Those Goshdarn Inconvenient Questions

Yesterday there was an important article in City Limits about an organization I've had questions about for years. Often, when I see their name in the paper, I email the reporter and ask who's in the organization. I seem to remember that the co-called parents union was going to have a big get-together over the perfidy of teachers, or maybe one of those Hollywood productions about how awful we are. Evidently few wanted to go, and they had to cancel it.

Also I knew the parent union was Mona Davids and never saw evidence of another member until this guy Sam someone joined her. I'm not sure whether they came before or after Campbell Brown (or even why we're under constant attack by someone named for a soup can). Still, I know their voices appear in articles that stereotype us as perverts and try to take away our tenure. I grew up being stereotyped and it was no fun at all. Now I teach ESL students, kids from all over the world, and I'm very sensitive to stereotypes. Any of my kids who uses one, and I'm glad to tell you that happens rarely, is surprised to see the lesson stop altogether as I deal with it immediately.

I'm on Facebook a lot and I'm always surprised and disappointed to hear adults use stereotypes. "You libs all think this," or whatever. First of all, anyone who needs to resort to name calling hasn't got much of an idea. Second, a lot of us "libs" no longer blindly support Democrats. I'm a lifelong Democrat, and I keep my registration so I can vote in the primary. But Obama fooled my only once and Cuomo never fooled me at all.

Mona Davids appeared to be an ally of working teachers for a while, but then started taking positions exactly like Campbell Brown. Because a small number of teachers were accused of doing outrageous things we should no longer have due process. The chancellor, who was then denying U-rating appeals at a rate of almost 100%, should decide whether to fire us. No more of this independent arbitrator nonsense. And then, of course, were the dueling lawsuits to end tenure. I can't remember which one is still going forward, but I'm pretty sure one is. Sadly for Mona, she never got nearly the name recognition Campbell Brown walked in with.

And someone has finally bothered to ask questions about her "union."

Reached by phone while on vacation in Florida, the Union's founder and president Mona Davids acknowledged that the four-year-old advocacy group was not listed on Guidestar, an online public register of nonprofits and advocacy groups, nor at CharitiesNYC.org, the New York State Attorney General's website of state nonprofits. 

Davids suggested that her organization's lack of an online paper trail made it more authentic. Her group's 9,000 members, a figure whose provenance Davids said she could not explain at that moment, were "unbought and unbossed," "parents on the ground."

Maybe I should start a union too. Instead of being NYC Educator, I can be the NYC Educator union. I can claim thousands of members and multiply my credibility by just that much more. I can get quoted in papers as President, rather than simply me. And the great thing about that is I won't have to necessarily hold any meetings, show where my funding comes from, account for who is part of my group, or bother with any of that grunt work.

I can say whatever I want, change my mind whenever I want, stop allying with people who decline to fund me, get all sorts of publicity for my group, whether or not there is anyone in it, and show up to public events with maybe one prominent supporter. I'm thinking Arwen. And I'm sure I can talk a few people into coming along with us. Maybe I'll offer them a free drink. Works for E4E.

I'll say the same thing and multiply my voice by 9,000. Or maybe a whole lot more. It's a WIN-WIN.

Beseiged at Every Angle

It's pretty fun to watch Mona Davids and Campbell Brown bicker over who is best to curtail the right of working teachers to due process. Who wins the prize for hating working teachers more? I read that Mona was passing out fake money with Campbell Brown's face on it. After all, how dare Campbell Brown be more famous, have more money, and get more attention than Mona? Who the hell does she think she is?

It's amusing to see someone like Mona fighting money and influence. After all, causes she espouses would not even exist without it. There is no teacher crisis. There is no need for insane and incomprehensible rating systems to fire teachers. And the fact is, even if the handful of examples Campbell Brown walks around reciting like a studious fourth-grader were true the remedy would not be curtailing the rights and academic freedom of all.

In fact, it's a pretty well-established practice in bigotry to use examples of the few to tar the many. Let's not even focus on an ethnic or religious group and rather look at actual criminals. It's a fact that they exist. Were we to extrapolate the Davids-Brown philosophy, we'd eliminate the court system altogether because the guilty are sometimes acquitted. Let's stop coddling the accused with trials and lawyers. If some cop says you're guilty, that's good enough for us. That's pretty much what the teacher-bashers advocate when they say you should be left at the tender mercies of a tool like Dennis Walcott. And the more I see of Carmen Farina the more I wonder whether she's much of a step up.

If you really hate teachers, isn't it enough that you make them sit through 80 minutes of faculty meetings every Monday? If there's a hell, Mona and Campbell will sit through them for all eternity. But that's little practical consolation as they drag us through the press in their quest to make us chattel.

At a recent chapter leader meeting Mulgrew asked whether the PD was like a faculty meeting, and the CLs agreed it was. He stated it ought not to be that way, and spoke of committees, and asserting what's written in the contract. But here's the thing--he can spin the 80 minutes of teacher torture as a victory. When it crashes and burns and they find some other way to waste the extra time they inserted into the day, he'll spin that as a victory too. After all, it was a victory when every aspect of Danielson was included in evaluation, and another victory when it was cut down.

It's so tiring to wonder whether or not the people we pay to represent us will be standing with us or those who'd destroy us. I know that Mulgrew wants to punch me in the face because I oppose Common Core. For now, he's defending our due process. But he seriously weakened it when he helped write the APPR law that can place the burden of proof on us rather than administration.

I sometimes think Cuomo is a better governor than Astorino would be because he has to at least pretend to be a Democrat sometimes. On that basis, I'll have to grant that Mulgrew is a better union president than Campbell Brown would be.

This notwithstanding, I see room for improvement.

Battle of the Titans

In California, a bunch of rich guys got together and pushed a lawsuit designed to shoot teacher tenure right smack between the eyes. After all, if you can't get the law changed, you go wherever your wallet takes you. So in the case of Vergara they've won for the moment, and those awful teachers will have fewer job protections if appeals aren't sustained.

Here in NY it's a little tougher. First of all, the arguments in California were crap to begin with. Firing more teachers will not address the conditions in America that lead children to fail in school. But it's a whole lot cheaper and more efficient to blame teachers than deal with poverty, or people who need to work multiple jobs to barely keep their heads above water. After all, how will Whitney Tilson's hedge fund profit from Walmart and McDonald's if they have to pay workers a living wage?

So here in New York, we heard a great deal from self-appointed education/ legal expert Campbell Brown about how we needed to get rid of teacher tenure. But wait--before Campbell Brown could do it, another self-appointed education/ legal expert, Mona Davids, filed a suit. So the question now becomes which one of these people is out to get us more?

It's tough to say. Brown is married to some bigshot on Students First NY, and is an ex-talking head on CNN. Davids runs something called the NY Parents Union, and vacillates between supporting charters, supporting public education, and going for the throat of working teachers. It appears the whole attacking teachers thing garners more attention this week, so that's what the NY Parents Union is doing. Who knows when they meet, or who's a member other than some unsuccessful Staten Island politician whose name I can't remember? Like Brown, she has a group, it has a name, and that's good enough for the papers.

But there's still the question of who hates working teachers more. How can this be settled? Can they wait until the first day of school, get a bushel of Jersey tomatoes, and see which one can hit the most teachers? I'd say they should save that for when they go after the Jersey teachers, but neither of them is from Jersey. Of course they could both move to Jersey and race to see who can file the suit fastest. That would suit me.

Perhaps they could have a stereotype contest. Which one of them can find the most outrageous story and manage to tar as many working teachers as possible with it? I have to give Brown the edge at this, since it's pretty much her MO. But I think Davids is a quick learner and can give Brown a run for her money if given half a chance. One of the great things about this is that you don't really have to prove anything. I regularly see in the press that the DOE agencies had already found them guilty. But few people understand that OEO is kind of like the police. The police aren't really supposed to arrest people unless they think they're guilty. But guilt is decided by a judge. In our system arbitrators judge.

I don't really care which one of them wins. I fully support tenure. Those of us who choose this profession do so because we care about children. We speak up when they're neglected, even if said neglect is committed by those who supervise us or sign our paychecks. That's our job.

And neither Brown nor Davids is any help whatsoever.