AFT and DNC Joined at the Hip

In this piece from Education Week, there's a clear connection between the DNC, which has recently been exposed as in the tank for Hillary, and the AFT, which has pretty much always been in the tank for Hillary. Tweets from AFT President Randi Weingarten are now peppered with anti-Trump items, but before Hillary pulled ahead the flavor of the month was those awful "Bernie Bros" and their terrible abusiveness.

Evidently Common Core is now the third rail of American politics, loved by virtually no one except Randi Weingarten and Hillary Clinton. Even UFT President Michael Mulgrew, who was gonna punch our faces and push them in the dirt, now talks of Common Core as though it's dead and buried. Of course it isn't. I fully expect the Common Core name to be erased and replaced. Maybe they'll be the Happy Smile Standards. But it'll be a while before we teach love of reading rather than close reading.

Clearly the AFT wanted to avoid that particular third rail and focus more on Mom and Apple Pie. I sat there for four days and the only really interesting parts of it were when someone stood up and started trash-talking Mom, or saying the Apple Pie was full of cyanide. So while AFT leadership can pat itself on the back for having passed a bunch of resolutions about how the world would be better if people were nicer, it's not difficult to have the appearance of unity when you avoid talking about topics that really trouble teachers.

That, of course, is not to mention that almost 30% of the delegates came from UFT, who'd have nominated a ham sandwich for President of the United States if Leroy Barr told them to. In fact, Mulgrew called Hillary the most qualified presidential nominee ever, or some such thing. Everything is pretty black and white when you're bound by loyalty oath, and you can't or won't look at the gray areas.

So it's better to have 2600 delegates stand around and pretend we don't have Common Core. They can pass some watered-down amendment suggesting some nebulous opposition to testing up the wazoo and continue to trash the opt-out activists who actually caused Emperor Andy to make some superficial concessions.

Let's be clear--it is the job of AFT to represent us, the working teachers who do this job each and every day. It is not the job of AFT to represent the DNC, or their clearly unethical priority to get Hillary nominated by any means necessary. In fact, while the Republicans are fairly awful, it's not the job of the AFT to work with the DNC unless it's advancing the education goals that will help us and the students we serve.

I'd argue that DNC has done a wretched job of that over the last few years. President Obama is the reformiest President ever. He's pushed charter schools, insisted that teachers be rated by junk science, appointed some of the very worst people on earth as Secretaries of Education, and ignored the concerns of activist parents and teachers. He's allowed Arne Duncan to make some of the most offensive comments I've ever heard, like Katrina being the best thing to happen to NOLA education, and shows virtually no awareness of what is actually going on in K-12 education.

How that merits our support, let alone our loyalty, is beyond me. And frankly, given our evident unconditional support, let alone the dollars flying to Hillary from Broad and Walton, I fail to see any reason to believe she will do any better than Obama did.

UFT's Charter Disaster--What Has Leadership Learned?

Errol Louis offers a postmortem for the UFT Charter School. Its title may not cause Weingarten or Mulgrew to jump with joy. “Why the UFT’s Charter School Flunked,” describes a school that appears to have earned low test scores, and that is the prime reason why grades 1-8 will be dropped. Do the low test scores indicate a failing school? Not necessarily, but they aren’t precisely a calling card either.

Other issues Louis brings up are, first, that the school’s leadership turned over repeatedly. This indicates that UFT lacked either a clear vision, the ability to execute it, or perhaps both. The other issue is that UFT Charter had a lower percentage of special needs kids. This, in itself, may or may not be significant. I’d argue that it is not only the percentage, but also the degree of need reflected in the population that is important.

For example, I teach beginners, kids who arrived in the US yesterday, or perhaps even today. I’d argue that Eva does not take kids like mine, and that neither does she take alternate assessment kids who will never earn a Regents diploma. This would not help a school with a laser focus on test scores. But someone has to teach these kids. It’s my understanding that Moskowitz doesn’t release this info, though there have been FOI requests for it.

Where Louis is indisputably correct is in the fact that the charter failed. Were that not the fact, it wouldn’t be closing up shop. The fact that UFT took a million dollars from the Broad Foundation, which I didn’t know until I read this, is unconscionable. Clearly our leadership was in bed with privatizers, and paid the privatizers a pretty sweet dividend by failing.

What’s truly disturbing is its implications for the future. I have repeatedly heard Mike Mulgrew pronounce to the Delegate Assembly that Cuomo is wrong to propose receivership for troubled schools. Mulgrew’s right, of course. Receivership is just another code for privatization, for shuffling kids around, for blaming public schools for failure. Of course, it has the added benefit of voiding those nasty collective bargaining agreements that suggest people ought to, you know, be compensated for their time, or have due process rights, and have other agreements counter to the good folks who wish to roll back the 20th century and bring back the robber barons.

Mulgrew confidently promises that we will show them how to run schools, and that we will fix the schools that have never been fixed. In fact, this episode suggests that he hasn’t got the secret sauce after all. It suggests that he’s failed to reflect, that he's setting us up for further failure, and that there will be more editorials demanding Cuomo-style changes. Worst of all, it suggests our actions, past, present and future, will be used to support said editorials.

There is indeed a secret sauce, and several charters have found it. What you do, of course, is extensive test-prep, capitalizing on those kids who are good test-takers, and get rid of those inconvenient children who won’t help you achieve that goal. First of all, the fact that there is even an application means that parents who couldn’t care less are immediately excluded, and will go wherever the hell the DOE sees fit. Beyond that are requirements that parents put in time. There are, of course, the suspensions, the demerits, the humiliations of wearing orange shirts, and the Stepford routines so favored by folks like Doug Lemov.

The best, though, is the requisite dumping of the students who don’t get test scores, most flagrantly exercised by American Express-hyping Geoffrey Canada, who dumped not one, but two cohorts seeking those all-important test grades. And then there are those schools, examined in detail by Gary Rubinstein, that dump a third, two-thirds, or other varying percentages and then claim 100% college acceptance by those who haven’t been dumped.

It’s a shell game, three-card monte, except they’re playing with our children. And, of course, the dumped children go back to public schools, which are invariably blamed for their test scores.

UFT leadership, rather than playing the game, ought to join those of us who oppose charters, who oppose high-stakes testing, who want to help all New York’s children regardless of what scores they may or may not achieve on tests. And charters that play cute games, that don’t serve absolutely everyone, ought not to receive one dime from taxpayers. 

The Gates/ Walton/ Broad Fix for That Nagging Teacher Problem

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A cheery little reverie by special guest blogger Michael Fiorillo

- Proclaim austerity for the public schools, while continuing to expand charters.

- Put non-educators in positions of power, from Assistant Principal on up.

- Maintain a climate of scapegoating and witch hunting for “bad teachers,” who are posited as the cause of poverty and student failure, doing everything possible to keep debate from addressing systemic inequities.

- Neutralize and eventually eliminate teacher unions (the former largely accomplished in the case of the AFT). As part of that process, eliminate tenure, seniority and defined benefit pensions.

- Create and maintain a climate of constant disruption and destabilization, with cascading mandates that are impossible to keep up or comply with.

- Create teacher evaluations based on Common Core-related high stakes tests for which no curriculum has been developed. Arbitrarily impose cut scores on those exams that cast students, teachers and schools as failing, as was done by NYS Education Commissioner John King and Regent Meryl Tisch.

- Get teachers and administrators, whether through extortion (see RttT funding) threats or non-stop propaganda, to accept the premises of “data-driven” everything, even when that data is irrelevant, opaque, contradictory, or just plain wrong.

- Get everyone to internalize the premises and language of so-called education reform:

 - Parents are not citizens with rights, but “customers” who are provided                        “choices” that are in practice restricted by the decisions of those in charge, based on policies developed by an educational-industrial complex made up of foundations, McKinsey-type consultants and captive academics.

- Students are “assets” and “products,” whose value is to be enhanced (see the definition of VAM) by teachers before being offered to employers.

 - Teachers are fungible units of “human capital,” to be deployed as policy-makers and management see fit. Since human capital depreciates over time,it needs to be replaced by fresh capital, branded as “the Best and Brightest.”

- Schools are part of an investment “portfolio,” explicitly including the real estate they inhabit, and are subject to the “demands” of the market and the preferences of policy-makers and management.

- Create an intimidating, punitive environment, where the questions and qualms of teachers are either disregarded or responded to with threats.

- Get the university education programs on board under threat of continuing attack. Once they acquiesce, go after them anyway, and deregulate the teacher licensing process so that it’s easier to hire temps.

- Eliminate instruction that is deemed irrelevant to the most narrowly-cast labor market needs of employers, getting rid of art, music, dance, electives, etc., thereby reducing the focus of education to preparation for passive acceptance of low-wage employment.

- Embed software and electronic gadgets in every facet of the classroom and school, from reading to test taking, with the intention of automating/digitizing as much classroom input and output as possible.

- Use the automation/digitiliztion of the classroom to enlarge class size - something explicitly promoted by Bill Gates - and transform teachers into overseers of student digital production that is connected to massive databases, so that every keystroke is data that can be potentially monetized.

- Cash your bonus checks, exercise your stock options, declare Excellence and Civil Rights achieved, and go on to Better Things.

Statement of Candidacy for NYSUT Executive Vice-President

I’m very proud to teach ESL at Francis Lewis High School, one of the largest schools in NYC, where I am also UFT chapter leader.

When repeatedly failed schemes, like merit pay, are promoted by Governor Cuomo, NYSUT needs strong leaders. NYSUT needs to represent all teachers, whether or not they support mayoral control, VAM, or Common Core. I’ve written in the NY Daily News and elsewhere against all these corporate reforms, and as a result, have been shut out of participation in NYSUT and AFT by UFT leadership.

Former AFT President David Selden wrote that teachers were expelled from the invitation-only UFT-Unity caucus for opposing the Vietnam War. A half-century later, little has changed within UFT-Unity. Our elections are winner-take-all, and all our NYSUT and AFT reps are hand-picked by UFT-Unity, which demands a signed oath to publicly support its positions. I can’t and won’t support baseless, counter-productive corporate reforms. I’ve opted to use the press instead.

UFT-Unity twice failed to oppose mayoral control in NYC, where it’s amounted to mayoral dictatorship. Nationally, mayoral control has enabled people like Gates, Broad and the Waltons to foist their anti-union notions upon public schools.

We know Common Core has never been tested anywhere. We know teachers, parents, and students all over NY are suffering due to its developmentally inappropriate expectations. John King labels vocal parents and teachers special interests, but sits mute when corporate-backed Students First NY monopolizes forums to shut parents, teachers, and students out.

VAM, as Diane Ravitch writes, is junk science. AFT President Randi Weingarten now says, “VAM is a sham.” Rather than co-write laws that can enable our brother and sister teachers to lose jobs over junk science, we should work toward crafting something supportive and research-based. In NYC, leadership boasted we’d negotiate a fair evaluation system, but we ended up having one forced on us by John King.

In fact, John King is right about one thing. We are a special interest. Our special interest is the children of New York State. Despite media voices proclaiming otherwise, we want our students to have the very best teachers and learning conditions. We want to foster readers and thinkers, and we won’t achieve that by restricting instruction to corporate-designed learning modules and script-reading, clock-watching teachers.

We want our kids to think freely and independently. Let’s set an example by promoting free and independent thought within our own union.

Common Core Geniuses and Our Children

Today at Perdido Street School, we see one of the most absurd conceivable uses of Common Core Curriculum--rating classic books by  grade level. Reality-Based Educator quotes another fine publication:

Here’s a pop quiz: according to the measurements used in the new Common Core Standards, which of these books would be complex enough for a ninth grader?

a. Huckleberry Finn
b. To Kill a Mockingbird
c. Jane Eyre
d. Sports Illustrated for Kids' Awesome Athletes!
The only correct answer is “d,” since all the others have a “Lexile” score so low that they are deemed most appropriate for fourth, fifth, or sixth graders. This idea might seem ridiculous, but it’s based on a metric that is transforming the way American schools teach reading.

It's almost inconceivable anyone would dream to rate books this way, but in 2013, in the United States of America, Bill Gates thinks it's a good idea. Therefore Arne Duncan and Reformy John King also think it's a good idea, and unless you're a "special interest," like a teacher or parent, you should too. I'm not trained in Common Core and am therefore an ignorant galoot who doesn't appreciate anything, but I'm a pretty avid reader. There's a quote that I heard as a child that has stayed with me for a long time:

Any damn fool can get complicated. It takes a genius to attain simplicity.
~Woody Guthrie

To me, this means if you can communicate with a large group of people you're doing a better job than you are if only few people understand, or care to understand you. There's a reason people still sing This Land Is Your Land decades after Woody's death, and that reason has nothing to do with the amount of large words Woody chose to insert. There's a reason people will still read To Kill a Mockingbird years after the silly sports book has been forgotten.

But alas, to the geniuses who invented Common Core, the qualities that make a work classic are of no consequence whatsoever. The important thing is to use as many unfamiliar, archaic and difficult words as possible. Because to them, the more tedious crap a kid can manage to slog through, the better a student it makes the kid. I've had multiple parents of young children tell me this year, the first of Common Core around here, their kids who used to love to read now cry at night and fake being sick in the morning to avoid school. That's a shame.

It's our job to inspire children, to make them love life, to make them appreciate what we have to offer so they themselves can offer something someday. Common Core doesn't understand that. A favorite book series of mine is The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency. It uses simple language, and manages to convey wisdom and humor while doing so. I've been able to teach it to ESL students, who loved it.

If you can trick kids into loving reading, they'll be more likely to read on their own, and to excel even when they need to slog through the tedious crap we all have to encournter. I went to college and had my fair share of professors who made me purchase books of awful essays just because they happened to have written one. I did what I had to do, got through the coursework, and sold or tossed the unmemorable volumes.

But that was only because I grew up in a house full of novels and mystery books. I read whatever my parents left lying around, and it was almost invariably more interesting that whatever my teachers prescribed. Kids without this advantage need teachers who will give them high-interest reading, not arbitrary crap deemed to be their level simply because it contains a lot of words.

It's tragic that ignorant, unimaginative non-educators are now dictating what our children will do in school. Is this really making them college-ready? More likely it's making them Walmart-Associate ready, or why would Gates, Walton, and Broad be ponying up for this crap?

They don't use it on their kids.

Why in the hell are we tolerating their experiments with ours?

Diane Ravitch and the Corporate Reign of Error

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.