When Things Come Together

 Full disclosure--I may say something good about an AP here, so if you can't take that, please stop reading now.

On Wednesday morning, my colleague Paula Duffy, English teacher and UFT delegate, Eric Mc Carthy, AP Security, and I met near the Francis Lewis trailers at 6 AM. From there, we drove to the Edison Ballroom in Manhattan for the Daily News Hometown Hero Awards.

I had applied posthumously on behalf of my colleague, Kevin O'Connor, who passed away suddenly last Spring. We had known since last summer that he'd won and had to keep it secret. Kevin taught social studies and worked as a dean.

Kevin would surely have done the same for me. Eight years ago I had to take a semester's leave when I got cancer, and he ran around seeking contributions from colleagues. He presented me with a $500 Visa card. That made for a lot of lunch dates for my wife and me before I went back to work.

Kevin had applied for the dean position a few times before he actually got it. He seemed to find his place and a really distinct voice in our school as a dean. He had endless patience for kids, and he had a way of connecting with the most troubled of kids. Kevin had had his own troubles, and he was able to quickly understand what troubled kids needed. Often it was a non-judgmental adult ear, and he was always ready and willing to provide one. Ears like those are hard to find.

Kevin himself found one in our AP Eric McCarthy, who would always listen and help him out with scheduling issues or whatever he needed. Any extended conversation I had with Kevin always included praise for Eric. I was really happy to hear this. As chapter leader, I get to hear absolutely every negative comment about every AP. It was very nice to hear something different for a change, and it's pretty good to be able to repeat it here.

Kevin, like me, had the insane habit of coming to school ridiculously early. He lived in Long Beach, which is not precisely a hop, skip, and a jump from Queens. The only way to beat the traffic is to leave well before you need to. Thus on days when there was some awful accident or something Kevin and I would be among the only people who showed up on time. Our drive to beat the traffic made for many early-morning conversations.

When my colleagues and I got to the Edison Ballroom, they were pretty impressed by the surroundings. I think they expected something like a school breakfast, with tables full of bagels and cream cheese, and a big coffee urn with 500 people waiting in line to take a cup. Instead, we got fresh fruit, table service, eggs, quiche, and asparagus with hollandaise sauce. It was a nice change, though we'd all drunk too much coffee to eat much.

There were celebrity presenters, one for each of the eleven award recipients. There was Chancellor Carmen Fariña, a bunch of TV newscasters, and rapper DMC. But we all almost fell out of our seats when Mayor Bill de Blasio broke from his general comments and started speaking about Kevin O'Connor. It was almost too good to be true to see the Mayor of New York City recognizing someone much beloved by our children, a thousand of whom stood to mourn and praise him at a ceremony held in our courtyard.

We're the largest school system in the country, with 1.1 million students and 76,000 teachers. One out of 300 Americans is a New York City student. So there's a lot of bureaucracy, and a lot of nonsense. There are a lot of people sitting around Tweed who've never taught a day in their lives. There are principals who haven't either. Consequently there's a great deal of nonsense with which we have to contend. (I may even have written about that once or twice.)

But sometimes they really get everything right. On Monday, everything kind of came together, courtesy of sponsors NY Daily News, UFT, CSA, DOE, and CUNY, and the excellent judgment of the mayor, who obviously had choices, and chose to come out and speak about Kevin.

More please.

Familes for Excellent Schools Does an Analysis

I'm always amazed when E4E finds 100 signatures demanding more work for less pay and Chalkbeat NY's subsequent article reports it as though it indicates something that isn't painfully obvious. I can garner 100 signatures on a petition in 90 minutes. Not only that, but if I do such a thing, it's to actually help students rather than advance the druthers of Bill Gates or some other billionaire.

That's why I'm kind of amazed when so-called Families for Excellent Schools, well-known BFFs and staunch supporters of Eva Moskowitz, does one of their studies and it ends up in the Daily News. In fairness, the News specifically portrays them as a pro-charter group, which is a lot better than what Chalkbeat does when they blather about the latest adventures of E4E.

You don't need to be a genius to know that they aren't necessarily families, or that their idea of excellent schools is whatever Eva wants, or whatever Bill Gates happened to pull out of his abundant and fruitful hind quarters on any given morning.

Nonetheless, I read with interest the results of their most recent revelation in today's Daily News.

More than half of all charter schools located within public school buildings are overcrowded compared to only 16% of district schools they share space with, according to the analysis of data conducted by the pro-charter school group Families for Excellent Schools.

The group’s look at city enrollment data also shows that more than half of all charter school students attended overcrowded schools in the 2014-15 school year, compared to only 17% of students in co-located district schools.

Naturally, I'm shocked and stunned. Why aren't the public schools overcrowded? I can only conjecture that's because the city decided not to place charters in overcrowded buildings. Can you imagine? The audacity! But by counting only the buildings containing colocations, the astroturf group misleads the public, and the public are likely to not make this important distinction.

Nonetheless, I can think of several ways to alleviate the issues raised in the piece. If 16 or 17% of the public schools are overcrowded, throw the charters the hell out so that our public school students can have some damn space. What moron decided to overcrowd the schools? Said moron should be fired. And if it's Governor Andrew Cuomo, so much the better.

Families for Excellent Schools CEO Jeremiah Kitteredge says the numbers show that Mayor de Blasio is swindling students of privately run, publicly funded charter schools.

“Even with 150,000 empty seats, this administration chooses to discriminate against public charter school students by granting them less space,” said Kittredge, referring to the number of empty seats projected in a city tally of public schools from 2015.

The notion that de Blasio is giving preferential treatment to public schools, though I wish it were true, is a pants on fire lie. As I pointed out, the FES figure does not take into account public schools that do not have colocations. My school has been over 200% capacity for most of the 20 plus years I've worked there. I have very little sympathy for the largely fabricated and wholly misleading plight Mr. Kittredge bemoans. What, exactly, constitutes overcrowding in a charter? And being as charters commonly shed students without replacing them, haven't they got the means to relieve it? Why the hell don't they if they care so much?

The answer, of course, is they take as large a group as possible, keep the ones they like, and dump the ones on the got to go list. As someone who works in a school that takes everyone, from the high achievers to the alternate assessment, as someone who teaches high-needs kids who wouldn't make it into a Moskowitz Academy on a bet, I have little sympathy for the poor rich charter schools.

The piece refers back to the last revelation FES had, that there are supposedly 150,000 empty seats somewhere in the city.  I have no idea what sort of biased nonsense FES may have utilized to reach that conclusion, but if there are any empty seats, Jesus, send them to us. We have kids sitting in trailers, in converted book rooms, in gyms with basketballs bouncing off the walls, and pretty much everywhere and anywhere we can find space. How about giving our kids a break?

Let Eva Moskowitz take the 35 million bucks she raised and buy a damn building. Why the hell aren't we reading about their spring benefit in the News, the Post, or for Christ's sake in Chalkbeat NY, which writes a feature every time Moskowitz sneezes or E4E announces a bathroom break?

The complaints manufactured by FES are self-serving and ridiculous. Why are they able to play the media like a violin while our leadership sits on its hands? Perhaps because leadership is so busy fighting genuine activists they haven't got the time or inclination to fight our real enemies or reach out to make sure the real story is told.

We certainly can and should do better.

If Reforminess Worked, NYC Would Be a Utopia

I read with interest a Daily News editorial rating Bill de Blasio on education. They say the graduation rate is inching up, and paint that as a legacy of Bloomberg. But Bloomberg controlled the city schools for twelve long, long years and despite his uber-reforminess they are not perfect. Of course it's hard to achieve perfection when people are not perfect. Bloomberg was certainly not perfect, or he wouldn't have bought himself a third term. But as a self-serving, self-important megalomaniac with billions of dollars, he had little choice.

The problem is, under Bloomberg and the geniuses who reside in the Ivory Towers of Albany, our students had little choice too. I remember when special education students could take RCT exams instead of Regents exams. I remember when ESL students were exempt from taking an English Regents exam specifically designed for English speakers. In fact, I'm so old that I remember an English Regents exam that expected me not only to have a knowledge of English and American literature, but also to understand English spelling. Spelling is incredibly illogical in English, but fortunately so am I. Personally, I've found the newer versions of the Regents exams to be not only more and more tedious, but also less and less challenging.

The Daily News looks at the graduation rate as something important, and I don't disagree. But now that we fail to differentiate (funny how teachers are expected to differentiate in classes but there's no such thing in assessment), it's tough for a lot of kids to pass required tests. I teach newcomers, and any reasonable educator would give them an alternate mode of graduation. The state's notion that we can replace English instruction with Common Core-laced subject classes via Part 154 is blatantly idiotic, and will result in even fewer ELLs graduating on time. Of course, this is the price you pay for stacking the Regents with people who are utterly ignorant of language acquisition. I'm sure that they don't bother making allowances for other special needs either.

The News, like most Americans, doesn't bother to question the one-size-fits-all reformy agenda. Most politicians are right there agreeing with them. Now here's the thing. There is nothing wrong with our schools. There is nothing wrong with our teachers. Sure, they aren't perfect. But the fact is every so-called failing school, without exception, has a high percentage of high-needs kids. To assume, because these schools get lower test grades, that they are not as good as schools full of affluent students is simply idiotic. And when I read editorials (not the one to which I linked) saying that poor-scoring schools have poor teachers, I'm also amazed. It doesn't take a genius to know that some kids score higher on standardized tests than others, or that income is among the best predictors of who those kids will be.

That, of course, is why the Moskowitz Academies need a "got to go" list. That is why Geoffrey Canada had to dismiss entire cohorts from his charter school. That's why the charters who boast of their 100% college enrollment rates forget to tell us that they've managed to lose 30-60% of the kids with which they started. Where are the ones that left? Surely in the same public schools being vilified for being so miserable.

Here's an idea. Instead of going on about how the schools suck, why don't we do something about the fact that 23% of our children live in poverty? Why don't we raise taxes on folks like Michael Bloomberg and actually help these kids? Because I'll tell you something--when you're hungry, when your house is cold,  when your parents can't afford to take time off from their multiple jobs, when parents have no time for their kids, when you have no health benefits or care, standardized tests become a whole hell of a lot less important.

That's why Bloomberg made no difference (though I don't recall the News or any paper holding him to task over that), and that's why, as long as de Blasio accepts reformy premises, he won't make a whole lot of difference either.