In California, a bunch of rich guys got together and pushed a lawsuit designed to shoot teacher tenure right smack between the eyes. After all, if you can't get the law changed, you go wherever your wallet takes you. So in the case of Vergara they've won for the moment, and those awful teachers will have fewer job protections if appeals aren't sustained.

Here in NY it's a little tougher. First of all, the arguments in California were crap to begin with. Firing more teachers will not address the conditions in America that lead children to fail in school. But it's a whole lot cheaper and more efficient to blame teachers than deal with poverty, or people who need to work multiple jobs to barely keep their heads above water. After all, how will Whitney Tilson's hedge fund profit from Walmart and McDonald's if they have to pay workers a living wage?

So here in New York, we heard a great deal from self-appointed education/ legal expert Campbell Brown about how we needed to get rid of teacher tenure. But wait--before Campbell Brown could do it, another self-appointed education/ legal expert, Mona Davids, filed a suit. So the question now becomes which one of these people is out to get us more?

It's tough to say. Brown is married to some bigshot on Students First NY, and is an ex-talking head on CNN. Davids runs something called the NY Parents Union, and vacillates between supporting charters, supporting public education, and going for the throat of working teachers. It appears the whole attacking teachers thing garners more attention this week, so that's what the NY Parents Union is doing. Who knows when they meet, or who's a member other than some unsuccessful Staten Island politician whose name I can't remember? Like Brown, she has a group, it has a name, and that's good enough for the papers.

But there's still the question of who hates working teachers more. How can this be settled? Can they wait until the first day of school, get a bushel of Jersey tomatoes, and see which one can hit the most teachers? I'd say they should save that for when they go after the Jersey teachers, but neither of them is from Jersey. Of course they could both move to Jersey and race to see who can file the suit fastest. That would suit me.

Perhaps they could have a stereotype contest. Which one of them can find the most outrageous story and manage to tar as many working teachers as possible with it? I have to give Brown the edge at this, since it's pretty much her MO. But I think Davids is a quick learner and can give Brown a run for her money if given half a chance. One of the great things about this is that you don't really have to prove anything. I regularly see in the press that the DOE agencies had already found them guilty. But few people understand that OEO is kind of like the police. The police aren't really supposed to arrest people unless they think they're guilty. But guilt is decided by a judge. In our system arbitrators judge.

I don't really care which one of them wins. I fully support tenure. Those of us who choose this profession do so because we care about children. We speak up when they're neglected, even if said neglect is committed by those who supervise us or sign our paychecks. That's our job.

And neither Brown nor Davids is any help whatsoever.

Boys and Girls High School is in trouble. For one thing, it's only graduating 40% of those boys and girls. This makes it look bad, and since there are no excuses for looking bad, there must be steps taken. The step favored by Mike Bloomberg would be to close the school and send all those boys and girls elsewhere.

This was a useful tool to Bloomberg, because once the boys and girls showed up in another building, he could then blame that building and close it too. In fact, he even closed some of the new schools he opened when they failed to produce results. Thus you have an endless stream of failing schools, you close them, open new ones, and nothing whatsoever is your fault. It's a thing of beauty.

Of course when you're closing and opening schools people notice it's not working. It's then necessary to expand the blame. Since nothing whatsoever can ever be your fault, you blame the teachers. Of course you've always blamed the teachers, but now you can take action. You attack their method of layoffs, saying you simply cannot afford to get rid of the new teachers. They are all wonderful and all the experienced teachers suck. The only way to fairly dismiss teachers is to give you absolute power to fire anyone you like, arbitrarily and capriciously. The good thing about that is if you don't get what you want, you can now blame the law.

And that's what's happening in the Vergara case. Kids can't learn because their teachers suck. It's not that they failed to study. It's not that they have learning disabilities. It's not that there's rampant poverty, and it doesn't matter that every single so-called failing school comes from an area of rampant poverty, even though it does. It's not that there are huge learning problems associated with rampant poverty, even though there are. If only we'd hired magical teachers poverty wouldn't matter at all.

This is very convenient for politicians, because it's a real pain in the ass to deal with poverty. That would entail actually helping the people they're elected to serve, and that's a pretty tough thing to do. Better to blame the teachers.

So now, in the US, we have rich people who want to stay that way. They don't want to pay more taxes to help the poor people. Instead they bring high-profile lawsuits so America believes it's the teachers failing our kids. And they really can't lose. If they win, they save big bucks by dumping the teachers who get higher salaries. And if they lose, they can continue to say you see, those teachers suck, and that's why kids aren't graduating from Boys and Girls High School.

And Eva Moskowitz can open charters, screen out the kids who she thinks will fail, and dump the kids who actually do fail. Then she gets a 100% graduation rate, and all the failing kids get dumped back into Boys and Girls High School, or some other public school that can be vilified in the press as failing. It's a win-win!

Except for the actual kids who are failing at Boys and Girls High School, because no one administering an education system has ever lifted a finger to help them.

In the wake of Vergara, corporate reformers are smelling blood in the water, and see this as the time to pounce. How else would you explain the sudden return of education expert Campbell Brown to the tabloids, and the banner article on the cover of yesterday's Post? (I'm not linking to it.)

The recipe is quite simple. Take a few cases, sensationalize them, and apply them to every member of a group. This sort of argument resonates with the public. I hate that group of people. They get too many privileges. Who the hell do they think they are wanting to sit in front of the bus?

And no, I do not see the distinction between using this line of argument against teachers or against racial or ethnic groups. I'm honestly not certain the Post, or the DOE even knows what a bad teacher is. Thus, they grab whatever they can find, blow it up to define the teacher they pick, and then display that image as representative of all teachers. That's simply ridiculous.

When demagogues like Bloomberg pack children like sardines into trailers, hallways, bathrooms and worse, these self-appointed protectors of our children are completely silent. When money-grubbing parasites establish virtual charters in which kids don't even turn on their computers, you hear crickets. When the saviors of the universe, the charter school owners, fail to take in kids with extensive special needs, when they make parents jump through hoops, when they indulge in practices that exclude those who need the most help, that's fine as long as Eva Moskowitz can be compensated at a higher rate than, say, the President of the United States.

This is only the beginning. And unfortunately, PR is one area in which the UFT is even worse than other areas. I've repeatedly asked UFT to step up and work with the press, but they tell me they're afraid it will backfire. In fact, it's tough to imagine worse PR than what we get nowadays. I can find an outrageous misrepresentation, give it to the UFT, watch them do nothing, and write about it myself. Mind you, they actually pay people to deal with the press.

When my school was in danger, I courted the press. We were covered in every major paper and even made the nightly news. Bloomberg and Klein even acknowledged us on TV. Sure, they lied and twisted the truth, but that's what demagogues do. These things can be done.

The only thing is they can't be done by timid people whose concept of doing the right thing revolves around loyalty oaths and gala luncheons. It's rather pathetic that none of the brain trust at 52 Broadway can conceive of anything better than what is, for all intents and purposes, nothing.