment, I guess it can't just be any space. After all, Eva needs to be particular. And she can't really complete her rampant expansion plans without  precisely the right space for her private schools that can't be bothered following city regulations. So why shouldn't the taxpayers foot the bill so she can go wherever she goshdarn pleases? You can't expect Chalkbeat to delve too deeply into questions like those, because you know, their reporters are busy, and haven't got time to think about all that stuff.

The important thing, though, is that Eva get her space. After all, Mayor Bill de Blasio ran on an anti-charter platform and won an overwhelming victory, but screw him and everyone who voted for him (and don't even mention that, ever). Governor Cuomo mounted his white steed and rode to Eva's rescue, passing a law that NYC had to pay for Eva's charter schools whether the city wanted them or not. (And for the record, I don't recall UFT leadership raising a peep in protest.)

Not to belabor the point, but Chalkbeat reporters have a lot of things to do. It isn't easy running a Gates-Walton funded operation. They don't have time to find answers to nagging questions,  let alone speak to lowly teachers. If you read yesterday's comment section, you'll see they actually don't even know any, so they asked a commenter who teaches in LA whether he could put them in touch with NYC teachers. Because, you know, they're Very Important, and he's a teacher. Therefore he has nothing better to do than find them contacts in their own town. That's the sort of bold, proactive journalism we've come to expect from Chalkbeat.

In fact, because they pay a whole lot of people a whole lot of money, the charter folks have gotten this story out to a whole lot of local press. You'd think maybe Chalkbeat, with its sole focus on education, might provide a little more depth to the story, but you'd be wrong. From reading Chalkbeat, you'd think there was space all over the city, just waiting for Eva to appropriate it.

Evidently, Chalkbeat is unaware of issues like oversized classes and overcrowding, because honestly, who cares about that stuff? Not Walton and Gates, who fund Chalkbeat. So why should they bother looking into stuff like that? I mean, how would that help Families for Excellent Schools or Eva Moskowitz? How would it help E4E, the Gates-funded group Chalkbeat turns to when it needs the vital opinions of former teachers?

Here on planet earth, I work in a school that overcrowded to the point of bursting. We're slated to have over 4,700 students, more than ever, and I have no idea how we are going to accommodate them. With the help of UFT, we were able to negotiate an annex that will provide us with ten extra classrooms after we lose the trailers. But that will take a few years, and while we wait the DOE has generously provided up with hundreds of extra students, pretty much canceling the value of the extra space before we even get it.

But hey, why worry about that? The important thing is that Moskowitz get her space, and that paid charter shills drown out the voices of those of us who actually do this work. Why on earth would we give extra space to actual public school students? Who lobbies for them?

Actually I do. So do people like Leonie Haimson, Diane Ravitch, Carol Burris, Jeanette Deutermann and others. So do a whole lot of working teachers. What do they think about this?

If you're relying on Chalkbeat for information, you'll never find out.

I cannot believe the crap that passes for news nowadays. Families for Excellent Schools says any damn thing it likes on behalf of Eva Moskowitz, who terrorizes young people into peeing their pants over tests. She's celebrated in the pages of the tabloids and, of course, in Chalkbeat NY, which considers her every move worthy of a feature story. They just had another expensive customized t-shirt heavy rally for more charters.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting in a school that's been over 200% capacity for decades and we have no place to put kids. My inbox is full of complaints from teachers in rooms with no windows that may or may not have air sources. I myself am in a room with a sunny southern exposure on the top floor that gets so hot I can barely concentrate. There's a non-functional air conditioner in front of the room. I complain and I'm told it will be fixed tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

It's a dual-edged sword for public schools here in Fun City. If your test scores and graduation rates aren't where the city wants them to be, you're under one program or other, and now they don't close your school anymore. You simply rehire the entire staff, and everyone has to apply to keep their jobs or become one sort of ATR or another. A lot of teachers don't bother to reapply, as they don't want to jump through all the various hoops demanded by the city and state, and who can blame them? Root causes like poverty, learning disabilities, and lack of English are no excuse for low test scores, and the core problems are vigorously ignored by all levels of government, right up to and including Secretary of Education Reformy John King, who happily dumps hundreds of millions of federal funds into charters.

And make no mistake--charters are not public schools. We don't run them, and we don't get to make decisions about them. We are, however, graciously allowed to pay for them. There is no way Eva takes the kids I teach, the ones who arrived here last week from countries all over the world. There is no way Eva takes the kids my school does, essentially everyone, up to and including alternate assessment students who are not expected to graduate and are a drag on the all-important stats. There is no miracle whatsoever in selecting students, dumping those who don't measure up, and achieving high test scores. If you or I allowed a student to pee her pants in class, we'd be up on corporal punishment charges via CR A-420. Of course Eva doesn't need any stinking rules.

My school is the most requested in the entire city. Any kid who lives in our district, or can successfully pretend to live in our district, gets in. As such, admin scrambles to meet contractual class size, but whenever you push out of one class, you push into another, and it's almost impossible. Our class sizes are already too high and we can barely keep up. Even if we do, 100 kids can walk through our doors on any given week and we'll be right back where we started.

It's a disgrace that the media celebrates the moneyed charter school astroturfers while studiously ignoring the effect on public schools. The more they draw from our best students, the more they can vilify us for not attaining the scores that they've achieved. The more they ignore what's actually happening on the ground, the more the public uncritically accepts their nonsense.

I don't know about you, but it's pretty clear that critical thinking is not being propagated no matter how much Common Core Crap we hurl at our hapless students. If so-called Families for Excellent Schools can regularly feed the media soundbites and stories, why the hell can't we?

There's an interesting discussion about how much time kids should spend in school over at the Atlantic. Various viewpoints are elicited, notably including that of NPE director Carol Burris. Burris, unlike a whole lot of other people who write and talk education, looks at and considers research before forming opinions.

The myth that American students spend less time learning than students in other industrialized nations is not true. It is also clear from studies that increasing school time is very expensive and there is little return in achievement. Reductions in class size and peer tutoring, for example, have been found to be far more effective.

This will be surprising to people who read op-ed pages, which spout baseless nonsense and rely on astroturf groups like so-called Families for Excellent Schools for information. A lot of people attack the summer break, saying it causes some sort of learning loss. You'd think kids contracted Alzheimer's for two months a year. But Burris says affluent kids continue to learn in the summer while poorer kids may experience a loss.

And this, once again, points to our core problem--allowing so many of our children to live in poverty. In fact, it appears the majority of our students suffer from poverty. Meanwhile, we're sitting around debating the summer vacation. The NY Post is trashing the mayor for not closing enough unionized schools and opening more charters. Of course, charters cherry-pick their students, target those who've got to go, and send them back to public schools. We are then vilified for their test scores, as they must be our fault.

Some schools, like mine, give kids summer assignments. We then pat ourselves on the back for having dealt with the learning loss that supposedly takes place. My daughter has had teachers who'd give her assignments over school vacations. I hated those teachers. I'd help her with projects and wonder why the hell they couldn't just give her a week off.

Learning is 24/7, 365 days a year. If we do our job right, we won't need to put guns to our kids' heads to make them learn. We won't need to make up crap for them to do in the summer, or make them answer stupid questions, or make them write reports to prove they read the assignment. If we do our job right, kids will form interests and follow them.

Unfortunately, as long as we place our heads in the sand and pretend we can place some kind of band aid on poverty, that's not gonna happen. Giving kids nonsense to waste time during the summer isn't gonna change anything. At best kids will comply and hate our guts for wasting their time. At worst they won't comply and will still hate our guts for trying to waste their time. Or maybe it's vice-versa. The result is not substantially differeent.

In France, there's a 35-hour work week and everyone, not just teachers, gets 5 weeks off a year. Oh, and no one goes bankrupt paying medical bills, because like in most of the developed world, they have single payer health care. In American, we're obsessed with filling time. God forbid anyone should get a day off. Maybe the kid will select B instead of C on the multiple choice test.

Meanwhile, we're spinning our wheels solving the wrong problems.

The NAACP is calling for a national moratorium on charter schools. This is an interesting development, and begs the question as to why the hell our union leadership is not doing so. It seems to me that leadership is so obsessed with that apocryphal seat at the table that they'll do absolutely anything to achieve it. Charter schools are now in direct competition with public schools, and they are designed that way.

Leadership sees this as a new paradigm, and I think they call it "solutions-driven unionism." That is, if Bill Gates likes charter schools, we'll support them. If charter schools colocate and destroy our public schools, we'll start a charter and do the same. We will presume, for no reason whatsoever, that union leadership can run a charter more successfully than the non-union ones who cheat, cherry pick, exclude and expel to inflate the test scores on which they are judged.

We will not only support Common Core, but also threaten to punch the faces of anyone who doesn't. We will send our President to help write the law that rates teachers by junk science. Not only that, but we will insult opponents of such outright nonsense by suggesting they wish to give more power to principals. We will ignore the fact that this law results in members being rated inffective based on junk science.

We will defend baseless and abusive testing by invoking civil rights organizations. We will say they support testing, and therefore we do. When a statewide movement causes our reformy and sellout governor Andrew Cuomo to pull back on testing in some small way, we will take credit and ignore the movement. Not only that, but we will also condemn it with an outrageously transparent and stupid argument. We will do this to discredit opponents of leadership to an audience that's largely bound by loyalty oath anyway.

This is a golden opportunity to open discussions with NAACP and help connect the dots to anyone who doesn't understand the connection between charters and testing. Both of these are used to vilify public schools and teachers, and testing in particular is used to close community schools, many of which are concentrated in communities of color.

I don't anticipate that happening anytime soon, as it seems vital to leadership to be five years behind the times. The leadership MO, sitting around and hoping for the best, seems to work for them. For example, if NAACP manages to influence other groups or make something happen, leadership can then take credit and attribute it to their "activism," or that of the loyalty oath signers who have the vision and discipline to do whatever the hell they're told. 

I was pretty surprised that Chalkbeat NY didn't deem this worthy of mention on Monday, so I passed it on to a writer, who passed it on to an editor, who did nothing whatsoever about it. That's because this story isn't worthy, I suppose. Who gives a crap what NAACP thinks when Families for Excellent Schools say charter schools are better than public schools, or E4E gathered 100 signatures saying teachers should do more work for less pay? Clearly Chalkbeat NY values the opinions of white billionaires who fund astroturf groups, and after all someone has to take a bold stand for white billionaires, otherwise it would be discriminatory.

Personally, I find it pretty sad that a preposterously small minority dominates the education conversation, entirely ignoring teachers, students and communities. But that's where we are in America circa summer 2016.

It looks like Governor Cuomo's plan of painting targets on the backs of all teachers has not worked out as well as planned in NY State. Evidently there is a shortage, and to ease it, the geniuses in Albany are relaxing standards. Their thinking, evidently, is people from other states will be anxious for the chance to judged by Governor Cuomo's matrix, and potentially be guilty until proven innocent. After all, there aren't many opportunities like that in the United States.

Another point of view, of course, is that Governor Cuomo is bought and paid for by Eva Moskowitz's BFFs at Families for Excellent Schools, and that he pretty much jumps at their beck and call. Maybe that's why he was so happy to appear at Ms. Moskowitz's field trip, you know, the one where she boarded all her students on buses and dragged them to Albany to lobby for her own political cause. If you or I did that, we'd be fired. But of course we didn't, so that's not why there's a teacher shortage.

There's a teacher shortage because we're tired of being used as punching bags. We're tired of being vilified in the press, and by every tinhorn politician that takes suitcases of cash from DFER and FES. We're tired of hearing people like Cuomo enact rating plans to fire teachers, call them "baloney" when they fail to fire enough teachers, and revise them for the express purpose of firing more. We're tired of being judged by test scores which the American Statistical Association correctly asserts have little or no validity.

We're tired of being told the only way to teach is like this, like that, or like whatever Bill Gates wakes up and decides children other than his own must be taught. We're tired of endless testing and being forced to teach nonsense that does not help our children. We're tired of underlying assumptions by people with no credentials or credibility that the children we serve lack "grit" and must be treated with "rigor."

I'm particularly tired of so-called leaders who create problems and then try to solve them in ways that don't address the problems at all. When I started teaching, pay was particularly low. The city didn't bother addressing the huge disparity in pay between the city and surrounding suburbs. Instead, there were ads in the subways and on buses to try to attract teachers. There were intergalactic recruiting campaigns. It turned out, though, that people from other countries and universes just couldn't afford to live in NYC.

And then, of course, there is the issue of quality. I was one of the people who saw a subway ad and took a teaching gig. I had no idea what I was doing. On my ninth day of teaching, my supervisor wrote me up and said I had no idea what I was doing. But I had told her I had no idea what I was doing when she hired me. To this day I wonder why she expected more. She wrote that I should try to be more "heuristic" when I taught. Naturally that cleared up everything for me. Doubtless with excellent advice like that every teacher will become instantly excellent, no matter how much they raise or lower the standards.

Cuomo is an empty suit, with loyalty to no one but Cuomo. He just said he won't support his party in its effort to retake the State Senate. This is they guy Hillary's people have representing the DNC for New York. He has no moral center whatsoever, does whatever the people who pay him say, and happily supports whatever the privatizers tell him to. And, oh, if the people rise up and say screw your ridiculous tests, he can always make some empty gesture, like a partial moratorium, and say, "See? I care what you think, sort of."

This is step one in addressing a teacher shortage created by Albany. There will be more. But until they start listening to teachers and learning why people no longer pursue this job, they will be empty gesture after empty gesture, likely helping no one but those who see education as an opportunity for profit.

I'm always amazed when E4E finds 100 signatures demanding more work for less pay and Chalkbeat NY's subsequent article reports it as though it indicates something that isn't painfully obvious. I can garner 100 signatures on a petition in 90 minutes. Not only that, but if I do such a thing, it's to actually help students rather than advance the druthers of Bill Gates or some other billionaire.

That's why I'm kind of amazed when so-called Families for Excellent Schools, well-known BFFs and staunch supporters of Eva Moskowitz, does one of their studies and it ends up in the Daily News. In fairness, the News specifically portrays them as a pro-charter group, which is a lot better than what Chalkbeat does when they blather about the latest adventures of E4E.

You don't need to be a genius to know that they aren't necessarily families, or that their idea of excellent schools is whatever Eva wants, or whatever Bill Gates happened to pull out of his abundant and fruitful hind quarters on any given morning.

Nonetheless, I read with interest the results of their most recent revelation in today's Daily News.

More than half of all charter schools located within public school buildings are overcrowded compared to only 16% of district schools they share space with, according to the analysis of data conducted by the pro-charter school group Families for Excellent Schools.

The group’s look at city enrollment data also shows that more than half of all charter school students attended overcrowded schools in the 2014-15 school year, compared to only 17% of students in co-located district schools.

Naturally, I'm shocked and stunned. Why aren't the public schools overcrowded? I can only conjecture that's because the city decided not to place charters in overcrowded buildings. Can you imagine? The audacity! But by counting only the buildings containing colocations, the astroturf group misleads the public, and the public are likely to not make this important distinction.

Nonetheless, I can think of several ways to alleviate the issues raised in the piece. If 16 or 17% of the public schools are overcrowded, throw the charters the hell out so that our public school students can have some damn space. What moron decided to overcrowd the schools? Said moron should be fired. And if it's Governor Andrew Cuomo, so much the better.

Families for Excellent Schools CEO Jeremiah Kitteredge says the numbers show that Mayor de Blasio is swindling students of privately run, publicly funded charter schools.

“Even with 150,000 empty seats, this administration chooses to discriminate against public charter school students by granting them less space,” said Kittredge, referring to the number of empty seats projected in a city tally of public schools from 2015.

The notion that de Blasio is giving preferential treatment to public schools, though I wish it were true, is a pants on fire lie. As I pointed out, the FES figure does not take into account public schools that do not have colocations. My school has been over 200% capacity for most of the 20 plus years I've worked there. I have very little sympathy for the largely fabricated and wholly misleading plight Mr. Kittredge bemoans. What, exactly, constitutes overcrowding in a charter? And being as charters commonly shed students without replacing them, haven't they got the means to relieve it? Why the hell don't they if they care so much?

The answer, of course, is they take as large a group as possible, keep the ones they like, and dump the ones on the got to go list. As someone who works in a school that takes everyone, from the high achievers to the alternate assessment, as someone who teaches high-needs kids who wouldn't make it into a Moskowitz Academy on a bet, I have little sympathy for the poor rich charter schools.

The piece refers back to the last revelation FES had, that there are supposedly 150,000 empty seats somewhere in the city.  I have no idea what sort of biased nonsense FES may have utilized to reach that conclusion, but if there are any empty seats, Jesus, send them to us. We have kids sitting in trailers, in converted book rooms, in gyms with basketballs bouncing off the walls, and pretty much everywhere and anywhere we can find space. How about giving our kids a break?

Let Eva Moskowitz take the 35 million bucks she raised and buy a damn building. Why the hell aren't we reading about their spring benefit in the News, the Post, or for Christ's sake in Chalkbeat NY, which writes a feature every time Moskowitz sneezes or E4E announces a bathroom break?

The complaints manufactured by FES are self-serving and ridiculous. Why are they able to play the media like a violin while our leadership sits on its hands? Perhaps because leadership is so busy fighting genuine activists they haven't got the time or inclination to fight our real enemies or reach out to make sure the real story is told.

We certainly can and should do better.

It must be great to put out a press release from so-called Families for Excellent Schools and talk about how poorly the public schools serve high-needs students. Those astroturfers just care so much. High needs kids are the ones I teach every day of my life, the ones who wouldn't get into a hedge fund backed charter school on a bet.

If you're a lucky astroturfer, some paper will put your press release out as news. That's pretty much what a Daily News article did yesterday. In fact, it did not present much of any other point of view (though mild protests from Carmen Fariña's office were later added). It appears Fariña's office has some sort of junk science VAM formula to show progress, or lack thereof, on the part of ELLs. It seems to entail the NYSESLAT exam and some other English exams, like the elementary school ELA or maybe the NY State Regents. Neither the ELA tests nor the English Regents are designed to measure language acquisition (and your humble correspondent feels it's absurd to have newcomers take these tests at all).

The fact is the new NYSESLAT test has been given precisely once. Any other test with which they compare it was substantially different, and if that's what Fariña's office is doing, well, it doesn't know what it's doing. I know this well because I administer the NYSESLAT each and every year. The new NYSESLAT, like the aforementioned exams, does not measure language acquisition.  It used to at least try, but now it's all Common Corey. For the edification of confused NYC DOE officials, as well as the CEO of so-called Families for Excellent Schools,  the purpose of ESL is to help newcomers acquire English. It is not, as some genius at DOE stated on a Powerpoint, to prepare them for core content courses (though it certainly helps).

Last year's NYSESLAT test was largely about doing close reading. This is not a language specific skill, and in fact any and all reading skills transfer with time, something so-called Families for Excellent Schools did not really account for. Nor, it appears, has the DOE. Of course, since absolutely no one mentioned in this article appears to have the remotest interest in language acquisition or what that entails, this is no surprise.

It's funny, because right now, while this article merits placement in the Daily News, ESL instruction has been cut to the bone in NY State. I happen to know the writer of this Daily News piece is aware of this, because I sent it to him personally. I'm going to send it to him again just to make sure. I'm a little curious how severe cuts in English instruction for newcomers do not merit mention, but a press release from a Moskowitz PR firm masquerading as grassroots is a big deal.

No one bothers to ask me what's going on with ELLs because I am not qualified. I only see them come into my classroom every day of my life. Yesterday I had a girl come into my classroom, speak Spanish to me and everyone in it, and act like everything was fine. My students were pretty surprised.

I took her outside and told her, in Spanish, she had to speak English in my classroom. I asked if she understood and she said she didn't. This was a first for me. I told her I would not speak Spanish with her in the classroom and that I would not answer questions addressed to me in Spanish. She found that unreasonable. I told her I couldn't speak Chinese or Korean for my other students, and that until I could translate for all, classroom business would take place in English. I offered to explain it to her mom by phone and have mom explain it to her, and she seemed to understand a little better. But just to make sure, I had a dean who speaks Spanish better than I do give her chapter and verse.

Now it's great that so-called Families for Excellent Schools are interested in ELLs. Even as I deplore their outlandish ignorance, I applaud them for their concern. Since they are such big proponents of the Got to Go List Moskowitz Academies, I'm sure they'll urge Eva to start taking in all beginner ESL students, including those SIFE students who don't know how to read and write in their first languages. Do you know how many of these kids are now in the much ballyhooed Moskowitz Academies? Exactly zero. (And it would probably be fewer if they could do anything about it.)

Personally, I'm not at all surprised that math scores are down for kids who don't speak English. I'm not at all surprised that schools with high percentages of non-English speakers have lower test scores. After all, they don't speak English. I regret that is evident to neither the DOE nor so-called Families for Excellent Schools.

I suggest Eva Moskowitz and her BFF, the CEO of so-called Families for Excellent Schools travel to China, take a bunch of tests in Chinese and share their results with us. After all, since they're so horrified by these test results I'm certain they'd do much better. And since the new plan in NY State entails teaching ESL via magic, rather than classroom time, and since this is noteworthy to neither Moskowitz  nor so-called Families for Excellent Schools, they should have no problem learning Chinese. Eva will work her magic and show her CEO pal how to be highly effective.

I don't know about you, but I'm gonna sit while I wait for that.