NY State's Unity Caucus Launches a Despicable Attack Against PJSTA President Beth Dimino

NYS Unity Caucus, of course, is the one that's behind Revive NYSUT. This is the Caucus that promised to oppose Common Core and Cuomo. Yet Karen Magee, pictured at left, offered the logical fallacy that it was CCSS or chaos at an AFT convention. That's called a black and white fallacy, insinuating that there are only two possiblities when there are, in fact, many more. Another Revive lie, also in the picture, was its claim to be against Cuomo. Revive/ Unity failed to oppose him not only in two primaries featuring the incredible Zephyr Teachout, but also in the general election.

Revive was a coup in NYSUT that was supported by Michael Mulgrew and his loyalty oath signing UFT Unity Caucus. UFT is by far the largest group in NYSUT and is pretty much the tail that wags the dog.

The NYS Unity blog is a largely self-congratulating tool, a piece in its ineffectual social media arsenal. It doesn't publish much, but just attacked my friend PJSTA President Beth Dimino. It is not widely read, and I'd never seen it until someone sent me the link. I'm not going to link or send traffic to it, but I will respond to it. Let's begin with the first sentence:

It is with great regret that we feel compelled to respond to a recent yet familiar rant by Beth Dimino, Chair of the Stronger Together Caucus and President of the Port Jefferson Station Teachers Association on Facebook. 

First of all, this is classic passive aggressiveness. We're sorry, but.... Everyone knows that once you say "but," you can disregard everything that's come before it. If they regretted it so much they would not say it. A claim like that is plainly disingenuous.

The UNITY Caucus has taken the high road for a year and a half but eventually, enough is enough.

I'm not particularly sure what the high road is for Unity Caucus. This smells like the same writer who did a similar hatchet job on me, full of nonsensical strawman assertions. In fact, AFT President Randi Weingarten thought that was just fine, and linked to it on Twitter.  She removed the link after I pointed out that the writer, by falsely calling me a part time teacher and part time unionist, managed to insult not only me, but also every UFT chapter leader in the city.  

I will spare you some of the invective, but this piece revolves around her refusal to pay into VOTE-COPE, known in NYC simply as COPE. This is the political fund used by NYSUT and UFT. It is, in fact, completely optional. There are things, most obviously NYSUT's failure to oppose Cuomo, and its dominance by folks who mistake logical fallacy for argument, that cause people like Beth (and me) to question their judgment. Here's more from Unity:

By publicly encouraging others to defund VOTE-COPE on Facebook, “Go into school tomorrow and reduce your VOTE-COPE contributions to $0.00!” she is feeding conservative legislators the ammunition they need to pull our union apart.

First of all, it wasn't Beth Dimino who gave tens of thousands of dollars to Senator Flanagan, who has helped enable the reforminess now making NYSUT members miserable statewide. It wasn't Beth Dimino who supported Senator Serphin Maltese, who helped break two Catholic school unions. Nor was it Beth Dimino who supported George Pataki, who thanked us by vetoing improvements to the Taylor Law. No, that was our COPE money. 

Some might say she should consider joining in with the Koch brothers and other right winged-politicians if her goal is to kill the union.

Let's be clear--this writer just said that, while attempting to sugar-coat the statement with "Some might say." Let's further examine the logical fallacy inherent in this sentence. Obviously, there's that strawman. Beth Dimino is one of the most passionate unionists I've ever met. The notion that she wants to kill union is preposterous, a pure concoction of the Unity writer. Secondly, by invoking the Koch Brothers, there's guilt by association, another logical fallacy. 

Let's be further clear that there is a movement to kill union and it is in no way supported by Beth Dimino. It is enabled, however, by our history of concession to reforminess. Look at the UFT 2005 Contract. Look at Michael Mulgrew helping to craft the APPR law. Look at him praising the Heavy Hearts legislature for making it worse. Look at Bill Gates addressing the AFT Convention. And those are just a few of the low lights.

When you cannot muster a proactive argument, logical fallacy is one way to go. What's truly pathetic is that this is what our leadership chooses to put forth as their voice. Among teachers, there are quite a few thinkers, quite a few creative and passionate souls. Judging from what passes for argument among leadership, and how they choose to treat people who speak their minds, they haven't got the remotest notion what a creative and passionate thinker even is.

Related: PJSTA defends its President. 

Related: ICE-UFT blog

Frank Bruni Waxes Poetic on the Teacher Shortage

It must be great to be Frank Bruni. One day you're a food columnist, and the next you're an education expert. Today Frank is all upset about the teacher shortage. After all, his own paper wrote a big story about it. Nowhere did they bother acknowledging that teachers are pretty much under nationwide assault, but hey, why sweat the details when you're writing for the Paper of Record? The fact that they print the column should be good enough for anyone.

As it happens, Bruni himself is a prominent teacher basher. He believes passionately in junk science rating of teachers and can't be bothered to do the most fundamental research. Who cares if the American Statistical Association says teachers change test scores by a factor of 1-14%? What's the big deal if they say use of high stakes evaluation is counter-productive? He knows some guy who likes it and that should be good enough for anyone. Bruni does other important work, like spitting out press releases for Joel Klein's latest book.

But now he's amazed no one wants to be a teacher. Naturally, being a New York Times reporter who has access to pretty much anyone, he goes right to the source, the very best representative of teachers he can muster:

Teachers crave better opportunities for career growth. Evan Stone, one of the chief executives of Educators 4 Excellence, which represents about 17,000 teachers nationwide, called for “career ladders for teachers to move into specialist roles, master-teacher roles.”

“They’re worried that they’re going to be doing the same thing on Day 1 as they’ll be doing 30 years in,” he told me.

This is what Frank Bruni interprets as vision. Let's make one thing clear--Evan Stone is not a teacher. He was for a few excruciating and clearly unrewarding years. But once he learned all he could from that dead end job, he started this glitzy new E4E thing and got his hands on Gates money. Now he gets to make pronouncements to distinguished NY Times reporters like Bruni. Meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck actually teaching children. Naturally Bruni doesn't ask us what we think. After all, given our obvious lack of ambition, what could we possibly know?

Bruni has gala luncheons to attend, fois gras to critique, and he can't be bothered.  Still just because Evan Stone's E4E got 17, 000 people to sign papers in exchange for free drinks doesn't mean they actually represent those people. I happen to know, for example, a UFT official who signed the paper just to see what was going on at one of those meetings.

In fact, there's no evidence to indicate anything E4E says is based on anything beyond Bill Gates's druthers. Their support for junk science and calls to actually worsen already tough working conditions border on lunacy. Their acceptance of reformy money and embrace of a reformy agenda mean they do NOT represent working teachers.

Here's something no one told Frank Bruni--teachers who want to "get out of the classroom" make the very worst educational leaders there are. How many of us have worked under supervisors who don't love our job, who can't do our job, but who don't hesitate to tell us all the ways we do our job wrong? How many of us know the, "Do as I say, not as I do." mantra well enough it might be tattooed on our foreheads?

Yes, Frank Bruni, there is a teacher shortage. And yes, there are reasons for it. Some reasons are your BFFs like Joel Klein, Campbell Brown, and Gates-funded astroturf groups like E4E. They spout nonsense-based corporate ideas designed to destroy public education and union. You talk to them and can't be bothered with us.

Another big reason is mainstream media, which hires people like you. When people read nonsense like the stuff you write, they may not know that fundamental research is something you consider beyond the pale. They may not be aware that your piece does not entail talking to working teachers. They may think we don't love our jobs and we don't love working with and helping children. They may not know that merit pay, which E4E is pushing in one form or another, has been around for 100 years and has never worked. They may even think that Evan Stone knows what he's talking about.

But he doesn't, Frank. And neither do you. That's why you're a big part of the problem.

All's Fair in Love and Teacher-Bashing

I'm a teacher, so I write about education. But if I were a NY Times columnist, I could write about hedge funds. I probably wouldn't write very well about them because I'm not really clear on what they are. But, like NY Times columnists, hedge fund guys are education experts no matter what, and turnabout is fair play, so there you go.

Frank Bruni used to be a food writer. I'm sure if you want to know where you can get a souffle, he's your guy. Now he's writing about tenure. Here's how he begins:

Mike Johnston’s mother was a public-school teacher. So were her mother and father. And his godfather taught in both public and private schools.

What Mr. Bruni has here is an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy designed to make us accept an argument whether or not it has merit. And there's more of that here.

Arne Duncan, the education secretary, praised the decision. Tenure even drew scrutiny from Whoopi Goldberg on the TV talk show “The View.” She repeatedly questioned the way it sometimes shielded bad teachers.

Well, if they think so, then it must be true, right? After all, they're famous, so they must know. Is that a good argument, or another appeal to authority? Or is it the bandwagon fallacy--Everyone's doing it, so it must be right. Let's take a look at the background of Colorado State Senator Johnston, on whose say-so Bruni appears to have determined tenure is no good:

Johnston spent two years with Teach for America in Mississippi in the late 1990s. Then, after getting a master’s in education from Harvard, he worked for six years as a principal in public schools in the Denver area, including one whose success drew so much attention that President Obama gave a major education speech there during his 2008 presidential campaign.

There's an expert for you. After all, he spent two whole years as a teacher. (That's almost as long as Reformy John King, who spent two in a charter and one in a public school.) Now me, I'd suggest that's not nearly enough time to be a qualified principal, let alone an expert on teachers or tenure. The fact is most teachers love the classroom, and want to be there. I know I do. I question the dedication and ability of anyone who needs to get out after two years.

Take a look at how vague that paragraph is. Six years as a principal, including one that was, supposedly, very successful. First, he was not principal of any single school for six years. Second, who knows how long he was principal of this successful school, who knows whether he was principal when Obama showed up, and who really thinks Obama, who hired DFER stooge Duncan as Education Secretary, knows or cares what a good public school is? Doesn't Obama send his own kids to Sidwell Friends, where they aren't subject to the reformy nonsense he and Arne impose on the rest of us?

And isn't this entire paragraph yet another appeal to authority--authority that is plainly questionable? Isn't TFA a political organization that sends five-week teachers to public schools, an organization that happily sends its young dilettantes to take the positions of Chicago teachers who've been dismissed by Rahm, an organization that got Arne Duncan to declare its five-week wonders were "highly qualified?" I'm left questioning not only Bruni's appeal to authority, but the authority with which we're presented. Let's take a look at what passes for actual argument in Bruni's piece:

“Do you have people who all share the same vision and are willing to walk through the fire together?” he said. Principals with control over that coax better outcomes from students, he said, citing not only his own experience but also the test scores of kids in Harlem who attend the Success Academy Charter Schools.

We've already explored Johnston's experience. Now let's take a look at the Moskowitz academies he so reveres. They have fewer kids with special needs than public schools do, and when kids don't meet expectations, they simply get rid of them. If you let public schools pick and choose, their test scores will go up too. What neither Bruni nor his expert understand is that we serve all kids, we take them as they come, and we don't dump them simply because they struggle, or misbehave, or whatever.

“You saw that when you could hire for talent and release for talent, you could actually demonstrate amazing results in places where that was never thought possible,” he said. “Ah, so it’s not the kids who are the problem! It’s the system.”

And yet, even disregarding Johnson's limited experience and poor grasp of Moskowitz schools, as well as his and Bruni's total lack of documented evidence, this entire concept is an anecdote. We don't even know what he bases it on. But it's the same reformy boilerplate--no excuses. We'll ignore poverty and just focus on the test scores. Was Johnston's school consistently successful? If so, how? If so, why? Who knows?

We need to pay good teachers much more.

Note that it's not "teachers," but rather "good teachers." There are several assumptions implicit here. One, of course, is that of the zombie plague of bad teachers that threatens both mom and apple pie. The other, of course, is that we need merit pay. This indicates that Bruni has not bothered to research merit pay, which has been rearing its ugly head for a hundred years and has never worked anywhere.

Here is Johnston's brainchild, the model to which Bruni sees us aspiring:

I sat down with Johnston, a Democrat who represents a racially diverse chunk of this city in the State Senate, because he was the leading proponent of a 2010 law that essentially abolished tenure in Colorado. To earn what is now called “non-probationary status,” a new teacher must demonstrate student progress three years in a row, and any teacher whose students show no progress for two consecutive years loses his or her job protection.

This is entirely based on value-added, judging from what Bruni says. This method is dubious at best, and junk science at worst. Regular readers of this blog know I see it as the latter. Bruni also bemoans job protections many Americans would envy. I don't blame them. I'm reminded of the story where one farmer says of another, "He has a cow, and I don't. I want his cow to die." For goodness sake, wouldn't it be better if both farmers had cows? My favorite argument in the column, though, comes from newly self-proclaimed education expert Whoopi Goldberg:

“Parents are not going to stand for it anymore,” she said. “And you teachers, in your union, you need to say, ‘These bad teachers are making us look bad.’ ”

This reminds me of nothing so much as the favored argument of bigots. "The bad ones spoil it for the good ones." Why not apply the same logic to criminal justice? Some of those criminals are just bad, so no due process for them. Just toss them in jail without any costly and inconvenient jury trial, because Whoopi Goldberg and Frank Bruni think it's OK.

Another argument bigots favor is, "I'm not a bigot. I know some of those people."

And waddya know, Johnston has teachers in his family. So he must be totally objective. And Bruni writes for the NY Times. So he must also be objective, with no ax to grind whatsoever. Doubtless it's mere coincidence that he was a guest at the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Campbell Brown, and that he failed to disclose it.

After all, Campbell Brown herself forgot to mention that her husband was a bigshot at Students First, so stuff like that raises no question whatsoever in what passes for journalism these days.

Update: From Leonie Haimson--you left out the most pathetically outrageous thing Johnston said: 

"[Tenure] has a decimating impact on morale among staff, because some people can work hard, some can do nothing, and it doesn’t matter.” 

You see, tenure is what hurting teacher morale, see, not widespread teacher bashing by policymakers and the media, and their insistence that bad teaching is to blame for low student achievement, and/or the concomitant move to diminish their autonomy, disrespect their expertise, and take away their job security, pension, etc.

Campbell Brown's Law

I try to help kids every day, but they're all different. I'd like them all to pass, but they don't. It's funny because I feel very bad for many of those who don't. Yet NY State assumes that I want to pass them all for no reason and thus does not allow me to grade their standardized tests.

On the other hand, I was once at a meeting where we brainstormed ways to pass everyone. It was ridiculous. It's somewhat understandable, because when you instigate a culture in which you close schools based on test scores, in which you send teachers out as wandering subs, Campbell's Law says corruption will ensue.

But Campbell Brown's Law is different. Campbell Brown's Law says whatever goes wrong in school is the fault of the tenured teachers. If you fail, it's because the teacher had tenure and therefore failed you. Absolutely everyone is a great parent, so that has nothing to do with how children behave. Campbell Brown's Law says parents have no influence whatsoever on their children. If parents have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, that will have no effect. If they provide no supervision because they aren't around, that won't affect kids either.

Campbell Brown's Law says kids themselves are not responsible either. If they don't study, that isn't their fault. The teacher should have made them study. If they fail tests because they didn't study, it's a crime and the teacher should be fired. Under Campbell Brown's Law the only obstacle to studying is if the teacher has tenure. This is unacceptable and it is therefore the reason that the parents work 200 hours a week. It's also the reason the kids didn't study. The kids figured they didn't have to study because their teachers had tenure.

Campbell Brown's Law is demonstrated in charter schools, where teachers don't have tenure. All kids excel in charter schools, except for those who don't. That explains why, in some charter schools, that all the students who graduate are accepted to four-year colleges. It's neither here nor there if two-thirds of the students who began ended up getting insufficient standardized test scores and getting dumped back into public schools. That's not the fault of the charter teachers, because they don't have tenure and are therefore blameless. Campbell Brown's Law says so.

In fact, as long as the teachers don't have tenure, it's OK for kids to fail in charter schools. And once again, all kids pass in charter schools, except for those who don't. That's why charter teachers, like students and parents, have no responsibility whatsoever. Also, under Campbell Brown's law, the charter owners aren't responsible either, and may continue to collect their half-million dollar salaries. That's not part of the problem because it's important for charter school owners to hobnob with the well-to-do. You can't just waltz into an Eva Moskowitz gala fund raiser in some tux you rented from the Men's Wearhouse.

And you'd better watch out if you teach ESL, like me. If your kids don't speak English and arrived in the United States five minutes ago, that's your fault too. Of course if you're a charter, you almost certainly don't accept kids like that so you're blameless. It's not Eva Moskowitz' fault she doesn't take those kids because she, after all, is not a tenured teacher and therefore earns every cent of her 500K salary. She can expand as much as she likes because Governor Cuomo says so, and not only does he not have tenure, but he also fires anti-corruption committees at will just because he can. 

In short, if you're a tenured teacher, you are an impediment to Excellence. The only way you can help children is by getting rid of your tenure, standing up straight and walking to Arne Duncan in Washington DC and saying, "Please sir, I want to be fired for any reason. Or for no reason. I want to take personal responsibility for all the ills of society. Neither you, society, poverty, parents, nor children themselves are responsible. I'm ready to be dismissed at the whim of Bill Gates or the Walmart family and I agree with you that Katrina was the bestest thing to happen to the New Orleans education system."

Me, I'm still a tenured teacher, and teaching teenagers can be trying sometimes.  Still, none of them seem to entertain theories remotely outlandish as those of Arne Duncan or Campbell Brown.

Cyber Charter Whoppers on TV

I was pretty surprised to turn on my TV this morning and see a commercial for a company called K12. This company sells education via computer. The commercial showed loving parents, and suggested that if you really loved your kids you'd sign up right away. There's no charge because K12 is a public school. That's true in the sense that you won't be paying out of pocket. But we're most certainly subsidizing the company via our tax dollars.

In less than a minute I pulled up what Diane Ravitch had to say about K12. It appears even DFER guru Whitney Tilson finds it subpar. That's saying a lot. Whitney Tilson runs a hedge fund and is bullish on anti-worker companies like McDonald's and Walmart. It's tough to imagine the depths to which a company must sink to incur his disapproval.

My kid is not a scholar, but she's very social. Had I placed her in front of a computer rather than with a peer group, she'd probably hate me. One of the most shortsighted things about corporate reform is the notion that standardized test scores tell the story of how well kids do in school. We're always reading about college readiness, and how students need so many points on a Regents exam to demonstrate it. Of course that's arbitrary and ridiculous.

I know very few people who get through life by taking standardized tests, more precisely zero. But getting along with people is key to pretty much any profession. I'm not personally persuaded sitting kids in front of computers is any substitute for interaction with peers and teachers. Ravitch's most recent book, Reign of Error, is full of tales of cyber-charters that fail to help our kids.

Sadly, few people who see this commercial will bother to look up anything about this company. It's kind of remarkable that we're publicly funding a virtual school that has the cash to promote itself on television. I guess when you don't need to pay for brick and mortar, and when you hire very few teachers with who knows what qualifications you can use your money elsewhere.

But I'd rather see my kid facing a real teacher every day. For me, much as I love computers, I don't see them as role models. And the neediest of our children are those most in need of role models, real people who can show them they have a chance of success. As we eliminate teacher jobs, we also eliminate opportunities for our children.

More importantly, children are in the process of learning. They need supervision, even if they fight us tooth and nail. They need guidance, and no matter how good we may be as parents, they need more and more varied role models.

Cyber charters are a bad idea, and everything I read about them (aside from their advertising) indicates they're cash cows for entrepreneurs. Schools ought to be about helping our children, not making people rich. It's particularly egregious when those getting rich appear to care about nothing beyond their own enrichment.

I wouldn't pay them to babysit my kid if they came to my house. No way in hell would I trust their computer programs to provide my kid education.

It's borderline criminal that people watching these commercials can't know what they're buying.

Media Mendacity--NY Post Covers the MTA Contract

I'm always amazed at the audacity with which the truth is twisted in our media. The MTA came to an agreement with Governor Andrew Cuomo over a five year contract, and the Post is upset because they view it as costly. Evidently paying people to work is an inconvenience that ought to be avoided at any cost. But here's how the Post sees it:

...the 34,000 TWU members who work for the state-run MTA just got a great deal from Gov. Cuomo: five years’ worth of raises, plus a bunch of new goodies.

That sounds great, doesn't it? Who wouldn't want a great deal? I haven't had a raise in over five years, and I certainly want a great deal. But then you come to this:

...they can expect 8.25 percent raises over the five years between 2012 and 2016. That’s likely to run only slightly behind inflation.

Wait a minute.  It's running slightly behind inflation? I'm not an economist, but doesn't that mean MTA members will effectively be earning less by the end of this contract? I grant that it's only slightly less, but how on earth does making less equal a great deal? I'd have thought earning more would be a better deal, and earning less, even a little less would not be a good deal at all. Yet the Post editorial board thinks it's great. But there's more:

The average transit worker can expect to earn above $75,000 with this $6,000 or so raise — and will only have to pay $400 more in annual health-care costs in return.

So they actually get even less. Sure, 400 bucks a year probably won't fundamentally affect your lifestyle. But when you're already making effectively less money it doesn't particularly help either. Here's another thing that upsets the NY Post:

They’ll now have two weeks’ paid maternity and paternity leave, plus better dental and eye care, as Samuelson said yesterday.

Wow. That's awful. How can we give new parents time with their children? What if everyone had dental and eye care? That would be awful! Why should we encourage working people to take care of their eyes and teeth? How does that help our country? And why should we care whether or not they're healthy? Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?

It's a little scary that if you read this uncritically, you'll think that it's reasonable. If you read David Brooks uncritically, you'll think that Common Core is reasonable. Does anyone seriously believe that the corporate interests that pimp Common Core want our kids to question the bilge that passes for commentary in the Post?

What's reasonable is leaving an America with more, not fewer, opportunities for our children. And that means, at the very least, casting a critical eye on the sloppy nonsense Rupert Murdoch would have us accept as journalism in our beloved US of A.

Examined further at Perdido Street

Fire Them All, Says Daily News

The Daily News gets one thing almost right in its otherwise deplorable editorial:

It is insane for the New York City public school system to keep 1,200 unwanted teachers on the payroll, at a cost of more than $100 million annually.

It's insane that they spend all that money without putting the teachers to work, that's for sure. And it would be very easy to give them jobs with the full blessing of city principals. I'll get to that later.

That's the first line, actually. From there, it's all downhill. Let's not blame this all on the Daily News. I'm fairly certain I've read the same thing in NY Times editorials, which leads me to ponder one thing---where the hell is that liberal bias they're always complaining about on Fox News?

It's been clear to me for many years that newspapers hate unions, and hate having to follow the rules they've contractually agreed upon. Why shouldn't people work all night and all day? Why can't we just give raises to people to whom we're related? Why the hell do they have to eat lunch? How can I eat lunch if I have to make time for others to do it?

Anyway, this is not all the fault of management. For example, I was at a school that was slated for closure, but I got out. I used a UFT transfer in 1992. My then boss had a Spanish teacher who frequently threw kids out of class. I never threw kids out of class. To make her life easier, she threatened me. Either I would teach all Spanish, or she would give me a program so late I couldn't make it to my second job.

I transferred. I had that option. It wasn't, in fact, that I was a bad teacher. I was facing punishment for the unforgivable offense of being good at one aspect of my job.

But, in one of the worst deals in my living memory, UFT gave up seniority transfers in 2005, allowing News editorial writers to conclude the only reason teachers weren't placed was their incompetence. It's surely completely unrelated that DOE now forces schools to pay salaries out of school budgets, and it's sheer coincidence that the overwhelming majority of ATR teachers are senior. Why bother protecting people who've worked all their lives when we can simply toss them out with the trash? That's precisely the future the Daily News is advocating for us and our children.

I've seen Michael Mulgrew at the DA announcing the new program was better, because there are more transfers. You see that? Sometimes Mulgrew thinks more is better, even while not thinking MORE is better. Nonetheless, shortly after I started this blog, I had an email dialogue with a teacher who was despondent at the prospect of being an ATR. She soon resigned, and Bloomberg won that one.

UFT leadership did not expect Joel Klein would continue to hire new teachers before ATR teachers were placed, nor did they anticipate how ATRs would be used as scapegoats and punching bags for our union-bashing press corps. In my view, the ATR brigade was the very worst aspect of the awful 2005 contract. Of course, making them move around week to week has made it even worse.

I was at the DA when the ATR vote took place. Several higher-ups in the UFT assured me that the DOE was inept, that they were disorganized, and that they'd never figure out how to send teachers place to place week to week. Jamaica Chapter Leader James Eterno told me they would certainly do it, and to vote no. As the other part of this agreement was that no teachers would be fired, I abstained. But Eterno was right, and it's highly doubtful that Bloomberg, after wasting months trying to kill LIFO, would have followed through and fired all those newbie teachers.

In any case, given we have the highest class sizes in history, it's insane to fire the ATR teachers. If indeed there are some who are as bad as the paper says, maybe they shouldn't be placed. But if Bill de Blasio really wants to do something, he can offer the services of these teachers to schools without having them pay from the school budget. Then we'd really know how much principals want these teachers.

Some of these teachers, I know, are carrying scarlet letters issued by Emperor Bloomberg. Their files pretty much instruct principals not to hire them. These letters, or marks, or whatever they are, ought to be removed, and principals ought to be able to interview these candidates unhampered by the prejudices of the now-abdicated Emperor.

I know two ATR teachers very well. Both of them deserve to work, and both should be placed. Just because the papers hate union is no reason to hurt working people. The News editorial is old news, old advice, and old ideas. I very much doubt such ideas will fly in Bill de Blasio's New York.

Real people voted for a real mayor, and we will see the sort of real changes we've been too scared to even contemplate for the last two interminable decades.

What You Aren't Reading in Gotham Schools Could Fill a Battleship

I was pretty surprised last summer when Gotham Schools managed to cover Moskowitz rallies at least three times while ignoring a UFT press conference to stop Bloomberg from imposing his destructive policies on his predecessor. When I confronted them about it, they gave me a line about giving their people days off. Evidently, I, as a union advocate, was being petty about their giving immense coverage to one side of a story and none to the other.

Last year I asked whether getting coverage for 100 signatures on a petition was unique to E4E. I was told in the comments that it wasn't, and that anyone could do it. So I made a petition asking for equal consideration for all ESL students when taking the English Regents. A Gotham reporter called me, asked all about the petition, and then proceeded to do nothing whatsoever about it.

When I emailed someone there about their fawning coverage of E4E, I was asked to write a piece explaining why I felt they did not represent the overwhelming majority of working teachers. Not only did they not run it, but they never even responded to it. So as not to waste my time, I modified it and got it published elsewhere. Two weeks ago I had a piece in the Daily News which they failed to link to. I cannot recall reading a single teacher-bashing editorial in the NY Post that didn't make Rise and Shine, including a remarkably ridiculous piece from their favorite E4E/ failed teacher/ current school administrator.

In any case, here's another story that didn't make Rise and Shine today. Apparently, although Gotham felt it important to tell us how much John King hates Buffalo public schools, it's of no consequence that there is dissent among the state Regents. Why bother telling readers that anyone as important as a NY State Regent has issues with Common Core?

Regent Betty A. Rosa wants people to know that her board of 17 members aren't all in agreement about the public education reform agenda that's currently upsetting many parents, teachers and school administrators statewide.

In fact, she thinks the Common Core program is based on incomplete, manipulated data.
"They are using false information to create a crisis, to take the state test and turn it on its head to make sure the suburbs experience what the urban centers experience: failure," said Rosa, a former teacher, principal and superintendent from the Bronx.

Even more egregious, though, is the remarkably one-sided coverage of the Brooklyn version of the John King traveling medicine show. For example, were you relying on Gotham Schools, you would not know that Students First NY was allowed in 30 minutes before the public was told to come, and neither would you know that they were all issued talking points for their two-minute presentations.

Perhaps there was some reason why that did not bear mention. Perhaps the reporters didn't discover this until after other papers. Nonetheless, it's nothing short of disgraceful that they represent themselves as offering balanced coverage, yet fail to tell their readers about the clearly corporate-stacked deck.

They can change their name to Chalkboard NY, but if we continue to get the same one-sided reporting they may as well merge with Fox News.

NY Times Uncritically Hypes Corporate Agenda

The next time I read or hear that education is the civil rights issue of our time, I'm going to projectile vomit. So you'd best get out of my way quickly. Reformy John is no Dr. King, no matter what the paper of record may believe.

Tonight John and Silent Merryl have yet another meeting with New Yorkers. They will sit, nod their heads, pretend they care what people say, and then go on their golly gosh-darn way doing whatever the hell they please. They'll say we need to stay the course, and perhaps they will make some adjustments, and blah, blah, blah.

Then the self-righteous corporate columnists from the NY Times will continue to claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that we need to move ahead with this untested and unproven Common Core mandate, because no one can possibly learn anything unless the hundreds of millions Bill Gates invested drive American public education. That's odd, because Gates himself has no idea whether the ideas he's forced on our children will work. He says it will take ten years to find out, and has no compunctions about using our children as guinea pigs.

Meanwhile, the great minds at the NY Times are keenly focused on helping education. The only way to do so, in their view, is to use not only reformy curricula that's never been tested, but also to use things that have never worked anywhere, like merit pay. Though it's been around for over a hundred years and has failed everywhere it's been tried, the NY Times editorial board can't be bothered doing any research whatsoever. After all, many of them wear bow ties, and if that isn't credibility, what is?

The Times has also had it with all this seniority nonsense. After all, it's better to use criteria like value-added, which has also never been proven effective anywhere. Perhaps the Times wishes us to use multiple measures, like who washed the principal's car most recently, or who spent last Tuesday at a Comfort Inn with the odd AP.

The Times also has issues with salary increasing as teachers spend more years in the system, because who the hell wishes to foster long-term commitment in a job like that? Better to declare TFA 6-week wonders highly-qualified, sweep them out after two or three years, then open up an entire new can of teachers to experiment on public school children.

Let's fire all the ATR teachers, most displaced for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's a much better idea than actually putting them to work. Why should we use working teachers to help children or reduce class sizes when we can simply fire them? Won't that be more beneficial to our most important educational goal--reducing the tax bill of Michael Bloomberg and his cronies?

And hey, let's make public schools more like charter schools. We've learned it's OK to drop entire cohorts, like Geoffrey Canada did, and to resist accepting representative populations, or public scrutiny, like Eva Moskowitz does. We've learned it's OK to pay obscene sums to charter leaders, and to share the wealth with Mike Bloomberg's other BFFs. Why not exclude high-needs kids from not only charters, but public schools as well? That will certainly raise those test scores, which are clearly the only measure of student achievement.

And let's give up on how many hours teachers work. Let's give them cell phones so they can answer questions 24-7, because teachers don't need private lives. They don't deserve social lives or families and neither do any working Americans. Such frivolities should be the exclusive province of writers who can't be bothered doing the most cursory research before issuing pontifications on how the rest of the world should live.


Because that's the sort of crap you get from the New York Times. And if they're this abysmal on education reporting, who knows what sort of crap you get if you rely on them for national and international news? They've blundered in the past, and their lame reporting may have been largely responsible for the wasteful debacle that is the Iraq war.

What will they surprise us with next?

Hedge Fund Nation

It's time we got together and discussed precisely what was going on in hedge funds. Now I don't personally know what a hedge fund is, or what it does, but I know that a lot of hedge-funders have become deeply involved in education. Therefore, I think it's only reasonable that I chair a national movement to discuss hedge funds.

We will convene next month. I've compiled a list of panel members. I will chair, as I have, if you don't mind my tooting my own horn, trimmed a hedge or two in my time. When I was a child, I lived in a home with a pretty substantial row of hedges in front. Naturally, our panel will be fair and balanced.

We will feature Reality-based educator, who will, as he's anonymous, be appearing with the traditional bag over his head.  RBE is well-known for his political commentary, and may actually have some idea what a hedge-fund is or does. Being broad minded, we won't hold that against him.

Also on the panel is Norm Scott, well-known educational gadfly, who will give us chapter and verse on his feelings about hedge funds. While I doubt he actually has any, I'm sure he'll find something to talk about.

I've also invited Michael Cleveland, who I think is the best fiddle player in the country. He has been playing fiddle since he was four years old, and plays with precision and fluid imagination second to no one. I realize a lot of people may not be interested in fiddle, but I am, so I don't care.

Naturally, a panel of this sort would not be complete without Fred Klonsky, with whom I had a beer in DC once. He's also a gifted artist, delivering some of the coolest drawings I've ever seen on his blog, and a noted authority on Chicago cuisine, including but not limited to deep dish pizza, beer-steamed brats, and those hot dogs with the stuff all over them.

Another great addition is the woman who works at my local pizzeria. I don't remember her name, but this place serves the very best pizza in my town. I'm particularly fond of the white spinach slices.

Next is one of the security guards at my daughter's school. He's really a pretty cool guy, and knows some jokes I've never heard before. As this will be televised, I will ask him to refrain from telling any.

I will, of course, be inviting Chaz, who's currently working as an ATR teacher. He is not sure about all this social justice stuff, but that's OK because we're talking hedge funds.

Finally, I will be inviting noted education scholar Diane Ravitch. I'm pretty sure she doesn't know anything about hedge funds either, but since she didn't get an invitation to NBC's Education Nation, featuring renowned educational experts like Goldie Hawn, this is the least I can do to make up for it.

Diane Ravitch, Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos

According to Jim Hightower, yellow stripes and dead armadillos are the only things you'll find in the middle of the road. And yet Jessica Levin, happily bad-mouthing Diane Ravitch over at Huffington Post, paints corporate reformers as occupying some middle ground. Levin, ruminating on Ravitch's book while showing little to no evidence she understands it, actually cites Michelle Rhee as one of these moderate voices. I'm reminded of another quote:

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

~Jonathan Swift

Ms. Levin appears to represent one of the first dunces to venture forth into the arena after having purported to read Ravitch's book. Levin finds hitherto unsung nuance in reforminess:

Ravitch claims all education reformers are bent on promoting privatization, vouchers, and for-profit schools. However, most of those I interviewed have little faith in market solutions to improve schools systemically. They won't actively oppose vouchers because they refuse to tell poor parents what they wouldn't tolerate hearing themselves: "Your kids must stay in this failing school while we spend a decade trying to fix it." But many talked about vouchers and for-profits as distractions more than game changers. 

So let's understand this. The corporate reformers oppose vouchers, but won't say they do. The important thing is what they think, not what they do, and of course to move the kids from so-called failing schools. Whether or not they address the underlying issues that cause low test scores, like poverty, learning disabilities, or lack of English, is of no consequence. Whether the schools prove better, equal, or worse than the "failing" schools is also unimportant. Note also that Levin says nothing whatsoever to suggest these "moderates" oppose privatization or for-profit schools in any way whatsoever. Yet she has the audacity to refer to Ravitch as "simplistic." Simplistic is a word I'd use for anyone uncritically viewing Levin's piece.

Levin further contends that reformy folk does not overemphasize testing. I'm not sure which astral plane Ms. Levin resides in, but in this one high-stakes tests determine whether or not schools stay open, and whether or not teachers remain employed. Levin praises Race to the Top, which enables this. She seems blissfully unaware there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that there is any validity whatsoever to value-added ratings.

Even as Teach for America inductees actively steal the jobs of laid-off Chicago teachers, Levin musters the audacity to suggest that it does not endorse any radical agenda, and implies that Ravitch is delusional to suggest anything of the sort.  Doubtless if scab labor took Levin's job, or jobs or her friends and family, she'd beam with approval.

What really amazes me about this column is the complete and utter ignorance of the role of unions. Levin characterizes them as obstructionist, but I've watched as my union embraced mayoral control, and then supported it again after it was fairly well-established as an anti-democratic disaster. UFT had a hand in writing the state evaluation law and boasted that "objective" measures only made up 40% of a teacher rating. They must have forgotten that any teacher failing that 40% must be rated ineffective overall. UFT supported charters, and even co-located to start one. UFT supported a failed merit pay program. Of course, that's not all that unique, since all such programs have failed. And UFT supports Common Core, which adds yet another layer of testing to the tangled web that appears to have eluded Ms. Levin.

If this is the best they can muster against Diane Ravitch, they'd better hope that absolutely no one reads her new book.

The Campbell Brown Show

Some people simply see earth as our home, but for legal expert Campbell Brown, it's a forum to shock us with spectacular and lurid accusations. There are 128 teachers who were accused of some sort of sexual offense. Only 33 were fired. Why can't Walcott fire the rest? The short answer is arbitrators, chosen jointly by UFT and DOE, found them not guilty.

But for legal expert Campbell Brown (who's married to some Students First bigshot, which surely has absolutely nothing to do with her crusade), that answer is just not good enough. She made it a point to confront UFT President Michael Mulgrew about it. You can see the video here.

Gotham Schools had originally written it was about "teachers who have sexually harassed students," but to their credit, they changed it after I complained. The fact is, not all these cases were about that, and I know of only one. In this case no such thing happened. However, Campbell Brown did not like it when I objected to Gotham's description.

@TeacherArthurG @gothamschools @CityAndStateNY um..... U don't think a teacher asking a kid for a strip tease is harassment?
— Campbell Brown (@campbell_brown) August 22, 2013

You see how this goes, don't you? You can only answer two ways. Yes, I think it's harrassment, and I'm therefore completely wrong. Or no I don't, and I therefore condone such behavior.

Brown was not finished with me.

@TeacherArthurG @gothamschools @CityAndStateNY u don't think teacher simulating sex acts with kids is harassment?
— Campbell Brown (@campbell_brown) August 22, 2013

Goodness gracious, what an awful person I must be for thinking such a thing. Or not thinking it. I told Ms. Legal Expert Brown that I knew precisely one of the notorious 128, that this person did nothing that merited dismissal, let alone suspension, and that Gotham's original description was misleading and inaccurate. I told her she was also misleading and inaccurate.

When you watch the video, note that legal expert Brown refers to these same two cases, as always. So out of 128 cases, 33 teachers were removed, but the teachers alleged to have done these things were not among them. Legal expert Brown refers to this as a "loophole." But there is, in fact, a process, described very clearly by Mulgrew. Maintaining otherwise is tantamount to stating that accused Americans who are found not guilty are getting by because of that darn jury system, the loophole that keeps police from tossing us into prison indiscriminately.

Mulgrew states, exactly, that the teachers in question were "not found guilty of sexual impropriety." Guess what legal expert Campbell Brown decided to tweet in response?

Michael Mulgrew says @UFT does not believe a teacher asking a little girl for a strip tease constitutes "sexual impropriety". @rweingarten
— Campbell Brown (@campbell_brown) August 22, 2013

And this:

Michael Mulgrew says @UFT does not think a teacher simulating sex acts with kids is "sexual impropriety". @rweingarten
— Campbell Brown (@campbell_brown) August 22, 2013

First, Brown is lying. Mulgrew said no such thing. The UFT said no such thing. And the video proves it. Neither Mulgrew nor the UFT were the arbitrators who made the decisions. In fact, I have no idea whether or not Mulgrew is even familiar with these cases.

Apparently, though, legal expert Brown is familiar with no others. She spouts these endlessly to the Daily News, to Gotham Schools, to me, to Mulgrew, to anyone who will listen. She has her "gotcha" argument and needs no more than that. You're either with legal expert Brown or you support sexual harrassment, you think mistreating children is a great thing, and she's got no problem telling you all about it.

But there are things legal expert Brown leaves out. Like what about the teachers who are not alleged to have done these things, what about teachers who didn't do these things, and since she has no problem misleading us with clearly false statements about Mulgrew, how do we know she isn't simply lying about everything else?

The fact is Dennis Walcott wants to fire all these teachers. He denies 100% of U-rating appeals. Leaving accused teachers to his tender mercies, as legal expert Brown would like, is simply idiotic. It's not surprising when groups like Students First NY jump on the bandwagon, and I remember them tweeting me a few months ago, trying to bully me into publicly endorsing their nonsense.

Teachers who abuse children sexually belong in prison, where they can meet like-minded individuals. I can't really assess how well the arbitrators do their jobs. Are they perfect? Perhaps. Perhaps not. In the one case with which I am familiar, they judged fairly well.

But legal expert Campbell Brown, endlessly repeating the same old strawman fallacy, is pretty easy to figure out.  Her argument may be good enough for the Daily News, and it may be good enough for Gotham Schools. But it's not good enough for those of us still exercising critical thought, thank you very much.

Charles M. Blow Joins NY Times Common Core Lovefest

It looks like, in the space of a week, three NY Times columnists have come out swinging in favor of the Common Core. The latest is Charles M. Blow, who I'd previously found thoughtful and worthwhile. His opening salvo informs us we are not keeping up with other countries, yet our lower test scores align precisely with our disgraceful higher poverty levels. As if that were not enough, Broad's source for this proclamation is the Broad Foundation. One wonders why he doesn't just go to the Walmart family, with his particular standard for objective sources.

It's ironic that Common Core is supposed to teach our children to think critically, and its prominent proponents appear incapable of doing so. Blow's second source, right out of the gate, is Amanda Ripley, who he describes as a journalist. One of Ripley's journalistic specialties is ad hominem attacks against real-live education expert Diane Ravitch, accused by Ripley of living in an "alternate universe."

Blow then explains it is endorsed by the Obama administration, and he's apparently unaware or uninterested that this administration has endorsed demonstrably nonsensical things like merit pay, which has worked nowhere, ever, value-added evaluations, which have worked nowhere ever, higher class sizes, which have worked nowhere, ever, and Hurricane Katrina, which Arne Duncan declared the best thing to happen to education in New Orleans, despite the abysmal results after it was privatized. One might say this administration was more or less in the bag for billionaires like Broad, Gates, and the Walmart family.

Then comes the unkindest cut of all, though this one is by no means Blow's fault. Common Core is also supported by the American Federation of Teachers. This certainly gives street cred to this reformy screed. One would thing that a group that ostensibly represents teachers would demand evidence that a group of standards were effective, but one would be mistaken. We've allowed this corporate scheme to be foisted upon our children for reasons that elude me utterly, and shame on us for doing so.

We're also led to believe it's a good thing because 45 states have accepted it. And yet, with all that apparent acceptance, an Edweek article suggests two out of three Americans know nothing about Common Core. While that's certainly a poor showing for an alleged democracy, it appears nationally prominent columnists who write about it don't know all that much about it either, so perhaps the majority of Americans, getting their information from sources like the NY Times, are doing the best they can with the information they have.

Blow finally says something that makes sense in this column:

We have drifted away from the fundamentals of what makes a great teacher: the ability to light a fire in a child, to develop in him or her a level of intellectual curiosity, the grit to persevere and the capacity to expand. Great teachers help to activate a small thing that breeds great minds: thirst.

And yet, Blow's very next statement suggests Common Core will do that. A fundamental misconception here is that testing our kids to death will somehow make them love to read. And yet, reformy folks like Obama, Bloomberg, Rahm, and even Reformy John King send their kids to private schools with reasonable class sizes. They don't send their kids to places that will treat their kids the way they want ours treated. They don't set their kids up for failure the way ours were, via Common Core.

In fact, kids who love to read can plod through the nonsense set forth in Common Core. They can read anything, no matter how dry or tedious, if there is some worthwhile task attached to it. But the notion we can get kids to love reading via forcing arbitrary percentages of non-fiction on them is ridiculous. In fact, the notion that there is value in writing that is difficult to comprehend is in itself questionable. I've read enough poorly-written textbooks to personally attest to that.

One of my favorite quotes is from Pete Seeger:

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

Seeger was referring to the songwriting skills of Woody Guthrie, most famous for the classic This Land is Your Land. Even as NY Times columnists rewrite Woody's ballad:

This land is Broad's land,
This land is Gates' land,
Walmart education,
For the kids of the nation...

It just doesn't have the same ring to it. This is especially true when Gates deems such nonsense unsuitable for his own kids. And any way you slice it, Common Core, established nowhere to prove anything whatsoever, is something less than classic, something distinctly less than genius.

Ignoring the massive poverty that afflicts this country, poverty that is exacerbated by the very businesses of the reformy foundations that presume to know how to educate our children, is not particularly genius either.

What a disgrace that people promoted by the NY Times are too incurious to examine the other side of this issue.

Krugman Becomes a Duncan Dittohead

 It's pretty suspicious that, on the eve of Diane Ravitch's book release, the dunces are in confederacy against her, and for Common Core. It's particularly egregious to find said dunces at the NY Times day after day.

I've long admired NY Times columnist Paul Krugman. During the insanity and excesses of GW's reign, he was a voice in the wilderness, a voice of reason, experience, and science. He always knew why things worked and did not work, and gave copious example to support his economic ideas. I found him incredibly persuasive.

But yesterday he wrote a rather unbelievable blog in support of Bill Keller's Common Core ad posing as a NY Times column. Apparently the right wing is bad, and anything they say is therefore also bad. It doesn't matter if they happen to be correct, and judging by both Keller and Krugman, we ought not even to delve one centimeter below the surface of governmental assertions. Of course this was different when Bush was in charge. But now that the government is run by Democrats, whatever they say must be correct.

I fail to see how this differentiates them from the Tea Partiers they ostensibly deplore. I fail to see how this differentiates them from Rush Limbaugh's dittoheads, who accept whatever preposterous nonsense he spews. In fact, I fail to see how people who think like this measure up to what Common Core claims to wish to instill in our students--critical thinking. It's kind of amazing that an alleged government drive to promote critical thinking entails telling journalists how to cover the story, but that's America in 2013.

I posted a response last night, which so far has not been approved by Krugman's crack blog team. Forgive me for twice mentioning that Common Core has never been field-tested, but when you see fit to impose a program on millions of American children, it seems like a fairly basic precaution. Of course, neither Keller nor Krugman bothered researching such frivolous details.  Here's what I told Dr. Krugman:

As a longtime reader and admirer, I’m very disappointed that you know so little about Common Core, which has never been field tested or researched. I’m even more disappointed that you’ve done so little research about who funded and pushed it. It’s not educators. I see no evidence you’re familiar with Common Core, or even the Obama agenda for American education. I suggest you read experts like Diane Ravitch or Linda Darling-Hammond rather than taking the word of Arne Duncan, who failied miserably in Chicago and is taking his program nationwide.
I suggest you think very seriously about high-stakes testing, which invariably closes schools in high poverty neighborhoods, and that you think very seriously about whether test scores tell the whole story about education. I suggest you look into the science behind value-added rating of teachers-because there isn’t any. I suggest you examine the way Common Core was researched and field tested-because it wasn’t.
I respectfully suggest that Obama has taken GW Bush’s education programs and not only extended them, but made them worse. You may argue that right-wingers oppose Common Core because it’s the program of Barack Obama, and you may be right.
However, I must tell you that whatever may motivate them, many of their arguments are correct. I expect much better from you, Mr. Krugman.

What would you like to tell him?

Arne Duncan Approved NY Times Column

I continue to be amazed at how low the bar seems to be for professional writers. Maybe they, rather than we, should be compelled to prove added value with some ridiculous mathematical formula. Even as teachers are under assault nationwide for the egregious offense of devoting their lives to helping children, NY Times writers continue to make many times our salaries without even the most cursory research.

Exhibit A is this column from Bill Keller. While it's ostensibly directed against far right critics of Common Core, and while I agree with his criticisms of their tactics, it's remarkably weak on the actual issues.

...the Common Core was created with a broad, nonpartisan consensus of educators, convinced that after decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education, the country had to come together on a way to hold our public schools accountable.

I'm not precisely persuaded by that. Take a gander at this and you too may wonder who these "educators" are. I'd also question the "embarrassing decline" of education. In fact, if this supposed decline is correlated with test scores, it's fairly easy to see that the lower scores are precisely aligned with high concentrations of impoverished and special needs students. Poverty, of course, is something Bill Gates has determined he can't change, so we're therefore supposed to ignore it.

Keller continues with the Duncan-approved talking points that Common Core is not a federal program, and that there is no national curriculum. In fact, the Common Core standards were highly encouraged by Duncan's Race to the Top. Cash-starved states adopted it, along with junk science evaluation of teachers, so as not to be shut out of the federal support for which their residents paid taxes. It's a bad deal, and will likely result in said states losing money which they'll be forced to devote to even further high-stakes testing.

Most deplorable is the fact that this writer appears totally unaware of the lack of research or field-testing that went into this initiative. As if that were not enough, the writer has no sense of what it means to set up millions of children as failures, particularly with tests with inappropriate and ridiculous standards.

The fact is it isn't simply right-wingers who oppose Common Core, and Keller makes a brief nod to that. But Keller appears unable to differentiate between the issues of health care and reformy education, and shows no evidence he's even familiar with their history. Destroying public education used to be the exclusive province of the extreme right, but groups like DFER have bought enormous influence over faux-Democrats, who now push ridiculous union-busting anti-middle class nonsense.

I'm frankly amazed that people with so little evident curiosity can make a living writing.

On Charters, Daily News Gives Us Half the Story (If That)

In yet another incredible feat of utter arrogance, Bloomberg's Tweedies have invested 4.5 million in having charter schools teach public schools how to teach. They've taken a charter school, which has "Excellence" in its very name, and paired it up with a public school. Since the charter has 4 times as many kids passing the reading tests, it's obviously superior.

Not mentioned in this article is the percentage of special ed. students, their level of learning issues, the percentage of ESL students, nor their level of English. Nor does the article mention the respective percentages of students below the poverty level. The article also neglects to mention the attrition level of this amazing charter school, because how many kids it dumps back into the neighborhood public school is of no consequence whatsoever.

Interestingly, the article interviews the charter leader, and prominently features New York's "Charter Center CEO" while neglecting to get one word from the public school principal, even though the school is described as "popular." Naturally, no criticism of this program is even implied, let alone spelled out.

Another detail here is that the public school does have something to offer the charter--it will show the charter how to get parents on board and supportive. So, essentially, this public school is being offered the opportunity to cut its own throat, and the charter CEO appears thrilled at the prospect.

Aside from the one-dimensional presentation, the underlying assumption here is that charters are simply better than public schools, and can therefore show us what to do. In fact, there are plenty of public schools that achieve higher test scores, if we are to accept that as the sole criterion. More importantly, public schools are a reflection of their neighborhoods, for better or worse. The "no excuses" crowd is relentless in its determination to ignore what ails neighborhoods, to wit, poverty. Bill Gates has stated he can't address that so everyone reformy has decided the hell with it.

Another thing you won't see here is that any prospective teacher with half a choice would prefer to work in a public school. Student teachers I've met have complained to me about how tough it is in this economic downturn to get a job teaching. They reluctantly look to charters as a last resort. I'd certainly expect to find teachers who made better impressions in public schools.

The thing that charters have, in case this is not already clear to everyone reading this, is a highly selective and selected student body. Frankly, when you pick and choose students, it's not all that challenging to raise test scores. Maybe the charters will teach public schools how to dump an entire cohort, as charter hero Geoffrey Canada did. That'll get those scores up.

Underlying this story is a willful act on the basis of the demagogic Bloomberg administration to leave the public with a false assumption--that charters are simply better than public schools, and that we should take this for granted. An article like this one, lacking detail and balance, certainly encourages him to continue pulling the wool over our blurry eyes.

If It Doesn't Get Them Sued for Libel, Daily News Can Run With It

Personally, I'm bone weary of ridiculous headlines like this one, announcing to the world what's happening with "perv" teachers. While I'm certain it's important to Bloomberg's BFF/ Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman to trash mayoral hopefuls for not being Bloomberg, I question the whole name-calling thing.

First of all, it's there for no reason other than to mobilize public sentiment against working teachers. Anyone who didn't know better might believe this nonsense.

Second, it's pretty clear the Daily News has allowed itself to become the ever-willing tool of legal expert Campbell Brown. It's getting to the point that the Daily News might wish to take note that legal expert Campbell Brown is married to some Students First bigshot. After all, if you're going to press a story like this one over a period of years, you might as well do a little rudimentary research.

Finally, and here's the major issue, the charges are simply untrue. Legal expert Brown contends that most teachers charged are still working. That's a fact because they were not convicted. I realize that legal expert Brown and the Daily News cannot distinguish between charges and actual guilt, but it's kind of irresponsible they mislead their readers like this. For example, not a single person relying on the Daily News for information will realize that legal expert Campbell Brown wants Walcott to fire teachers who were not convicted.

Isn't it libel to write lies about people? I don't know what the legal burden is to establish it, but I suppose the News has lawyers on staff to advice them of what lines to cross. I'm sure they manage to draw lines that keep them out of court.

Because that's important.

The truth, on the other hand, appears to be of no consequence whatsoever.

Mayor Bloomberg Lays Out Plan to Eliminate Sex Creeps

Mike Bloomberg here. I just want to say how pleased I am that the Supreme Court has finally repealed the Defense of Marriage Act. Our LGBT brothers and sisters should certainly be able to marry and live as they wish. Except for teachers.

UFT teachers, as you know if you've been reading the Daily News, tend to be pervs and sickos and sex creeps. After careful consideration, Chancellor Walcott and I have decided that we don't want sex creeps doing anything unconventional, and we've determined we need the right to fire any teachers doing anything we decide to be out of the norm.

This is because our students simply cannot handle role models that vary from those in 1950s TV shows. Clearly in those times, there were no LGBT models on TV, and everyone was white. We think white people have had it all too tough recently, and as you know they are randomly stopped and frisked more far too often.

That's why, for teachers only, we're going to demand they be straight and white, or at least convincingly pretend to be straight and white. If they can't manage this little request, it's going to be necessary for Chancellor Walcott to be able to fire them. As Ruben Diaz and legal expert Campbell Brown have pointed out, we need the right to fire sicko sex creeps whether or not they've been found guilty. Since we assume all teachers to be sicko sex creeps, we won't be firing them for being LGBT or non-white, but for being sex creeps.

And sure, a lot of you will be saying, "Mike, you're discriminating here." I understand that, and that's why we will make sure to also fire white straight teachers too. Since all teachers are sex creeps because we say so, this will make teachers think twice before they criticize the way we place Children First, Always.

The best way to put Children First, Always is by closing their neighborhood schools, turning them over to Eva Moskowitz, firing unionized teachers based on junk science, and replacing them with at-will employees in charter schools who will never, ever earn a pension. This way, teachers of the Children we place First, Always won't have time to develop into the sex creeps all current teachers are.

So basically, we need the right to immediately fire sex creep teachers who are not straight and white. We also need the right to immediately fire sex creep teachers who are straight and white. Anyone not fitting into those categories will not be affected by this bold but necessary new policy.

However, since all teachers in these categories have been demonstrated by the crack reporters at the Daily News to be sex creeps, we desperately need the right to fire them right away without all that contractual red tape. We can't go through all the rigamarole of negotiating new contracts, because that will cost money we don't have. Once we fire all the sex creeps, the costs of negotiating new contracts will decrease dramatically.

So please, New York, remember that mayoral control means I do what I want, when I want, and how I want. Support me, Senator Diaz, and legal expert Campbell Brown in our efforts to fire sex creep teachers immediately. It's the only way we can protect our children from these dangerous predators.

We are also very disappointed that no other publications have been running the story about sex creep teachers. In our next step to place Children First, Always, we will look into whether or not it's in the interests of these children to allow these publications to continue doing business in my city.

Why the War on Teachers This Week?

Aside from my typical disgust when we are targeted for the egregious offense of dedicating our lives to guiding children, I know there must be a particular reason the Daily News and legal expert Campbell Brown targeted us this week.

There are big issues with this story. The primary issue is the teachers they discuss have not been found guilty of anything. The person who determines guilt, or lack thereof, is the arbitrator. So the Daily News, abetted by legal expert Campbell Brown, cries, "WHY WEREN'T THEY FIRED?" or some such inflammatory nonsense. However, they fail to provide the answer, which is quite simple. "BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T GUILTY!"

That gets left out of the mix, of course, because it tends to detract from the story. "TEACHERS NOT GUILTY DON'T GET FIRED!" won't get you as many readers.

What is it that they want? Ostensibly, what they want is for Chancellor Dennis Walcott to determine ultimate guilt or innocence. That is, instead of the independent arbitrators selected jointly by UFT and DOE mandated by the Contract, Walcott's agency would investigate, and Walcott would decide whether or not his agency did a good job. The fact that Walcott rejects 100% of U-rating appeals has not made it into any of the articles. One could say that is because legal expert Campbell Brown, who just happens to be married to some Students First person (Michelle Rhee's group) does not know about this. Or maybe she chooses not to know about it.

It's tough to say. But last year they made a big deal of it, and they appear to wish to do the same this year. And the message the public gets is that teachers are a bunch of perverts, sickos, weirdos, or whatever invective they've selected this week.

Make no mistake--the message is total nonsense.

But Students First people, like the one legal expert Campbell Brown is married to, tend not to like unions. And the charter movement is very much about avoiding unions. I meet a lot of student teachers, and not one I've met wanted to work for a charter. But in a tough market, a job's a job.  So let me assure real parents out there that public schools get first pick of available teachers, and Eva Moskowitz, despite her glitzy ads, gets whoever is left. That's just one reason I send my kid to a public school.

The bottom line is the people the DN and legal expert Campbell Brown are raving about are not threats to children, as far as I know. For one thing, if they were, and Walcott couldn't make a case against them, that speaks more to his ineptitude than anything else. For another, if they were actually criminals, like my daughter's former principal appears to be, there would be real stories enumerating real charges, rather than nebulous crap about only being able to fire 30 of 100, or whatever it is.

So let's be clear--this ridiculous vague attack against a large group is NOT about keeping our children safe. It's about attacking the working conditions of unionized teachers. It's about depriving us of voice.

Because there's one thing I know as sure as I live and breathe--there are people who love kids, who support them, who want them to be happy and successful. The Daily News and legal expert Campbell Brown, and the Students First demagogues are not those people.

We are those people. We stand up for what's right for kids. And we will continue to do so no matter how many times they slime us, no matter how many nonsensical stories they put forth, no matter how much filthy corporate cash they toss around, and no matter how many tinhorn politicians, at any level, they buy.

We love the kids. And we will expose those who attack us for what they are.

Day by day.

Lie by lie.

We tell the truth. We show kids how to find the truth.

Because that's what we do. That's why we're here. And it's also most certainly why we're under attack.

Wolfson's Miraculous Feat

It's kind of hard to believe the level of nonsense that passes as information these days. Despite Mike Bloomberg's education programs having improved, conservatively, nothing, his paid propagandist Howard Wolfson has a piece in the Daily News insisting that Thompson can't be mayor, as he'd be a tool of the union. That's even more absurd than the union endorsement of Thompson.

For one thing, Thompson supports Mayor Bloomberg's unilateral decision to give virtually all city employees but teachers a raise. That alone gives me pause. You'd think that a Bloomberg employee would give the guy a little credit for trying to screw teachers, one of Mayor Mike's key priorities this endless decade. But no.

Now it's certainly noteworthy, as Wolfson points out, that more kids graduate nowadays. After all, when you close schools that don't post high graduation rates, you tend to motivate principals to post them by any means necessary. You can pressure teachers to pass kids who don't merit it, or even promote ridiculous credit recovery schemes. Of course, when college readiness rates linger around 25%, you have to wonder precisely how effective Mayor Bloomberg's magic has been. He did, of course, amazingly raise the city test scores, before we found out that the tests had actually been dumbed-down. Wolfson surely must have forgotten how much loyalty Bloomberg money had mustered, or how New Yorkers felt about that third term he bought.

I love that Wolfson brings up his mom, working somewhere in the South Bronx, then pushes charters. One wonders whether his mom would've managed a career in a charter. Teacher turnover tends to be pretty high, even higher than that of public schools. I suppose it's fine to subject kids to underqualified teachers who are just passing through. But that kind of negates the story about his hard-working mom. Would Wolfson want his mom to work with no job protection, to be subject to arbitrary and capricious dismissal, and to go five years without a raise? It would seem so.

Of course Wolfson mentions the raise in salaries, conveniently omitting the compromises and givebacks that entailed, and the fact that virtually all other city employees got an 8% bump between 2008-2010. He probably also forgot that no city employee is working under a current contract. I guess the notion of leaving things better for those who follow you is not important enough for Mayor Mike to worry about. 

Another great point he brings up is that of mayoral control. Wolfson loves the fact that the mayor has 8 of 13 votes in our fake school board, the PEP, and can fire whomever he wishes, whenever he likes, for any or no reason. After all, democracy is a messy thing, and giving a billionaire unlimited power to do whatever the hell he feels like to public schoolchildren certainly simplifies things.  And it's certainly indisputable that no one ever ran the Regents exams quite like Mike Bloomberg.

I suppose if you get paid to write propaganda, you can really only give one side, no matter how far you must stretch to do it. But why is Wolfson trashing Thompson, Meryl Tisch's BFF, simply because the UFT endorses him? After all, the UFT also endorsed mayoral control, twice, and the King Reformy John's junk science evaluation system, the Emperor's pride and joy?

Reality-based educator has an interesting theory, right here. Could he be tearing down Thompson so as to make it appear he isn't just another Bloomberg-endorsed hack? It makes as much sense as anything else I've heard.