NYC has woken up and come to its senses. After 20 years of GOP mayors who hated us and everything we stood for, the city has elected a progressive-minded mayor, a mayor who seems to value not only working people, but also the people who professionally serve the city. I went to see him speak in Brooklyn during the campaign, heard him say so, and have no reason to doubt his word.

We have a new chancellor, Carmen Fariña, who not only taught, but taught for decades. There will be no more talk about how tenure and seniority promote mediocrity, and no more fanatical ideologues in Tweed preaching privatization. Of course, no one is perfect, and Fariña has not yet come to her senses about Common Core. But she recognizes its miserable implementation, as does everyone on earth save those who actually implemented it, Reformy John King, Merryl Tisch, and their army of private interns who do not answer to we, the people.

The New York Post is horrified. De Blasio isn't opening any more charters! De Blasio may charge Eva Moskowitz rent! Gazillionaires may have to pay more taxes to support pre-K for the children of the bootless and unhorsed! I smile at every one of Murdoch's perceived outrages. It's about time we had a mayor who was concerned with helping our children rather than comforting the comfortable. Finally the UFT President has come around to support our new mayor's pre-K plan. AFT President Randi Weingarten, who once ridiculed the program, appears to have come to her senses as well.

Now Mayor de Blasio's prime obstacle is Governor Andrew Cuomo, self-described student lobbyist, who's helped our kids tremendously by funding most schools at a lower rate than six years ago. Cuomo's vision of saving the millionaires appears woefully inadequate. When you want to actually improve things, rather than simply give the appearance of doing so, you need to find a way to pay for said improvements. It appears the mayor, unlike the governor, has actually thought this through.

So we are at an impasse. We can follow the mayor and support his vision, or we can listen to our governor, the one who was elected based on promises of going after unions, and hope for the best. It's sad that a Democrat can run on a plank like this, but Andrew Cuomo is not fundamentally a Democrat. Like Michael Bloomberg, who overturned the twice-voiced will of the people to buy himself a third term, Cuomo is a relentless and unapologetic opportunist. His goal is to be President of the United States, and if that entails taking money from DFER and their sleazy corporate allies, so be it.

I'm glad UFT leadership has come to its senses and supported the mayor, albeit a little late. It now behooves us to stand up for what's best for the kids we serve. Unfortunately, "student lobbyist" Cuomo is not responsive to the public. For example, the public now opposes Common Core by a wide margin. Rather than stand up and risk the wrath of his corporate supporters, Cuomo has created yet another panel to study what we already know. Cuomo has seen fit to include not only a member of E4E, which in no way represents teachers, but also to have an IBM executive as chair.

It's pretty clear how much Governor Cuomo values teacher voice. When Reformy John King publicly declares public school parents and teachers to be "special interests," he offers not a whisper of rebuke.

But here's the thing--John King was right. We are most certainly special interests, and our special interest is the public school children of New York. It's an abject disgrace that neither John King nor Andrew Cuomo shares that special interest. But we will not waver in advocating for better education, reasonable standards, and developmentally appropriate treatment of our children.

If Cuomo and King do not share our vision, that's a shame. But it's not their job to agree with us. It's their job to help and serve us. And it's our job to make sure they do their job.

I've been teaching for almost thirty years, and I don't know precisely when my colleagues and I became public enemy number one. But after reading Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch I'm getting a pretty good handle on why.

Corporate reformers like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family seem to believe teachers have done a disservice to kindergarteners by allowing them to blow bubbles in their milk and push trucks around on the floor. Why weren't we training them to take valuable multiple-choice exams? Why did an entire generation of Americans, including public school teachers, misdirect its energies by trying to eradicate poverty? Couldn't we just fervently ignore it, as corporate reformers have done so successfully?

In Reign of Error, Ravitch demonstrates how, by ignoring poverty, America has managed to shift blame to public schools for its consequences. That's clear when the Governor of New York declares schools with poor test scores deserve the "death penalty," and the mayor of Chicago closes 50 schools in one fell swoop.  The fact that all so-called failing schools have high percentages of high-needs kids is either attributed to coincidence or ignored  completely. Standard practice is to replace them with privately run schools that generally perform either no better or much worse. Still, no one can argue they don't place more tax money into the pockets of investors.

Reign of Error  shows us corporate reform is largely about where the money goes. Americans are led to believe teachers earn too much, and entrepreneurs like Rupert Murdoch and the Walmart family earn too little. To correct this inequity, corporate reformers work to erase collective bargaining, unionism, teacher tenure, and other outrages that have left middle-class people able to make a living. This, of course, is all done in the name of helping children.

The most trendy way to redirect public money into private hands is via charter schools. If charters don't have unions, they don't have to worry about collective bargaining. If they largely exclude learning disabled and ESL students, they not only improve their test scores, but also save a ton of money on mandated services. Charter trailblazer Geoffrey Canada, who pays himself a half-million per year, turned away an entire student cohort rather than deal with their impending scores.

Ravitch points out in detail the excellent investment opportunities charters can provide. People who have enough money to really appreciate it can get more of it before it's frittered away on the education of impoverished children. They save even more money for needy rich people by hiring less-qualified instructors, thereby cutting teacher salaries. And wealthy foreigners have literally bought green cards via investing in charters

Charters are all about choice. They therefore choose whether they're public or private depending on the circumstances. Their reps go to court to prevent audits, because in those cases they're private schools. But they happily accept government support because in those cases they're public schools. And even if they fail on test scores, the sole criterion by which corporate reformers judge schools, it makes no difference. They're still, evidently, providing the all-important choice of where our still-needy children will fail these tests.

Reign of Error shines a bright light on cyber charters, which save quite a bit of cash for eager investors. Unlike brick and mortar charters, cybers cannot jack up rents 900% for profit. But they make up for it in other ways. Cyber charters divert many millions that might otherwise be wasted on live teachers and human interaction with children. While graduation rates are abysmal, and a CREDO study found 100% of them perform worse than public schools, there is no denying their immense profitability.

On every page of Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch paints a portrait that's conspicuously absent from mainstream media. She shows us a tangled web, and paints every thread with an arrow pointing to where our tax dollars are really headed. Anyone who's interested in the true meaning of corporate reform needs to read this book. If you're already focused on what moves and motivates our educational system, it will surely sharpen that focus. If not, it will be an eye-opener.

And for the naysayers, Ravitch goes into detail about what America would do if it really wanted to help children, rather than simply test them and redirect public money. Here's hoping that school boards and mayors everywhere read this book.

Bill Gates, the world's richest man, has appointed himself our national education expert. It's pretty clear he's got the ear of Arne Duncan, who gleefully repeats whatever Gates says. If Gates says we need higher class sizes, so does Arne. If Gates says release junk science scores of individual teachers, Arne wholeheartedly concurs. If Gates says don't release them, Arne's on board with that too.

This begs the question, has anyone ever seen Arne Duncan speak while Bill Gates drinks a glass of water?

This notwithstanding, Bill Gates has determined, after having been responsible for closing scores of schools, after having decimated neighborhoods, after having privatized public schools, after having seriously cut into the power of teachers, the last bastion of vibrant unionism in these United States, that he needs to branch out. It's not enough to degrade and codify K-12 in ways his limited intellect can process. Apparently, we need to do the same in college.

Gates looks at the figures, which are all that matters. There aren't enough college graduates, determines Gates, and we must correct that. Let's get rid of all these teachers and buildings and simply have people sit on computers. Socializing is not an important part of college. Who cares about all those wasteful discussions about literature, morality, society and other such nonsense? Let's stick to the meat and potatoes. That way, we can make sure Americans get not only a one-dimensional K-12 education, based solely on test scores, but also an equally shallow college education.

Who cares whether or not the graduates end up getting jobs? That's not Bill's job. Who cares whether or not kids are raised in poverty? That's not Bill's job either. He doesn't think he can fix that problem. What he can do is bring "accountability." That means unionized teachers get fired if they don't get enough kids to pass the tests Bill's BFFs collect millions to design.

Why can't we export this model to college? Since K-12 teachers cannot be trusted to design tests, let alone grade them, why can't we use this model in college? Let's have all American students rated on standardized tests only, and graded by computers. Let's dispense with that human factor Bill can't comprehend.

Because anything Bill can't comprehend, apparently, is not worth considering.

Actually, all that talk about American education being in crisis, or left behind, or whatever they call it is abject nonsense. In fact, if you discount poverty (as Bill Gates does), American students are doing fine. If you were to address poverty (as Bill Gates does not), a whole lot more American students would perform a whole lot better.

It's a sin that we allow a clueless billionaire to toy with our national education system just as a two-year-old will toy with anything she can find. Just as we preserve things from our two-year-old, so they don't get irrevocably broken, we need to fight to preserve our schools, our legacy, our country, from this idiot savant.

This is particularly egregious as whatever is, was, or was perceived to be savant about this idiot continues to become more elusive.

There's a great piece by Texas superintendent John Kuhn suggesting that schools reflect our communities, for better or worse.  Can we improve our schools and communities? Of course we can. Should we close them and turn them over to billionaires who wouldn't want to live or study with us? Probably not. Yet that's precisely what we're doing with our schools, as we follow programs more aligned to the druthers of Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton family rather than anything based on research or demonstrated practice.

Now they have a second major Hollywood production, demonizing teachers as the source of all that afflicts our communities. There are great reasons to be suspicious of its motives, even if we ignore its ridiculous claim to be based on a true story. There are a few things I've experienced my entire working life that I'd like to mention here.

One is that teaching has never been a career for those looking to get wealthy. You have to love it or you don't last, and indeed, half of all prospective teachers are gone within five years. For most of my career, NYC was dying for teachers, ran job fairs, recruited internationally, and offered free training for anyone who'd sign up. They did this because their insistence on paying the lowest wage in the area made it very tough to recruit. And despite what you may have heard, it's no picnic being a teacher. I remember what it was like in front of 34 teenagers before I got the hang of it, and had I not done so, I'd certainly be among those who walked.

In fact, bad teachers are not roaming the earth like a plague of zombies, and we are simply not in crisis. And please, while we can tolerate GW Bush as President, or Arne Duncan as education secretary, don't lecture me on merit. Tenure exists so people like me can speak up against the abject nonsense propagated by such figures without being tossed into the street. I have seen people "counseled out" and I have seen people fired. The simple fact, though, is most people who can't hack it simply leave of their own accord.

Whatever the movie may contend, I'm not sitting around watching Rome burn, and nor are the overwhelming majority of my colleagues. Those who demonize us are no different from garden-variety bigots who target a racial group or sexual orientation to stir up hatred among those with no better use for their time. We are the ones who spend every waking day with children. We are the ones who look after them while parents work, and we are the ones who try to inspire them to find a direction in life, whether or not they pass the often ridiculous multiple choice tests imposed by the corporations who profit from them.

By publicly ridiculing our profession, by degrading working conditions, by presenting corporate fairy tales by precisely the same folks who jettisoned the economy with their insatiable avarice we are not much helping our children. In fact, Barack Obama, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Joel Klein, Rahm Emanuel and their ilk do not patronize the test-prep, high class-sized factory-like institutions they're trying to create for our children. We need to reject their indulgence in fairy-tales like "Won't Back Down" and insist our kids get what their kids get--small class sizes, individual attention, and assessment without ridiculous high-stakes tests.

Finally, we need to recognize one major consequence of degrading and insulting this profession. I teach high-needs kids exclusively, and when corporate hacks degrade teaching, they're actively trying to remove a viable path to middle class for kids like those I serve. Last year I had a former student as a student teacher. She would be great at my job. Her very existence as a teacher sends kids the message, "I did it, and so can you."

Making her into a test-prepping, drone-like, wage slave is not what she needs, not what our kids need, and not good for America. Firing her for test scores that are likely as not meaningless is good for neither her nor our children, all of whom need more, not fewer opportunities to make it in this increasingly tough job market.

In fact, no matter how much money bumbling Bill Gates gets his hands on, he will never know anything about public education or the struggles of our children. And it is we, not the billionaires, who spend every waking hour looking toward their best interests.

Last night, on Twitter, Arne Duncan congratulated the USA Women's Basketball Team for a wonderful performance. But a lot of teachers on Twitter questioned it. For one thing, how do we know they're doing well if there isn't a charter team to ensure healthy competition? And why aren't we doing this right now? Isn't this a crisis that can't wait for solutions?

Also, it's important we fire the bottom 10%, so as to ensure we are truly fielding the best team. And it's not enough that they do an excellent job. Sure, it looks like they're doing well. But how do we know they're doing well unless we give their opponents tests in reading and math twice a year and check the improvements from September to June? We really can't go by measures like whether or not they win games. What does that mean, ultimately?

Let's also make sure that the charter teams get space in the stadiums. I don't think it's fair we allow our teams to practice in courts by themselves. Lets collect a few trash cans, hollow them out, and dump them in the basement for our public teams to use. The charter teams could use the ones upstairs. And I don't want to hear that the players are only three feet tall, or 9 years old, or that they've never played before. We will accept no excuses.

Basketball training will be done by hedge-funders and billionaires who have no training or experience whatsoever about basketball. However, since they've established their success by accumulating all that money, we'll rely on their excellent judgment. We will not bother to study or test their ideas before enacting them systemwide, and we will establish blue-ribbon panels with celebrities and rich people, and not basketball players, to praise the ideas on the media. When they fail, we will close stadiums and replace entire teams.

We will, of course, start an organization called Democrats for Basketball Reform. We will travel around with suitcases full of cash to help persuade legislators. We will start a satellite group, Students for Basketball Reform, to give us the appearance of credibility. Then we will go after those darn unions, and claim they only pursue adult interests. We will show basketball players how cool it is to work without contracts, to get rid of that health insurance, to pay for their own uniforms and balls, and to work in substandard conditions. Finally, we will halve teams so as to save money, and demand equal performance. No excuses.

Because that's the way we do things in America. We have a model, and even if it proves to be utterly without merit, we must replicate it everywhere, immediately, to avert the crisis we contend to be in.

Governor One Percent, Andrew "I am the Government" Cuomo is taking yet another principled stand. You may recall his first principled stand, when he made sure the millionaires who bought and paid for him wouldn't have to continue paying that nasty millionaires tax. Now he's standing up for the millionaires once again, billionaires like Gates, Broad and the Wal-Mart family actually, in demanding that an untested, ineffectual, and very troublesome evaluation system be imposed on city teachers.

Never mind that over a quarter of the state's principals have signed a petition opposing the system. Never mind that value-added evaluation is unsupported by research. Never mind that principals who've dealt with it find it insane, unworkable, and largely incomprehensible. The important thing, in Governor One Percent's principled opinion, is that the self-appointed billionaires education experts have decided it's a good idea, and if they have that much money, how could they possibly make a mistake of any kind?

So Governor Andy, apparently, will round up the usual suspects and appoint a commission. That way, it won't look like he alone made the decision to unilaterally break the agreement he made with state unions. And, in fact, he didn't. More likely Bill Gates, or DFER instructed him what to think, and he thought it. After all, there are suitcases of money to be had for politicians whose principles are for sale.

Still there is reason in our fair state. Several people have publicly challenged the governor to include, say, public school parents or teachers, or anyone who actually uses the system the "experts" are working their magic on.  Will the governor listen? Tough to say.

But don't bet on him disappointing his 1% constituency, the folks who own him body and soul.