This week, I'm spending some time with a teacher friend who doesn't teach in New York. She's been a long-term substitute for the past two years in a small district where it is commonly accepted that full-time teaching positions are filled via nepotism and cronyism. She's been on obviously faux interviews that are conducted to achieve the appearance of a job search for any interested parties; she's been passed over for jobs that are filled by folks younger, less experienced, and less educated than herself because the folks in questions are someone's nieces or cousins. She's saddened, but hardly surprised; this kind of thing has been going on there for generations.

You hear the most remarkable things about the "Children First" crowd. For the last few days the blogosphere has be abuzz with news of Jonah Edelman's smarmy boasts about  how he tricked unions into making ridiculous deals. Edelman simply forgot to mention those dear children he cared about so much. Sure.

Now Keith Olberman tweets about uber-"reformer" Joel Klein stealing a foul ball from a kid at Yankee stadium in 2009. Can you believe that? I can. There's something about demagogues like Klein and Edelman--it's not really the alleged missions they're carrying out. That's why Edelman forgets his. It's really all about them, and how clever they are. In fact, it doesn't really matter whether Klein stole the ball from that kid or not. He's committing far more serious offenses against children each and every day.

By attacking and demeaning union, the only real way working people can have a say in the workplace, he's screwing with the lives of children in a far more serious fashion. How can teachers have pensions? Why should they have health care? How come they get sick days, and why on earth can't we fire them whenever we feel like it? That's what Klein asks, over and over, in print, on camera, and everywhere.

The oddest thing is, here in America, that message resonates, with the aid of propaganda outlets like Fox and the NY Post. Yet by attacking these few things teachers have held onto, after years of working for lower salaries than their peers, Klein and his ilk seek to deprive our children of something far more serious than a baseball--by attacking working teachers, he sentences our children to lives without security, lives as wage-slaves, lives ripped out of Orwell's visions. He'd sentence our children to lives, essentially, without much of a future.

Klein can have the damn ball, if he wants it that badly. But we've got to keep him far away from our kids.

Thanks to Reality Based Educator

Jonah Edelman, taped giving a candid assessment of his dealings with unions, has apologized, in his fashion, to readers of Fred Klonsky's blog. I'm one of them, and I found it elegant that it was presented without comment. Perhaps it's more accurate to call it prescient, since dozens of comments made it unnecessary for Klonsky to say a thing. Here's a little taste of Edelman's mea culpa:

It left children mostly out of the equation when helping children succeed is my mission in life...

This is very telling. Does anyone really forget their "mission in life," even for a moment? Do I forget that I need to stand up for the middle class, so my daughter can be part of it one day? Never ever.

It could cause viewers to wrongly conclude that I’m against unions...

Which, of course, he is not. He simply wants to extract every ounce of power they have, and render them powerless and irrelevant, as evidenced in his joyous conclusion that he's deprived them of the ability to strike.

Senate Bill 7 will make performance rather than seniority the basis for granting tenure...

And we are to trust Edelman and his ilk to make such determinations, I suppose. No more teachers like me, who speak up, will be tolerated in Chicago. Doing so would likely render them "ineffective." Having fewer teachers speak out against the nonsense Edelman and his buddies advocate, incidentally, would certainly not help the kids he claims to care so much for. (You know, the ones who are his "mission in life," that he somehow forgot to mention.)

Before the dismissal process can proceed, based on advocacy by teachers’ unions, with which I again wholeheartedly agreed, a second evaluator must corroborate that dismissal is warranted. 

I'm thinking Edelman's girlfriend, mother, or possibly Bill Gates.

I was wrong to state that the teachers’ unions “gave” on teacher effectiveness provisions when the reality is that, indeed, there were long, productive negotiations that led to a better outcome than would have occurred without them.

Here, Edelman admits to making statements that have no basis in objective reality. Was he doing so then, is he doing so now, or is that simply what he does all the time?

Third, I was wrong to make assumptions or comments about the unions’ political strategy. In future presentations, whether on video or not, I will refrain from supposing why a particular party made a particular decision.

Having put my foot in my mouth once, I will try very hard not to do so again.

I deeply regret what I perceived in watching myself as an arrogance in my tone.

The truth hurts.

I was raised to be humble and respectful and reared on stories of my grandfather and grandmother’s service within the African-American community in their small South Carolina town, 

I honestly can't say what motivated Edelman to throw that in, or what he was trying to sell to whom. But here's the thing. We got to view a "reformer" raw and unedited. The denial only serves to one conclusion, which Klonsky provides in a nutshell:

It is not unusual for an immature young man, brought up in a world of privilege and means, to behave this way. It happens.

After all, once you strip away all the self-important nonsense in his Aspen presentation, everything Edelman says in the tape is repeated in the apology. It was all true.

Those of us who've been watching closely know precisely what "reformers" have to offer. There is now hard evidence of this, in the form of Edelman's widely available video. Let's keep up our vigilance.

 And for goodness sake, let's tell our leaders to do the same, and stop putting things "on the table" for demagogues like Edelman to joyously rip to shreds.

There's not a whole lot to add to the video below. Jonah Edelman smugly discusses how he managed to snooker the teacher unions into accepting deals clearly not in their interest. It shows, yet again, how Obama's people, specifically Rahm Emannuel and Arne Duncan, are not friends of people who need to work for a living.

Most importantly, it shows "reformers" are not to be trusted. Edelman boasts of how his people were able to write the "fine print" on this deal, and how union reps dropped the ball and failed to exert due diligence. The best we can hope from a hard lesson like this is that union leadership wake up and pay close attention.  

See more on this at Schools Matter and much more at Fred Klonsky's Blog.

It's refreshing to see someone who will stand up for our middle class. As President Obama places Social Security and Medicare "on the table," we really need someone to champion us. As Sanders points out, candidate Obama ran promising not to cut it, and now appears to be reversing several key promises he made to us in his campaign.

I've heard Republicans say that everything is on the table except taxes. That's insane. We are in trouble because GW cut off our tax base to make things easier for billionaires. It's time they started paying their fair share. It's time we stopped cutting seniors, working people, and our children so that we could ease the all-important tax bill of Steve Forbes. And it's time we started voting in candidates like Bernie Sanders, who speak the truth and work for us.







Thanks to RP.

NY Daily News reveals that tenure is being withheld more than it used to be. I believe tenure ought to mean something, so on the face of it, that's not a bad thing. However, it appears the city is not doing its job. I know, for example, that Long Island City High School simply denied tenure to all applicants, and they're not alone.

I've also spoken with teachers who tell me they are not regularly observed, and that tenure decisions are based on a single unannounced observation that took place 8 months into the year. The News story tells similar tales.

It's remarkable that teachers are so regularly and viciously trashed in the media while virtually no attention is given to negligent supervisors. It's their job, in fact, to observe and mentor new teachers. New teachers should also be mentored by colleagues, and I know of many cases where that is ignored. I rarely got any meaningful assistance when I was starting out, and I'm certain many of my colleagues have similar experiences.

There's also the nonsense of test scores being used to evaluate new teachers. Given the idiotic but time-honored tradition of giving new teachers the least desirable and most difficult classes, this will hurt a lot of them.

Despite a statement from some DOE rep in the News, public school tenure certainly does not mean employment for life. It simply means the DOE must show just cause for termination. In a culture where giving prizes to kids, bringing plants to school, using school fax machines or photographing school clocks can be used to charge teachers, we need protection. If the city persists in bringing charges for idiotic reasons, failure is precisely what they deserve, and I wouldn't have it otherwise. In a culture full of administrative corruption, we need to be able to speak out--tenure allows us to be a check on Mayor4Life's nearly limitless power.

Not everyone should receive tenure. If, in fact, people can't do the job, they ought not to be doing it. But it behooves administrators to provide training and support. If they don't do it (and I've personally seen many who don't, or simply go through the motions of pretending), then they, not teachers, ought to be denied tenure, brought up on charges, or sent to do jobs more appropriate to their talents, or lack thereof.

Joel Klein, who blithely observed scandal upon scandal for Mayor Bloomberg, has been tapped by Rupert Murdoch to oversee his own scandal. It's about time we saw Klein utilized for something he actually knows about. Wasn't it Klein who oversaw his no-bid contracts result in children freezing on street corners, while waiting for buses that never came? And didn't Klein tirelessly plug the achievements on state tests that proved to be nothing whatsoever after revelations in 2010 that they'd been dumbed down?

Joel Klein brought accountability to students, making sure they could pass tests before graduation. Diana Senechal took one of these tests, marked A, B, C, D in a pattern without reading the questions, and passed.  Klein bravely fought to fire teachers, as nothing that occurred under his tenure was ever his fault. He presided over the closure of almost every high school in the Bronx, contending they were failures. None, of course, were failures on his part. That's what Klein called "accountability."

Klein spent years at the job, dispensing favored treatment to people like Eva Moskowitz, and setting up a two-tier system that ensured Eva's students were better treated than the overwhelming majority of kids attending city schools. He took almost a billion dollars to reduce class sizes, and through innovative management techniques, managed to make them go up just about everywhere.

So, if a scandal's brewing, Klein's your guy, Rupert. He's seen scandal from just about every angle there is. Only one thing, though--making things better for Rupert Murdoch is not necessarily the same as problem-solving. Klein's image was in the toilet when he resigned. I'm not remotely certain he's the guy to rehabilitate the image of a propaganda king.

This summer is very odd for me, in that I've actually got more time than I know what to do with. I turned on the History Channel, which I never do, and came across this very cool show called, of all things, Pawn Stars. Then I found three seasons of it on Netflix, and I've watched maybe eight episodes.

It's really interesting seeing the things people bring in, what they are worth, and then watching people haggle over it. The haggling makes it more interesting than the staid Antiques Roadshow on PBS.

So if you're stuck home, as I am, on call to drive family members around, NYC Educator gives two thumbs up to Pawn Stars.

Have you got any guilty summer pleasures? Please share them in the comments!

Probably the last thing you want to think about right now, especially if you're not a principal (or maybe if you are a principal, actually), is your school's budget for the upcoming year. Pretty much all the budgets are going to be ugly. Your school may see excessing, attrition, copying limits (OH GOD, ANYTHING BUT THAT), and more. Nevertheless, there's two pieces of budgeting news of which you may want to be aware, if you like to be aware of this kind of thing.

I've heard quite a bit of talk about getting a "seat at the table," most of it from the UFT. For example, we decided to partner with Bill Gates to study teacher evaluation via testing, and now "value-added" is all the rage. Gates endorses it, it was widely placed into practice before this study concluded, and teachers have lost jobs based on various flawed iterations of this system.

I recall the NEA speaking out against the nonsense propagated by Gates and Duncan, and was therefore shocked that they've apparently decided to not only endorse the Obama/ Duncan team, but also to support some undefined teacher evaluation program that appears not to even exist.

Apparently, the allure of Obama has something to do with GOP candidates being even worse. I'll acknowledge that's a strong possibility, but it provides slim justification for an endorsement. In fact, at this point, an endorsement is a wink, a nod, and an ironclad agreement that no matter how his administration ignores, disrespects, slanders and vilifies us, he has our vote. That's an egregious error. UFT withheld endorsement of faux-Democrat Cuomo, and I hope AFT will do the same for President Hopey-Changey.

As for judging teachers via student achievement, the NEA's decision is a decidedly mixed bag.

...the union also made clear that it continued to oppose the use of existing standardized test scores to judge teachers, a core part of the federally backed teacher evaluation overhauls already under way in at least 15 states. 

This is a good decision. Everything I read suggests that there is no validity to any form of "value-added" currently being utilized. There is, then, the problem of how the hell to use it without any apparent system that's remotely effective. When and if they find one, though, the NEA has come to a very peculiar determination of how it should be used:

Some teachers also balked at another section of the policy — the proposal that failing teachers be given only one year to improve, instead of the standard two. But in the end a clear majority voted yes. 

How on earth can they come to that conclusion based on tests that do not, by their own admission, even exist?  And why do we need a union to help us get rid of so-called "failing" teachers? We know, for example, that "failing" schools simply means schools full of high-needs students, like Jamaica High School. On a smaller scale, couldn't teachers have more high-needs kids and consequently be determined failing, through no fault of their own?

It's time we stopped accepting baseless and unfounded labels. Having a "seat at the table" is absurd if not only no one is listening, but we ourselves also buy into unfounded assumptions. I'm reminded of Michael Moore's assertion that it's absurd to put "everything on the table," in the video below.

We need to deal in objective reality, even if it eludes the billionaires and hedge-funders who've taken over the education of our children. As Moore so ably points out, things that make no sense whatsoever do not even merit discussion (let alone endorsement).

Biden suggests we should vote for him because he, and Obama, and Duncan are not Scott Walker. He says they should work with us, not against us. And he's right, of course.

Why, then, do they applaud Hurricane Katrina for bringing us more charter schools?  Why do they cheer when the entire teaching staff of a Rhode Island school is fired? Why do they allow Duncan to use his plainly failed Renaissance 2010 program as a template for America? And how on earth can they take marching orders from Bill Gates rather than we, the people?

NEA is contemplating an early endorsement of President Obama. I hope they decline. During the last campaign, Obama promised NEA to do things with us, not to us. He's broken that promise, and repeatedly. He fooled me once. Will he fool the NEA twice?

I hope not. If we support people who stab us in the back, who take orders from billionaires, who stab us in the front, we can expect and deserve only more of the same.

On this Independence Day, let's not only celebrate; let's also declare ourselves free of politicians who do not support us, be they Democrats, Republicans, or whatever.

Update: Fred Klonsky reports the NEA has endorsed Obama. 

Michelle Rhee tirelessly pushes her group, Students First. We care. Teachers don't.

Apparently, though, while they try to appear neutral on the whole abolishing collective bargaining and firing teachers without just cause thing, they privately push it. In fact, this piece says they actually write the laws that hurt teachers.

In the United States, oil companies write energy legislation, pharmacy companies write Medicare reform. Teachers, being unionized, can't write education laws, so those who'd break their unions do.

Barack Obama said he'd get a pair of comfortable shoes and walk with unions when they were under attack. Oddly, in the presidential debates, he called Rhee a great gal or something.

If the President actually cares about working people, here's the perfect opportunity for him to reconsider.  He can find those shoes, or continue to support demagogues like Rhee who work full-time trying to hurt working people, the people the students they claim to care so much about will grow up and become.

Matthew Yglesias wonders whether we're all home run hitters. Some say those who hit more home runs are more valuable, and should get more money, simple as that. Only it's not home runs he's focusing on--it's test scores.

For years I've listened to people making such comparisons. They'd fire you in the NFL if you didn't score touchdowns, or whatever guys in the NFL do, so why shouldn't they fire teachers? Oddly, though, the NFL never had to recruit via subway ads, or pay people to take courses, or run various 6-week courses showing you how to be a football player. For most of my career, in fact, the low-paying Board of Education was unable to find enough people to actually do the job. And it wasn't, despite popular sentiment, because the job was too easy.

Now, of course, things are different. The economy is in the crapper and our job looks so attractive that virtually every day hedge fund managers, horrified there is still a middle class, vilify us while reveling in how profitable their Walmart and McDonald's stocks are. Why can't teachers be compensated like people at McDonald's?

And why do kids fail tests? The tabloids, Michelle Rhee and Bill Gates proclaim it must be the teachers. After all, KIPP works miracles with these kids, getting incredible results with the half of them who don't drop out and return to public schools. But in public schools, when kids drop out, they don't return to KIPP! Therefore public schools are terrible.

Most importantly, teachers do much more than test prep. It's very frustrating to me because it's my job to teach newcomers English, and the test they're required to take, the NYS English Regents, does not measure that at all. I've actually been pretty good at making them pass it, but I'm 100% certain the skill of passing the Regents exam translates to absolutely zero of the skills they actually need. As for college readiness, kids who don't know English will certainly be taking remedial courses to catch up. I know because I've taught them, and in fact I could teach kids what they need rather than prepping them for a test that's largely impractical.

Learning a language can be a lot of fun, as conversation, discussion, and projects can be very stimulating. Test prep sucks. But I will do it if my kids need it. And while we all like money, that, in fact, is what motivates teachers. I can't necessarily make a kid who came from China two months ago write enough to pass the English Regents. That's not my fault, or my school's fault. There are a million variables that cause kids to fail tests. Teachers do what we can, but with real income having gone nowhere since 1983, with parents working round the clock just to keep up, with Democrats no different than Republicans and a disappearing middle class, you aren't going to see an amazing rise in test scores anytime soon.  Unless, of course, you dumb down the tests like New York did when Mayor4Life proclaimed himself a genius and bought himself an illegal third term as a reward.

Yes, we are a team. But teachers are just part of it. And until folks like Barack Obama and Andrew Cuomo start working with the team rather than trying to figure how to best dismantle that pesky middle class and appease billionaires, we won't see that uptick in test scores they publicly claim to care about, the one they use as a hammer against teachers, the last remaining vestige of vibrant unionism in this increasingly corporate entity we call the United States of America.

I do my part. I stand up for working people in many ways, as do thousands of my colleagues. What we really need, though, are millions more standing with us. Because until we pass that test, the ones Bill Gates publicly complains about will be as meaningless as the ones NY State makes my poor ESL students take.

I did a bit of shopping on my first day of summer vacation yesterday, and while chatting with the salesgirl, I mentioned that I was a teacher. She asked if I was on summer vacation, and I said that I was. She laughed, saying, "My mom always told me I should be a teacher so I'd get my summers off. I couldn't handle the kids, though, no way."

It must be great to be Dennis Walcott. You ride around the city in a limo and the New York Times writes puff pieces about what a great guy you are. You've changed the tone, apparently. People like you.

One of the great things about being a New York Times reporter is you need not ask a single teacher about the chancellor, and indeed, this reporter didn't even pretend. The extreme fear and loathing that I see and hear about every day has no place in this piece, and the reporter shows not the remotest awareness of it.

Walcott, who ran around the city insisting that layoffs were necessary in the face of a 3.2 billion dollar surplus (another little tidbit that escaped this reporter), gets credit for coming to an agreement with the UFT. There's no hint whatsoever that he did so to give Mayor4Life an opportunity to save face and back away from the preposterous claims both he and Walcott spouted incessantly.

Nor is there any mention of the fact that retiring teachers will not be replaced, leading to 8,000 fewer teachers over the past three years. It must be great to be a New York Times reporter, able to spout out a piece that so blatantly glosses over reality.

Me, I have to work for a living. (But not today. I wish all my colleagues out there a happy and restful summer!)

One does not become an education blogger in New York City without having the stomach for some depressing stories. Today, for example, I was all set to write a happy-go-lucky "Hey, it's the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL!!!!!!!" post and wish you all a happy summer vacation. But that was before I switched on the news in the wee hours of the morning (for the last time until September, I do hope) and heard this story.

You see, the graduating class of Performance Conservatory High School in the Bronx (all 23 of them, which I imagine is a problem in and of itself) was short 9 of its members yesterday. These 9 members were informed that they would not be graduating yesterday morning. How did this happen? Bureaucratic incompetence? Apathy or ignorance on the part of guidance and administration? We don't know yet, and naturally an investigation is pending. But as a teacher, I have to admit that I'm just as confused as the kids involved. One young lady said she had 48 credits and 5 Regents exams, which, to me, sounds like she met the graduation requirements.

This would be bad enough if it had happened in, say, April. If some kind of mix-up had transpired a couple of months ago, when schools are supposed to be combing through graduation requirements, it would have been fixable in plenty of time. Assuming the school is mistaken now, they've ruined these kids' chances at a memorable and enjoyable high school graduation ceremony for nothing, including the class valedictorian who should be spending his summer thinking about his scholarship to Boston College. Instead, apparently, he'll be in summer school.

This story would be a good one to keep in mind when school "failure" is blamed on teachers. No one here is accusing teachers of having taught poorly or lacked caring for their students. Yet these students' futures are sidelined all the same. The principal of Performance Conservatory didn't even attend the graduation. That's a failure of leadership if ever I heard one.

Well, happy summer vacation anyway, y'all. I'll come back on Thursday, I hope, with a more upbeat post in which I embrace the coming weeks of vacation with gusto. I'm not teaching summer school, so there's some time off for me on the horizon, but no matter what your plans, make your last day today a great one for yourself and your kids.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott, in his infinite wisdom, has decreed that today will be a full teaching day. Now don't get me wrong--I actually like to teach better than most anything else my job entails. But there's a time and place for everything.

Call me madcap, but in my view, it's better to teach before the final exams have been given and final grades have gone in. After those things happen, kids, being more perceptive than Chancellor Walcott thinks they are, tend to get the notion that any further classes are relatively meaningless. In fact, a great many of them simply don't bother to show up at all. I'm not the sort of teacher who will change a kid's grade for absence on a day holding relatively little meaning, and I'm happy to say I can't picture a colleague who feels otherwise.

So why do we have this teaching day? It's one of the remnants of the 2005 contract. After the August punishment days were added, a lot of people did not much care for them. I believe Randi Weingarten negotiated a change. It was, apparently, very important that we kept these two pointless days, so they were moved to June.

I'm ready to teach if I have to. But I have a strong feeling I'm gonna be very lonely. I think a lot of teachers will be. Think of the money we could save in electricity if we didn't have to open the schools two days a year. Maybe we could replace some of the 7,500 teachers Mayor4Life has quietly lost to attrition these last three years.

Is it, or isn't it?

Obviously, averting layoffs is a good thing. No one can argue with that, except perhaps Mayor4Life and his minions. In fact, it's probably good for him too, as layoffs would prove yet another PR disaster. Should we allow him to endure that at the expense of the teachers who'd be sitting on pins and needles waiting to be called back? That's a tough call. I've lost my teaching job several times, excessed when there was no ATR to fall into, and I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

Now if this simply called for ATRs to be placed in regular teaching positions, that would be a no-brainer. But Gotham Schools says otherwise:

The second concession is that teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve, or ATR, will be redeployed to fill substitute teaching positions, which are currently filled by teachers who work on a per diem basis. The daily rate for substitutes is approximately $180, according to the city aide. That money would be saved because the ATR, a pool of teachers without full time positions who remain on payroll, would be able to replace those spots. Under the agreement, each week teachers from ATRs can be sent to a different school in their district.

It's that last sentence that's got me nervous. Given the history of the DOE, I fully expect them to consciously and methodically work on making these 1,200 teachers as miserable as they can. This week you're here, next week you're there, no long-term connections with anyone, no being a role model for kids on any regular basis--in essence, you are not really a teacher.

I cannot describe how miserable I would be under such an arrangement, and it's hard to know how anyone could vote to put teachers through this. On the other hand, would voting against it entail voting for 4,000 layoffs? The UFT is going to put it to the DA on Tuesday, yet no one has seen any document containing precise details.

The results of the vote are a foregone conclusion--it will pass by a massive margin.

Nonetheless, I want to hear from all comers, pro or con.

What do you think?

I recently had the dubious pleasure of meeting an individual whose job it is to go to closing schools and advise the teachers how to better do their jobs. One teacher I spoke to told me he comes in, walks around, looks at kids' notebooks, and then chides him because the kids don't have enough aims in them. Or he may comment on how much litter there is on the floor. Nonetheless, nothing of any practical assistance is forthcoming from this individual.

So I was surprised to hear him tell someone, "You know, I go into these schools, and they don't appreciate anything. This is why they're in trouble. But they just don't want to hear it."

Actually, I don't blame them. This person's advice is of no value whatsoever. Unless the UFT/ NAACP lawsuit is successful, their schools are toast. This person offers them no way out, and is simply placed there so Bloomberg can pretend he's offering help. I know for a fact that if they really wanted improvement, I (for example) could offer much better advice than this guy, who has considerably less teaching experience than I do.

And the fact is they are most certainly not in trouble for not following his advice, for having too few aims in their notebooks, or for having to much paper on the floor. They're in trouble because they were overloaded with too many special needs kids, because the ESL students need to learn English before they can pass Regents exams, and because kids with learning disabilities need time to overcome them. They're in trouble because Bloomberg's new schools don't often take these kids in the same proportions, and when they do they're just as likely to close as the comprehensive high schools Bloomberg hates so much. It seems to me he's closed almost every high school in the Bronx. If they were all that bad, and he couldn't improve them, what does that suggest about Mayor4Life?

And what does it suggest that he pays pedantic, pompous windbags to traipse about closing schools and offer useless unsolicited advice? It's sad that the man who chose Joel Klein and Cathie Black wouldn't recognize good advice if someone were beating him over the head with it, but there you are.

I thought, when a heard a math teacher from my school ranting white with rage about a question on the algebra Regents, that this was an isolated incident. This particular teacher was so incensed that he was putting together a PowerPoint breaking out every single thing wrong with the question and showing it to his colleagues, all of whom were shaking their heads sadly. Yes, I thought this was an isolated incident, but I am wrong. (Even if you're not a math teacher, click over to take a quick peek at the post from JD2718; it's short and you'll get the point.)

Mayor Bloomberg wants city workers to pay him thirty million a month to refrain from firing teachers and closing firehouses. While there seems to be a fund that can cover it, it doesn't seem like the best idea ever. For one thing, what happens at the end of the year? It's fairly obvious that Bloomberg will dredge up some new slimeball senator to kill seniority rights and try to fire us all over again.

Last year, of course, he pretended to avoid utterly unnecessary layoffs by unilaterally announcing teachers would not get the raise he granted to all other city workers. This year, he's claiming there's a fiscal crisis while he sits on a 3 billion dollar surplus, a one billion dollar rainy day fund, and a few hundred million that he disappeared from the DOE. There is no reason whatsoever to fire a single teacher and the mayor is simply putting a gun to our head.

It appears the UFT President wishes to revive this deal. That's a slippery slope, and ought to be undertaken with extreme caution. Other unions are demanding a 2.5 year no layoff pledge to do so. That would get us well into Mayor4Life's fourth term. Bloomberg is wildly unpopular, and the scholastic achievements he's claimed have disappeared into the dust of NY State Exams Past, so it's possible even another hundred mil of his loose change may not buy him that.

Of course he needs to renounce his support of killing seniority so as to subvert the contract to which he agreed, and also to give teachers the raise he gave everyone else. After all, when the pattern is a piece of crap, he always insists we take it or give him the sun, moon and stars to better it.

And we need these agreements in writing, with express provisions that Bloomberg go to prison and personally finance them anyway if he once again lies to us. There must be no loopholes, and there must be no good faith, as he has shown none over the interminable decade he has owned New York City.

After we secure these agreements, we can talk. Before that, we can inform the public of his rampant hypocrisy. And then, maybe we can impeach him over his no-bid contracts that leave children to freeze waiting for buses that don't come, and the 600 million he lost to his no-bid buds at CityTime. Maybe we can finally start a worthwhile trend.

The cartoon at left (from Jim Morin, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Miami Herald) made me laugh without laughing, if you know what I mean. "You don't have a plan!" is a popular straw man argument that one side can use against another when one side simply doesn't like the other's plan or finds it to clash with pre-established beliefs (or talking points). Just as Congressional Republicans like to accuse Democrats, including President Obama (who has put forth a deficit reduction plan), of not having a plan, so Mayor Bloomberg seems to think that his opponents don't have a realistic plan for averting teacher layoffs. Well, we here at NYC Educator have some news for the Mayor: We have a plan.

That's what some Republicans want, and it wouldn't surprise me at all to see Democrats chiming in any moment now. Employers would love to put kids to work at any and all hours, and the hell with school and all that other nonsense. If it weren't for all this education crap, they'd be ensured of an extremely low-paid work force with even less hope for advancement than there already is now.

Last Friday I proctored an English Regents exam and the young woman in the seat closest to the door kept falling asleep. I had to keep asking her if she was OK, and eventually sent her out to wash her face and try to wake up. I asked her what the matter was and she told me she'd been working until 3 the previous morning. I told her her boss belonged in jail.

She told me she worked in a catering hall. When I asked how old she was she told me she was 18. So I suppose her employer is not criminally liable. However, if this dirtbag could hire 16-year-old high school students instead of waiting until they're 18, I have no doubt the girl's younger friends would be joining her.

Of course the girl's judgment is poor. But she's a kid, and I don't expect sterling decisions from teenagers. Her employer ought to know better. Parents ought to know better as well.

Given the way this country treats education, it seems a national goal is to make sure no one knows better, except the billionaires who benefit from the exploitation of our children.

Just read a blog post from a teacher complaining about a new contract that offers a 1% salary reduction. The blogger followed up with a request to give to his classroom via Donors Choose, the outfit that offered bribes to those who'd sit through Waiting for Superman,  a propaganda film that enabled and encouraged things like his own salary reduction,  not to mention giving up public school space to charter privateers like Geoffrey Canada and Eva Moskowitz.

I will not give a dime to Donors Choose, no matter what. To demonstrate it's not due to my inherent cheapness, I'll make a small donation to Class Size Matters instead.

If you would like to support a truly worthy cause, feel free to do the same.

There's now a push for a parent trigger law in New York. This law was passed in California in an effort to turn an elementary school into a charter.

The Parent Trigger was conceived by a group called Parent Revolution, formerly known as the Los Angeles Parents Union. It's no secret that the organization was founded by the Green Dot charter school chain, though occasionally there's a halfhearted effort to portray Parent Revolution as a “grassroots” parents' group.

And State Senator Gloria Romero, who sponsored the legislation in California, scored herself a nice gig with Democrats for Education Reform, after voters rejected her bid to become Superintendent of Public Instruction. It must be great to take all that "reform" money and run around creating even more faux-grassroots organizations, like "Educators4Excellence."

I've long found Green Dot and its outspoken founder to be obnoxious and disingenuous. Steve Barr claims teachers drop tenure to work for him, the Green Dot website proclaims its teachers have neither tenure nor seniority rights, yet I've repeatedly seen UFT sources state that its teachers had "just cause" protection. A prominent "reform" voice once told me that GD teachers were "counseled out" when there were problems. I've repeatedly asked union sources and journalists how many GD teachers went through its "just cause" process, and how many teacher jobs were preserved as a result. I've never gotten an answer.

The UFT is partners with a Green Dot school, and while it may have precluded Barr taking over a city school, as he did in LA, it's hard to see how this organization advances the interests of working people (you know, the kind our kids grow up to become). This parent trigger thing just looks like one more "reform" effort to close and privatize even more schools.

This does not help us or our kids (though I never deluded myself Green Dot had any such goal to begin with). Nonetheless, this is one heck of a thank you for our union bringing them to the Big Apple.

Nice if you can get it, and that's precisely what Mayor4Life Bloomberg is demanding from city workers. Basically, you give me 30 million a month, more than I would have saved by firing all those teachers, and I won't fire all those teachers.

Yet nowhere in the article does it mention the actual emergency which necessitated all those firings, to wit, a 3.2 billion dollar surplus. Last year, you probably recall, the mayor dropped the firings by unilaterally canceling the 8% pattern raise all other city workers got for teachers. I'm still not clear how that's okay with PERB, which insists on the pattern for all whenever it's such a stinker no one wants it. In 2005 the UFT agreed to draconian concessions to get a compensation increase that didn't even keep up with cost of living.

The real problem is this--if we give Bloomberg that money, it will not be enough, just as unilaterally canceling teacher raises was not enough. Next year, there will be another crisis. Perhaps the surplus will only be one or two billion, and we'll really need to cut back.  Bloomberg will roll out the LIFO nonsense again, and do his darndest to circumvent the contract he and the Tweedies agreed to. He'll find some other stooge in the Senate to demand we kill seniority protections only for teachers, and only for teachers in New York City, and he'll claim that's the magic bullet to force the improvements he hasn't been able to make over this long, long decade.

Do we want to even consider giving Bloomberg this money? Only if we can preclude a repeat of all this nonsense next year, and the year after. Bloomberg needs a face-saving out for his idiotic and longstanding contention that teachers need to be fired.  That's why it's a good thing they haven't given it up yet.

Let's make him pay dearly for any way out, and let's not give him another in come next year.

It appears the much-touted "transformation model," much beloved by Arnie Duncan, Mayor Mike and President Hopey-Changey, has failed to turn around the troubled Central Falls High School. The first approach, you may recall, was to fire all the teachers.  Education Secretary Duncan "applauded" that action. (Will someone remind me what the heck I was thinking when I voted for Barack Obama?)

Personally, I'm shocked that the 75% of Central Falls students receiving free lunch are not suddenly affluent. I was also certain that the 22% receiving ESL instruction would suddenly achieve native fluency.  How could that have failed?  There is, of course, the possibility that the reason kids are failing has something to do with the kids themselves, with poverty, with learning disabilities, or with other factors I cannot conceive of. However, if that were the case, surely educational experts like Bill Gates and Arne Duncan would have acknowledged them.

As they did not, it's pretty clear to me that these factors are irrelevant, and that failure must be met head on with a drastic and draconian solution that makes no sense whatsoever. After all, that's what they do in public schools, and both Arne and Obama thoroughly endorse such actions, or in fact any actions Bill Gates deems necessary. It's fairly obvious the  only workable solution is to close the White House and replace 50% of qualified employees. Let's replace Obama with Ralph Nader, who has a proven record of accomplishment. We can replace Duncan with Diane Ravitch, or Linda Darling Hammond, or Leonie Haimson, or pretty much anyone who isn't insane.

Sure, you say, these people aren't elected. Well, neither is Bill Gates, Eva Moskowitz, or Michelle Rhee. In fact, Rhee pretty much brought down the elected official who selected her.

One of the most frustrating things about my last year at my old school was the problem of "change for the sake of change." I worked in a school that was excellent by any measure--test scores were up, parents were happy, students were achieving and felt safe and happy. So many of the teachers at my school were never sure why the place had to be reinvented from the ground up when our new principal came, and this feeling that changes were being made simply so the new principal could assert the new authority that came with the job never went away.

I marvel that Joel Klein gets major publication to post the nonsense he writes, but being a corporate-backed celebrity, one can place op-eds fairly easily. This week, Joel is amazed that candidates backed by billionaires are appointed with such regularity. What a shock, to see money and power working hand in hand.

Joel, of course, left his post to make millions from Rupert Murdoch, who cares so deeply about schoolchildren he's backed every move to destroy the middle class their parents hope they will enter. His company's most recent foray is the receipt of a 27 million no-bid contract to replicate ARIS, the crappy boondoggle of a computer program that Klein managed to acquire for NYC for over three times the price.

Klein praises KIPP, amazed at how successful it is with the kids who complete the program. He can't be bothered figuring how many kids drop out beforehand. Apparently, they've eliminated the achievement gap, that same gap he himself claimed to have eliminated before NY admitted it had dumbed down the tests on which Klein based the claim.

Klein then goes on to make his standard attack on lifetime tenure, failing to note there is no such thing and that teachers are routinely brought up on charges. Klein forgets his failures to convict teachers for such things as giving watches to kids, bringing plants to school, or using DOE fax machines to report malfeasance, all of which occurred under his watch. He then attacks pensions, as he always does, failing to note that he himself took one, to supplement the millions he gets from Murdoch.

But mostly, he fails to notice that absolutely nothing he did as chancellor actually improved the New York City school system he ran for eight interminable years. And apparently, the fact that none of his "reformer" colleagues have done anything to better the lives of kids is not worthy of note either.

But that's all in a day's work when Rupert Murdoch puts you on the gravy train.

(Picture from NYC Public School Parents Blog)

 I have no idea, but here you can see 6th grader Sierra Hull playing mandolin with Alison Krauss.  If you haven't heard Alison Krauss yet, well, what are you waiting for?

...to a McDonald's play area. Here's what one parent found:

As Chancellor, I want the best for our kids. That's why I'm closing their schools, and allowing charters to take over. After all, charters are better than public schools 17% of the time, so it's crucial we give our kids the chance to enroll in a grueling, dehumanizing lottery process in which they have a small chance of getting into one of these schools. That way, if they do, they have a 17% chance of getting a superior education. Me, I sent my kids to private schools until high school, because I don't take chances with my own kids.

In any case, I'd like to give the rest of you the opportunity to take that crapshot. I figure if 20% actually get into the charters, that 3.4% of your kids will have better schools. But consider this--if I can double the number of charters, 6.8% of your kids will have better schools. Perhaps one day I'll be remembered as the chancellor who managed to get 3.4% more kids better schools.

Let me tell you, I don't take this responsibility lightly. I want to close all the public schools the failing public schools because it's very important to me to raise the number of privately-run charters improve education for that 3.4% all children. We do meticulous research before taking the drastic step of closing a school, and we stand by our findings. We don't care how many people get up and protest at the hearings on closings, and we don't worry about what people say to us at the PEP meetings when we allow public comment.  Mayor Bloomberg knows best, and we all know that he'd fire us if we disagreed with his findings.

Sure, 78% of public school parents think we're going the wrong way. But I ask you, is that a reason to change horses mid-stream? If it means my job? What are you, nuts?  No one wants to have their jobs on the line. That's why that pain-in-the-ass union is always complaining. Sure, some Gloomy Guses ask why we want to fire teachers, reducing the number of working teachers by 6,000, when we're sitting on a 3.2 billion dollar surplus.

That's simply because it's better to have kids in a class of 140 with a good teacher than a class of 25 with a mediocre one. And Mayor Bloomberg and I know what a good teacher is. A good teacher is a low-paid, non-unionized, constantly terrified for her very livelihood trained professional who knows how to look the other way when we commit outrageous violations train her students for a fuller and more rewarding life. And believe me, with the money we save on losing the 6,000 teachers this year, we will focus on expanding our bad ideas opportunities for all our kids.

And remember, I've pledged never to say a bad word about teachers. I shall show the utmost respect while I fire them based on deficits that don't exist usher them into a world of new opportunity and outrageously raise the class sizes of those remaining create new challenges for our always-excellent working teachers.

Thank you, and be confident that together, we will achieve whatever the hell Michael Bloomberg says great things.

...it's not far from the mind of high school teachers and principals, who are asking the state to reconsider the discontinuance of January Regents exams. New York State requires that students pass a minimum of five Regents exams to graduate from high school, and in the past, they have been offered three times a year: January, June, and August. With January's administration out the window, New York students will only have 2 shots a year at the exams.

Yesterday morning, in my mailbox, I found a note declaring there should be no parties during class. You can imagine my surprise. After all, here we are, almost ten months into the year, and they're setting policy. And here I am, partying since September, ready to continue, and lo and behold, I'm instructed to halt immediately. Isn't that a kick in the pants?

This is not so bad as the last miscommunication, when the principal told us to not work. Imagine my surprise when he walked in on me, found me not working, and asked what the hell I was doing. "You told us to not work," I reminded him.

He was furious. "I told you to network!" he said.

My feeling is, you have to lay out a policy and stick to it. If you want people not to have parties, just say so. If you want them to network, well, I guess you actually ought to have parties.

Just one more reason I'll never make principal.

While it was nice to see an administrator pointing out the obvious flaws in E4E's public relations approach at GothamSchools yesterday, what was far more telling, in GS's coverage of the administrator's letter, was Sydney Morris's response. Morris responded, "E4E is, and always has been, a membership organization and some [emphasis mine] events are for members only...[W]e sometimes [emphasis also mine] have to limit the numbers of attendees we have..."

Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, recently sold for a dollar,  is now writing for Bloomberg. Unsurprisingly, he's written a hatchet job on Diane Ravitch. Ravitch, for the unforgivable offense of examining the actual facts about so-called education reform, must be dealt with. Alter does so via an ad hominem piece that might be persuasive to those who have not studied the actual results of "reform." Alter expresses shock that Arne Duncan would speak against her, despite the undeniable fact that Duncan has been on the reform bandwagon since well before he was Education Secretary.

Most reformers, according to Alter, are not Scott Walker. They don't want to stop collective bargaining. Take Mayor Bloomberg, Alter's employer, for example. He only wants to do layoffs based on innuendo, on unsubstantiated accusations. He also wants to eliminate right of return, so that the layoffs are actually firings. What could be wrong with that? Arne Duncan simply wants entire school staffs fired, like they tried in Rhode Island, and thinks natural disasters are great opportunities to privatize. Of course, Alter doesn't see how privately run charter schools are privatizing.

Alter's been thoroughly refuted at the Public School Parents blog, both here and here, in Accountable Talk,  Salon, and in the ceaselessly observant Schools Matter. Of course, with Billionaire Boys' Club money everywhere, he's far from alone. It's unpleasant to be attacked, even when attacks are baseless. Teachers know well, as every day we open the tabloids to find double-paged assaults on our sins, more unforgivable each day. How dare we be paid? Why should teachers have health care or pensions? Wal-Mart employees are barely paid, and have benefits that are essentially worthless. Wouldn't America be a better place if teachers were the same?

That's the sort of thinking that goes on in America today, and it's a huge problem. I'm very sorry to see Ravitch attacked like this. Since racism is no longer as chic as it once was, someone else needs to be Willie Horton. For the last few years it's been teachers.

Ravitch, as a truth-teller, has been thrust in our midst. They say people are measured by the company they keep. We've got a very hard road ahead, but standing with people like Diane Ravitch, at the very least, should let us know we're going the right way.

She's got a great response. I love her expressions. Were I to deliver a message in this fashion, people would surely toss tomatoes at their computer screens.

I was screaming at one of my Chinese students the other day, probably because she made a subject-verb agreement error, or spelled "writing" with two Ts, or committed some other infraction I found absolutely unforgivable.

"How could you?" I pleaded, as dramatically as I could muster.

She laughed at me. Just sat there laughing out loud. I was shocked. How dare she?

"Aren't you afraid of me any more?" I asked.

"No Mister, I've never been afraid of you."

"Why not?"

"Because this is nothing. You just say one thing. But in China, the teacher yells at you for an hour."

"Really?"

"Yes, and they are way more angry than you."

"Okay," I said. I walked over to her, ready to try yelling at her for an hour, though I knew the class would be over well before that.

"Action!" shouted the girl next to her, gamely.

But the girl stopped me. "It's all wrong," she said. "You should be sitting down, and I should be standing up. Also, I can't look at you. I have to keep my eyes to the floor."

"Wow. Okay, I'll try."

"No, it's not good yet. You need to have a pot of tea. Then you pour yourself a cup. Drink tea, then scream. Drink more tea, then scream some more. And you can't stop until I'm crying."

With all the nonsense they throw at us, I have to admit I'm still glad to teach here in the United States.

Climate control:

"MISS, PUT ON THE AIR CONDITIONER."

The geniuses at Education Sector have come up with ways to economize on those wasteful teacher contracts. If only we could eliminate raises, sick days, pensions, class size restrictions, and those awful health and pension benefits, we'd have more money to lavish on the children we love.

Thanks to Education Sector, our children can look forward to even more opportunities to get jobs without raises, sick days, pensions, workload limits, and those awful health and pension benefits. This is a great way to sustain tax breaks for those who really need them, like Bill Gates and Eli Broad. But why should we limit such great ideas to teachers?

Couldn't we save money on restaurant bills if we got rid of this whole tipping nonsense?  I mean, if an entree costs 18 bucks, shouldn't it cost 18 bucks? And are we actually paying for those hairnets I see them using in the kitchen? And what about those long rubber gloves the dishwasher is using? How will he know how hot the water is? And are we actually paying to heat it?

Often, I'll see restaurant staff sitting around doing nothing. Sometimes they'll even be eating. Is the price of their food reflected in my eighteen bucks? And if they have nothing to do, shouldn't they go out and make the world a better place? In fact, if they weren't wasting their time cleaning the restaurant, they could clean the streets and save us the expense of hiring sanitation workers. What the hell does Education Sector care if there's a little grease on their plates, or the odd rodent jumping into their soup? Maybe that 18-dollar entree could be ten bucks if we stopped throwing money at the problem.

Also, I've just about had it with these doctors. Why should they have health insurance? If they're so smart, can't they heal themselves? Why should they have professional associations lobbying for them? Are they socking money away for their retirement? Wouldn't it be better if they just stopped charging so much? And what's with these receptionists? Are we paying for them? Wouldn't it be better if the doctors came out, greeted you personally, filled out whatever forms need filling out, and took you into the office?

What really grinds my gears are those waiting rooms. If there are too many people, doctors ought to bring them all into the offices, and that way they'd be sufficiently motivated to get them out quickly. The more they treated, the more money they'd make. You know, like merit pay. Let's find ways to keep it moving and stop wasting time. As long as they're effective doctors, who gives a golly goshdarn how many patients they treat?

Forward-thinking Americans could apply the Education Sector method to many areas of society, save lots of money, and give it back to billionaires in tax cuts.

Because that's what our nation needs more of.