Many who read this blog or know me, know that I am not a "union shill," nor even a "union goon." If the UFT does something I disagree with, I will speak my mind. If the UFT does something I agree with, my mind will be spoken.

In my opinion, the UFT has been inconsistent in how it reaches out to and supports the rank and file. And chances are I am not the only one that feels that way.

I stayed with the UFT because a union that is not fully functioning is better than no union at all. Those that left, they have no right to bitch and complain anymore. Those on the outside have never had a right to complain about the UFT, and I will defend the UFT against anyone who wished to denigrate it. Just like in Animal House.

That being said, there is a cancer out there. A non-UFT member, trying to sow discord amongst the rank and file, and worse, trolling closed Facebook NYC teacher groups. All the while not only publishing teachers words (That they believe are private), but their names as well all over Twitter, without permission nor knowledge. The account (NYC Public School Comments) and handle (@NYCSchooIs) (very inventive Chris uses an I instead of an L) run by disgruntled former teacher Christopher Vasquez has been bringing a lot of anxiety to these people, who are mostly women, and whose comments are reasonably expected are being shared amongst friends and confidantes.

Now I will give Chris some props. He does want better schools. But his logic, graphs, and conclusions come across as convoluted and per-determined to fit his hypothesis.

So who is Christopher Vasquez? Chris used to be with the DOE and soon went to Mount Vernon High School from where he was terminated in 2018 for causing a lockout. Let's look at some highlights.

According to News 12...

The Mount Vernon school district was on lockout as a safety precaution Tuesday over a disgruntled employee, according to the district.

In a statement, a district spokesperson said that they were made aware over the weekend of a number of concerning statements made on social media by a disgruntled employee that were emailed to staff members.

Chris Vasquez reached out to News 12 saying he's the reason for the lockout. Vasquez, a science teacher, says he alerted Superintendent Dr. Kenneth Hamilton about corruption from inside school. Dr. Hamilton then sent Vasquez a letter ordering him to go on paid leave.

Vasquez alleges a teacher is selling food to students, and in one case, that a teacher pushed a student into the window for not paying for a bag of chips, causing him to bleed.

So the corruption at the school (And mind you this is not the only blog post on Chris. More is to come) was a teacher selling food and another teacher pushing a student into a window.

Let's look at some things. One, the teachers selling food. That's all the information we have, or for that matter, anyone. Was there a food drive? Was this for charity? What are the details?

Secondly, the teacher who pushed a student into the window causing him to bleed. Where is the proof? I'm not saying this did not happen and if it did happen the way Chris claims then the teachers should face all available penalties. But according to News 12...

Vasquez then shared his concerns by posting comments on social media and emailing the staff about what he says he's witnessed.

But if there were truly an assault, where just post on social media? Why not go to the Mount Vernon Police? If he didn't trust MVPD then go to the Westchester District Attorney. He could have gone to the Journal News in both instances.

But from this News 12 article and others The Crack Team has come across Christopher Vasquez has no problem, no guilt, no feeling about throwing a colleague under the bus if it serves a purpose for himself.

And that is what he has been and continues to do on Facebook. Taking comments of teachers, mostly female, and using their comments to fit his narrative. He has already caused plenty of consternation, anxiety, and yes, even some fear.

Christopher Vasquez is about himself it appears. He has no qualms on who he damages or hurts. Give this guy a wide berth.

The Westchester Journal News has reported that New York State has stopped collecting
agency fees from 31,000 state workers. As far as I am concerned that is 31k freeloaders and rats.

I am getting tired of this whining from UFT "members" who are threatening to withhold dues in light of Janus. Yes, as I ahve said in the past, I empathize with them. But a dysfunctional union is better than no union or not being in a union.

I have been reading a lot of the comments on James Eterno's blog. Yes, the grievances and feelings are real. But the one question I brought up and could not be answered to the complainers is, "What have you ever done for 'the cause'"? The question has been met with silence. Instead of cursing the darkness light a god damn candle.

I ask those that are thinking of freeloading that are reading this, what have you done? Where have you been? And please, anonymous comments on blogs don't count.

Even under the best of circumstances if the UFT was strong and proactive there would be people complaining and kvetching. Nothing is perfect. Too many are looking for a perfect fit on an off the rack world.

Yeah, our working conditions and the way we have been treated pretty much sucks. But we make more than most teachers in the country, let alone New York State. We have solid pensions awaiting us. We have rights that are bargained for. And, we have great health benefits.

Yeah, Mulgrew got stupid again about saying health benefits can be bargained. Would you rather have no health benefits? Crappier health benefits? A friend of mine that teaches in Armonk NY told me that he has a family deductible of about $6k on his health plan and pays into it 10% (or a little less) or so of his pay. If you have GHI you pay $0 and with the out of network rider (which I have) $16 a month.

I have been without insurance and on insurance. Guess which I prefer? Thirty years ago I dislocated my right shoulder (I am a lefty). It was popped back in never saw a doctor because I had no way to pay for it. I have developed horrible arthritis, I have bone grinding against bone, I'm in pain, can't golf, and I will need a shoulder replacement eventually.

In January my wife had almost her entire back fused. We saw the hospital bill. It cames to about $550k, with about $200k for the hardware in her back. Maybe another $95k for the bed. We owe $200.

This is what you can give up if you fail to join the union and other things as well. Under law freeloaders are covered by the CBA. Well, what happens if the next CBA there are provisions for freeloaders to be own their own? Too bad.

Remember, how the UFT got the family leave (Yes, it's not parental, stop bitching.). And something that was just shared with me. Family leave was negotiated outside of the contract so we would not have to do a quid pro quo. Yeah, sometimes the UFT gets it right.

But the worst thing, aside from being a freeloader, for not paying dues is that you will hurt each and every member staying in the union (I've been to a union meeting already. The anger at the freeloaders is just beginning), in negotiations, in solidarity, in advancing our needs, and more importantly, the needs and wants of the communities we teach in.

Being angry and frustrated is fine. Acting out on being angry and frustrated impulsively and for spite will hurt others and worse, yourself.

There is a great disturbance in the public service employees force. And it's emanating from Port Chester NY.

Earlier this month in the next town over from me, Port Chester NY, the village board  wishing to reduce an $800k budget gap laid off the 8 professional fire fighters that service the village and left the protection of the village to about 300 less trained volunteers. Mayor Dennis Pilla is a voting member of the board as well as the catalyst in this thuggery. This also negated the agreement the village had with neighboring Rye Brook in which Port Chester supplied one paid overnight fire fighter (Rye Brook has had it's issues with firefighters in the past. In the 90's they privatized and went with a publicly traded company for fire protection, Rural-Metro. It was a disaster).

There is talk that the village board did this because the paid fire fighters filed a labor complaint claiming the volunteers mishandled a house fire in March.

Port Chester can afford these fire fighters. The village population is almost 30k, but is almost 60% Hispanic. The Justice Department had to get involved several years ago because no Hispanics were being elected nor nominated to run for the village board.

Twenty years ago, heck even 15 years ago the only reason to go to Port Chester was if you were drinking in Connecticut in which closing time for bars was 2 AM and you wanted to continue drinking until 4 AM. Today, restaurants dot Main St left and right, the resurgent Capitol Theater is becoming a stop for the likes of Jackson Brown and Ringo Starr and there has been much waterfront development along the Byram River. 

A dad of a son my son has played baseball with just retired from the Port Chester Fire Department. He is lucky. He has a pension. For now.

The professional fire fighters of Port Chester are in same boat us teachers public service employees being blamed for the incompetence of politicians. Ironically, Rye Brook is where the Westchester Hilton is in which the UFT holds all it's "retreats." Wouldn't Mulgrew not want to worry about fire protection? In fact the closest house to the Hilton is in Port Chester, not Rye Brook (The Rye Brook fire house is near Westchester County Airport).

And guess what the Journal News reported today? Three Democrat board members who were elected in March have been removed because they;

 "failed to sign legal paperwork following this year's election wins."

This is another attack on public service employees. Port Chester is yet another municipality that can't keep it's finances in order and decides that the scapegoats must be it's public service employees and the the public it's victims.

Each and every time I get into a conversation with a sanitation worker, a parks workers, a cop, a fire fighter, etc... and share that I am a teacher and what is happening to us I tell them that they are next. Well guess what? The professional fire fighters of Port Chester have been the next ones nailed.

Our union, it's leaders, the caucus that runs the UFT has been silent. It has paid thousands to the Westchester Hilton for years to have it's retreats as well has paying hotel tax to the Village of Rye Brook (Rye Brook and Port Chester are both in the Town of Rye...not to be confused with the City of Rye)

We here at SBSB are calling for the UFT to immediately cease doing any business with the Westchester Hilton and any other businesses within the Town of Rye and the villages of Rye Brook and Port Chester until the eight professional fire fighters have their jobs restored as well as the appropriate back pay.

I have run into some really good people at the UFT in the last several months. This does not negate me from my support of MORE/New Action. But sometimes a word of support can go a long way.

God forbid if someone were to die due to inadequate fire protection. 

You know who are the biggest losers in this opt-out movement? The so-called "(de)reformers" and their faux grassroots organizations like StudentsFirst, Education Reform Now, Success Academy, Educators4Excellence and Democrats for Education Reform (DFER).

The irrelevance and slow death spiral of DFER was seen by all last week when DFER New York director Nicole Brisbane was quoted in the Journal News as saying;

"Schools are one of the biggest differentiators of value in the suburbs. How valuable will a house be in Scarsdale when it isn't clear that Scarsdale schools are doing any better than the rest of Westchester or even the state? Opting out of tests only robs parents of that crucial data,"

It really is quite simple. Look at SAT scores. Number of students going on to 4 year colleges. Number of students going to Ivy League colleges. Visit the school. Ask neighbors. Graduation rates. Teacher turnover. Home values. Really, there are so many reasons. In fact Nicole fails to grasp what did Scarsdale do before there were high stakes exams?

But please, don't listen to Nicole. Nicole claims she was somewhat misquoted and only using Scarsdale as an example, that her real thoughts were in a blog post on DFER that she had written ;

"Part of the draw of the suburbs is the high performance of local schools. How will suburban communities maintain their draw if there isn’t a measure of how the schools are actually doing in comparison to those across the state?"

Nicole, see above. But we here at SBSB suggest to Nicole that if she is really concerned about how others can measure up to one another to take Chevy Chase's advice.

Nicole does decide to deride the parents of not only Scarsdale, but of all affluent communities as well when she says on the DFER blog;

"The same parents are opting-in for other standardized tests like the ACT (not mandatory), the SAT (also not mandatory) and the Specialized High School Admissions Test (also not mandatory but absolutely necessary if you want your kid to go to a “choice” high school in New York City). Affluent parents aren’t opting out of optional tests, so why opt out of the state exams? Maybe it’s because the results aren’t what they wanted to hear."

See Nicole does not understand something here (And of course we can go into the the multitude of flaws with testing but we shan't tonight). These tests are a choice one makes for their child. These tests are not forced upon parents by a bully governor, a clueless chancellor of the Regents, or a faceless bureaucrat. The parents have ownership of their child's education. Such as my son made a choice to continue his Jewish education after his bar mitzvah after telling me and my wife for years he will stop once he became a bar mitzvah. HE HAD OWNERSHIP!

However after the missed opportunity at a testing analogy Nicole decided that it would be best to charm the parents of Scarsdale and all affluent communities by sharing;

"That their kids, or their kid’s teacher or their beloved (Emphasis by The Crack Team) neighborhood school isn’t performing as well as they expected."

What Nicole fails to realize, as the Journal News as reported, is that the vast majority of affluent communities (For this post will use Westchester County), Scarsdale, Chappaqua, Irvington, Bronxville, Ardsley, had quite low opt out numbers. WAY TO WIN OVER PARENTS NICOLE! KUDOS!

If you are left wondering who is this expert in education that is gracing the pages of this award winning blog we will share what The Crack Team has learned.

Nicole Brisbane is a former teacher, now a lawyer, and shared with The Crack Team that she was a reading specialist for 5 years at Allapattah Middle School in Miami.

Oddly, according to this link she only taught two years at Allapattah before entering law school. Only two years? Well, if you read the headline of that link she was with Teach for America.

So how can we believe anything she says, even when she told The Crack Team she won Rookie Teacher of the Year at Allapattah and in fact raised the grade level of her students (Who were 4 grades behind at the time of her ascension at Allapattah 2.5 grades in the very short time she was there?

We can't believe her even though we requested several times for some kind of verification or conformation to her outstanding teaching and her award. Is her story truth or fiction?

But according to Nicole, the affluent, or shall we stray into reality, the "regular people",  or strating from the test because,

"The people who are opting out of tests are largely those who already feel like their child has access to a high-quality education, and are doing so in a way that directly harms poor and minority students throughout New York. We should be supporting students and teachers throughout New York, whether they are in Scarsdale or the Bronx, and making sure all students have a fair shot at a quality education. Rather than maintain the status quo where wealth determines a quality education, data can and should highlight where the gaps are so we can invest in schools that need it the most. High property values shouldn't determine the quality of education for the neighborhood--and the way we are going to change that is through access to data that will allow us to make investments where they are needed"

 And she shares some links here, and here. Big deal. Hey Nicole, let's see how the students from Success flame out when they hit college, much the way they flamed out on tests for the NYC specialized high schools.

Nicole this is why the opt out movement is picking up steam. We are fed up. We are fed up with Albany and Washington DC deciding what is best for our children and our school districts. We are fed up with millions going to testing companies like Pearson. We are fed up seeing our babies go through 8 hours of testing when a bar exam is only 3 hours. We are fed up seeing our children stress out. We are fed up with the narrowed curriculum. We are fed up with teaching to the tests. We are fed up with our narrowed curriculum. We are fed up with Common Core. We are fed up with a governor that pockets $4.8 million from DFER and others like it instead of fixing our poverty and having the state pay its fair share to ALL school districts.

Mostly we are fed up with people of your ilk. You and yours are the modern day carpetbaggers, just this time it is education that you and yours needs to control. You truly believe that since you taught for two years this gives you some kind of street cred when it comes to education and the welfare of our children. You feel that you must share "stories" on how you raised students 2.5 grades and were Rookie of the Year. Guess what? Joe Charboneau was AL Rookie of the Year in 1980. What did it mean in the long run? Nothing. At least Charboneau can prove he was ROY.

Put your skills to good use. Sell Amway.

I get home from Port Chester on Monday night and go on the Journal News website and what do I see? A video with two men who were at the forum in Port Chester to hear The King spew forth. One gentleman, is a a teacher, a union president, and a teacher from Ossining, and the other is of someone named Vincent Marrone, a self proclaimed "parent" from Larchmont named Vincent Marrone.

Now in the video Vince claims that he has a five year old daughter (presumably in Kindergarten?) and in a nutshell, says he has no problem with the Common Core standards, supports testing, believes the tests will help them get into college, and says, "I don't know why people are objecting to that," and goes on why teachers don't like testing is that, "...a big part of the scores is tied to their jobs, and it is a big deal that it is tied to their jobs." 

So why all the hub bub about some parent sharing his opinion? I guess one is that the parent from Ossining shared exactly what his background is. Simple, "Bob Rosenbaum, a high school English teacher, a union president and a parent." I think if he came out and shared that he believes that The King is a deity no one would have a problem, (except for thinking The King is a deity) with that for he fully disclosed who he is.

On the other hand, Vinny lied. Yes, he is a parent. But is so much more. Vince is founder and president of Public Strategies, LLC, "full-service government relations firm that specializes in representing clients on regulatory, statutory and budgetary concerns." He's a lobbyist!!!! Oh, oh! Vince, for shame. Why not share this with the Journal News? Are you ashamed of what you do?

As was reported today in New York BATS Facebook page, and on the Hall Monitor blog by Journal News education reporter, Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, one of Vince's clients is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Yes, that very same Bill Gates who failed to innovate at Microsoft and is attempting to do to education what he has done to Microsoft. Yes, the very same Bill Gates who has shoved Common Core down our throats and who said that we won't know if Common Core will succeed for another ten years.

But let's not stop there. Another client of Vinny's is the New York City Charter School Center. Yeah, charter schools, Common Core, testing, hmm, I see a connection for Vince's sycophancy. Oh snap, I almost forgot. NYC Charter School Center is supported by Billy and Melinda. I am starting to think that Vince was a plant on Monday night and wasn't speaking from the heart but rather from the wallet. And speaking of wallet's, click here and see how much all his clients (some worthy ones I will admit) paid him, in particular Billy and NYC Charter School Center.

But enough of outing Vince, maybe it's time we educate Vince. Maybe Vince should know about the teacher, Rigoberto Ruelas, in Los Angeles who after years of being a beloved teacher was rated ineffective (and outed by Jason Felch of the Los Angeles Times) by some inane algorithm tied to his students test scores. How did Rigoberto deal with this? He committed suicide.

As far as the tests, no one has a problem with testing as long as it is done for assessment, but to make testing part and parcel of a student's whole reason for being in school and to judge teachers is just wrong. How can we determine in 3rd grade, or even Kindergarten (which the powers that be wish) are college or career ready? How can we judge whether or not a teacher is effective by testing? Teacher's have no control over what happens at home.

Vince, worse, and as I said to The King on Monday night, there is no crisis in education. It was creates by the billionaire boys club and the people you represent. All that matters to these people is they see that there is a buck to be made from education and from children.

That is all that seems to matter today in education. Dollars.