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. 

UFT Charter School--Another Spectacular Failure for Leadership

As far as charters go, the UFT has not found the secret sauce. When charter schools showed up, it was important for leadership to show they knew better than anyone else. Turns out, though, that they didn't know diddly squat about how to run a high performing charter.

The way to make your charter great is to reach amazing test scores. You do this, of course, by selecting kids who already get amazing test scores. First, you place obstacles to entry, like a lottery, for example. After that, you make requirements for parents, like giving time to the school. That's pretty inconvenient. If I'm an indifferent parent who somehow won the lottery, I'm gonna send my kids right back to PS Whatever.

Then, of course, it's no excuses for the kids. If they act up, you can dress them up in prison orange and humiliate them. That's no problem, because charters aren't subject to chancellor's regs. Were I to treat a kid like that (and I wouldn't think of it), I'd be sitting in the principal's office facing A-420, corporal punishment. Of course, corporal punishment, verbal abuse, and all other such wonder is fine in charters. Zero tolerance is for the kids. Eva Moskowitz can spend enormous amounts of money dragging her little pawns to Albany to lobby for what they're told to lobby for, and that's tolerated from Governor Cuomo right on up to President Obama.

There is no magic. That's why charter bigshot Geoffrey Canada got to dump not one, but two cohorts in the quest for the Holy Grail that is test scores. In fact, you don't eradicate poverty, high-needs, or lack of English ability via good intentions. If your goal is to get test scores that make everyone jump up and pay heed, the only sure way is via being selective in enrollment. If you want to advertise that 100% of your grads go to four-year schools, all you need to do is dump every student who doesn't appear poised to meet that goal, even if that's two-thirds of your cohort. And that's been done repeatedly by charter-running publicity hounds.

While there's a big brouhaha over suspensions, over whether suspensions actually hurt kids, the only schools affected by it are public schools. And it turns out we don't suspend nearly as many kids as charters. They, of course, aren't subject to suspension requirements because they don't need no stinking rules. All they need is the freedom to use every tool at their disposal to get rid of kids who don't make them look good.

UFT leadership, to its credit, was not willing to play that game. But just like they did when they failed to allocate enough money to pay recent retirees, they played a weak chess game. They failed to look ahead. They failed to see what they charter movement was all about. They assumed it was somehow idealistic rather than a direct assault on public schools. And in the end they were unable to compete with their utterly unscrupulous privatizing colleagues.

Not only that, but they weakened our potential as a force for truth. By supporting charters, they failed to anticipate what the charter movement was about. By actually indulging in co-location, they made it very difficult for us to argue against it. And by actually failing, they gave our opponents ammunition to make the false argument that union contracts are an impediment to student achievement.

This is one more in a series of entirely predictable outcomes of living in an echo chamber and failing utterly to engage membership.

Related: EdNotes Online

Stay Out of the Teacher Lounge, New Teachers

by special guest blogger Michael Fiorillo

Last month I gave a short presentation about unionism and the UFT to a group of teachers, many of whom were incoming Teaching Fellows. At one point during the question and answer portion of the event, the topic of divisions (real, imagined and provoked) between veteran and new teachers came up. There was wry acknowledgement of the false stereotypes and caricatures that are used to divide us: veteran teachers are jaded, lazy burn-outs who don’t believe in kids and are responsible for their failure, while newer/younger teachers are arrogant, know-it-all drinkers of ed reform Kool Aid, and crypto strikebreakers (as if  a teacher strike is on anyone’s radar for the next political eon).

In other words, it was the usual nonsense people say, and something that we could shake our heads over and laugh about.

But it was upsetting to hear them say that, in a speech to them and other incoming Fellows (and, according to the  “At the Chalkface” blog, in other venues, as well) at a June welcoming event, the Chancellor told them to stay away from their senior colleagues and “Stay out of the teacher’s lounge.”

For years now, teachers, especially experienced and senior teachers, have been blamed for the “failed status quo” responsible for the frequent dysfunction of the public schools and the problems of their students. Classroom experience, once seen as highly desirable, almost overnight became a liability, and veteran teachers have become rhetorical and literal targets. Under Joel Klein, the school budget process was changed to penalize schools that might be so foolish as to hire veteran teachers, and created incentives for hiring inexperienced  one’s, who are cheaper, more vulnerable and presumably more compliant.

Meanwhile, newer/younger teachers, while glorified in the media and by management, in practice are beaten down at least as badly as their senior colleagues. Achieving tenure now resembles a desert passage, as the DOE pressures Principals and Superintendents to postpone granting it, and it can be a five year ordeal. Newer teachers are also stuck in new pension tiers that discriminate against them, relative to their senior colleagues. The entire system is being purposefully re-configured so that fewer and fewer people receive tenure, let alone a pension.

The election of Bill De Blasio and naming of Carmen Fariña as Chancellor was supposed to at least change the way DOE management looked upon and interacted with teachers. The open contempt that Michael Bloomberg habitually expressed toward us was to be a thing of the past. After all, Ms. Farina was a real educator, and promised to bring “joy” - a buzzword that even Arne Duncan has recently picked up - back to the classroom. (That she also promised to “sell” the Common Core to teachers and parents was not given the same prominence).

But now we know that the Chancellor is going around telling new teachers that only “whiners” are in the teacher’s lounge. We know that she is telling the Daily News (8/31) that ATRs will disappear “… as principals are taught best practices for writing up teachers and beginning the arduous termination process” (which for ATRs is not arduous at all - MF).

I always thought “best practices” were successful teaching and classroom management strategies, not paper trails and DOE lawyer hit squads. Does that make me a whiner?

Suddenly, the widely reported fact that PS 6 had eighty percent staff turnover when Farina was principal doesn’t look quite so benign, if it ever did. Oh, and she was Deputy Chancellor under the Lord of Darkness himself, wasn’t she?

Possibly worst of all, and suggesting that De Blasio either is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or that he promised something he wasn’t willing to fight for with his campaign rhetoric about charters, is finding out that the Chancellor sits on the Board of the New York City Charter School Center.

The NYC Charter School Center says that its mission is to “… help new charter schools get started…” and that their work involves “Foster(ing) a favorable public policy environment.” In less delicate terms, the Chancellor’s name and reputation are being used to lobby for ever-more money for charter schools, and eventually a raising or elimination of the charter cap.  That would further undermine the UFT contract, and negatively affect all future teachers, some of whom might now be students  now in those very same charter schools.

Additionally, as we all know, charter schools are famous for the enviable  working conditions their teachers enjoy,  as well as the “joy” their students feel as they  march silently down their hallways , on their way to becoming “little test taking machines.” Then there’s all the additional funds charters bring to neighborhood public schools.

Some of the Chancellor’s  fellow Board members  at the Center include such friends of public education as Geoffrey Canada, he of the expelled classes and half-million dollar a year salary. Also on the Board is Spencer Robertson, a Wall Street scion whose family foundation promotes charters and who sits on the Board of charter schools that have aggressively coveted and taken over public school facilities.

So-called reformers will keep repeating, and the Chancellor will perhaps be obliged to affirm, that charters are public schools, but the reality is that they are not: they are private entities, privately controlled and managed, that receive public money. They undergo minimal public oversight, and do not serve the same populations as the public schools they siphon money from.

Chancellor Farina has said and done some good things. Changing Chancellor’s Regulation C-30, so that non-educator’s can no longer be made principals and APs is an important rollback of one of the many terrible things Bloomberg did (assuming it’s not undermined by the  waivers it provides for).

So, then, what is the Chancellor doing on the Board of the New York City Charter School Center? Why is she boasting of “best practices” to harass and fire ATRs, rather than re-integrate them back into the schools? Why is she telling new teachers to stay away from their colleagues?

Maybe I’m just a whiner, but I’m not feelin’ the joy.

Eva Moskowitz Collects 7.5 Million, Buys a Governor

Naturally, I was heartbroken when mean old Bill de Blasio tried to keep his campaign promise and blocked a few Moskowitz academies. After all, if they don't go up, how will all the zillionaires spend their money? What will they invest in? Certainly not public schools that take and keep everyone. Now that Reformy John King has rigged the tests so that 70% of our children will fail, who wants any part of that?

A much better system is school choice. That's the system in which schools choose their students and send all the others back to those awful public schools. Then you get fabulous test scores and they all look like they suck. Except, of course, when you don't. On those occasions you have to take extreme measure, like dumping an entire cohort. Or two.

But Eva did very well the other night, thank you very much. After her BFFs spent over 5 million dollars on a television campaign to make sure Bill de Blasio could not do what he elected them to do, they had a big gala, featuring legal expert Campbell Brown, and threw over seven million dollars at her. That's ironic, because these are the very people who say you can't just throw money at a problem.

But that, of course, refers to lowly public schools. Governor Cuomo, who not only endorsed but spoke at the school-day rally where Eva dragged her hapless kids, can't be bothered to fund them. That's why he so adores the Gap Elimination Adjustment that makes sure we balance the state budget on the backs of schoolchildren. And just in case that doesn't get the job done, he's set a tax cap in place. Because Andrew Cuomo is the student lobbyist, he's made sure that people who say no to kids get more of a vote than those who say yes. Therefore districts outside of NYC need a super-majority of 60% to overcome the tax cap of 2% or rate of inflation, whichever is lower.

But that doesn't mean Andy Cuomo isn't the student lobbyist. What it means is that he only lobbies for the 3% of NY schoolchildren who attend charters. After all, those of us whose kids attend public school can't give him 800K we know about, and who knows how many vital suitcases full of cash, like Eva's BFFs can.

It's a question of values. And it's pretty clear to me, at least, that Governor Andy highly values the highest bidder.

How to Make It in Mayor Bloomberg's New York

There's gold in them charter schools, says the NY Daily News. And make no mistake, that's what the Charter Superman is really here to deliver:

Money for charter schools exploded from about $32 million to about $659 million over a decade as Bloomberg increased their number from 17 when he took office in 2002 to 125 in 2010-11, the most recent year for which spending data are available.

Why on earth are we wasting our time with this public school stuff? Well, for one thing, we aren't very smart. Clearly the money is in running the charters, not teaching in them. Charter teachers are largely not unionized and subject to the caprices of their employers. I have not met a single student teacher who wanted to work in one except as a last resort.

And where does Mayor Mike get all that money to dump into charters? For one thing, he unilaterally denies teachers the 8% raise virtually all other city workers got between 2008-2010. And this is instructive. When the city pattern is crap, it's sacrosanct, and we have to give the sun, the moon, and the stars to better it. When it's attractive, it's screw you, you will take nothing and like it, and we'll also throw in a junk science evaluation system so you, like the charter teachers, can be fired for no reason.

Charter schools need the money, because they are amazing. What's amazing about charter schools?

Charter schools outperform public schools on many measures, but only 6% of their students are English-language learners, and just 9% of their students have special needs — much lower than the citywide averages.

It's pretty easy to run a school that looks good. All you need are the right students. Make sure you don't take the same mix the community has, which Eva Moskowitz opposed, and then say screw you all when they come to audit you, as Eva Moskowitz did. If that's not your cup of tea, you could just dump an entire cohort of kids, as Geoffrey Canada did.

It's fairly well known that it's harder to teach kids with learning difficulties and kids who don't speak English. It's less well-known that there are varying degrees of learning difficulties and English knowledge. If I were a charter school, I'd simply pick and choose those kids with the most minor problems, say I've taken my share, and leave the real problems to those awful public schools with the unionized teachers.

It's pretty simple, and if I had half a brain I'd get out of the teaching game and pull in the big bucks. Just like Eva and Geoff.

This Is Why I'm a Teacher

I was giving placement tests to incoming ESL students, and a young woman came in with her sister, who'd just gotten here. She said she had graduated from our school recently, and asked about one of my young colleagues. I told her I was sorry, she wasn't here, but why not leave a note? I gave her a piece of paper and she began writing, all excited.

When my colleague got back, I told here there was a note for her. She pulled it out of her mailbox and looked that the smiley faces on its folded cover, and began to resemble them. The note said thank you for all you did for me, thank you for helping me with English, I'm in college now, and concluded asking my colleague to pray for her. I hoped that was out of some religious conviction rather than some sense of hopelessness, but we'll never know.

Nonetheless, my colleague was thrilled, as happy as I've ever seen her. She said, simply, "This is why I'm a teacher." I don't suppose Bill Gates would understand that. Nor would the disingenuous sycophants who leave teaching, take Gates money and flock to astroturf groups like E4E. But I know exactly how she felt. Notes like those mean more than observations from administrators. I treasure them. And the fact is, most of us are moved far more by things like that than getting a few extra bucks for raising test scores.

That's not to say we don't want money. It's atrocious that demagogues like Mike Bloomberg publicly claim to care about education, but actually issue raises to all city employees but educators. We know how little regard he has for us, and how much he cares about stuffing the pockets of entrepreneurs like Eva Moskowitz and Geoffrey Canada. Next month will be four years we've gone without a contract. It's very tough to be treated with such vicious contempt by those who, ostensibly, are your employers.

But we still know what it's all about. We still love the kids. And as our brothers and sisters in Chicago have shown, ultimately it is we, the teachers, who won't back down.

A Vision

One of my daughter's friends, now 17, got a summer job working at IHOP. She was really excited. We went there a few weeks ago and were pretty happy to see a nice kid like her had gotten a job. Daughter was jealous, but at 16, they wouldn't hire her.

A few days ago, my wife saw this girl walking home in her IHOP uniform, and stopped to pick her up. Apparently, the folks at work felt they didn't need her that day. So, after she'd walked a half-hour to work there, they just sent her home, saving whatever pittance they'd have paid her for the day. They must have been too busy to give her a call so she wouldn't waste her time like that. Of course, if they were really busy, why the heck did they send her home?

I don't think I'll be going back there anytime soon, however good the pancakes may be. And I'm pretty sure that even one visit from my little family would more than pay the girl's daily salary, so IHOP is not profiting much from this move. But that's not really my point.

What is? Well, more and more we're accepting the unimaginable. Years ago the UFT went on strike because 19 teachers were involuntarily transferred. Now almost a thousand teachers wander week to week like gypsies and it's sanctioned by our contract. Now we're looking at being judged by methods that are utterly unreliable, flat earth, nonsensical, and the debate with the union is whether it's 20% crap or 40% crap. Actually, the precise amount of crap necessary to evaluate a teacher, or anyone, is zero.

And now there's a shield, supposedly to protect us, so only parents can see our evaluations. Problem is twofold. One--parents will not be aware how much crap the evaluation entails, and may assume it's zero. That will almost certainly be their assumption if they're reading the papers. Second, there's simply no way we will be able to keep parents and the press from attaching names to the public evaluations. They will likely show up on both the net and the tabloids, perhaps even in the Times, whose editorial board likes us about as much as Rupert Murdoch does.

Of course now, no one imagines going to work and being told, "Go home. The kids don't need any more English today." But if this could save money that could go to important things, like the salaries of Eva Moskowitz or Geoffrey Canada, or more importantly, reducing the tax bill of Steve Forbes, it's tough to imagine "reformers" failing to suggest it in a few years, as yet another way to put "children first."

Unless, of course, we get the truth out, and stop them in their tracks.

Don't Know Much About History

Is NY State right to abolish the Global History Regents exam? Lots of us have had our fill of standardized testing, and would like to see far less of it. Of course that's not the case, as the state plans all sorts of nonsense, largely to assess teachers. Kids will be spending hours of potential learning time indulging in nonsensical junk science, to appease those who wish to fire teachers by any means necessary.

The problem with this proposal is not that there will be one fewer test. The problem is the rationale behind eliminating it--that too few students pass it. As the test with the worst record, it needs to be eliminated, disappeared. There is a counter proposal to make two tests rather than one, but that will cost more money. It's kind of amazing where they choose to make cuts--like the January Regents exams that not only allowed kids to graduate on time, but also boosted school stats.

That, of course, was a huge waste of money, as the notion here is to close as many schools as possible. This global exam, though, not only made the schools look bad, but also made the state look bad. That is unacceptable. So, like Geoffrey Canada dumping an entire cohort rather than deal with scores that make his school look bad, the state is exercising its absolute power rather than deal with a problem.

If the state were taking a reasonable approach, like empowering rather than vilifying teachers, we could present history in a way that might actually interest our kids in it. We could incorporate current events, and try to develop involved citizens. Or, we could simply dump the tests, hope interest in history wanes, fire hundreds of teachers who don't contribute to valuable test-taking, and try to raise a generation of citizens who believe people like John King, Mike Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, and Arne Duncan actually work for them rather than zillionaires like Bill Gates.