Alice in Reformyland

I don't link to the 74, but the reformy Gates-funded make-believe teachers over at Educators 4 Excellence are making a stink over the ATR. It seems they and their reformies care a great deal about students in so-called failing schools, the ones full of poverty, health issues, and homelessness. Since their Dear Leader, Bill Gates, has already decided to ignore those problems, the former untenured teacher who runs E4E has decided to go a different way. the same way StudentsFirstNY went.

They're asking all sorts of questions about the ATR, like which ones were removed for disciplinary charges. You see, in Reformyland, charges are the same as convictions. It doesn't matter if said charges led nowhere, and by the way, all of them did. Otherwise these teachers they want to know about would've been fired rather than retained. This is mentioned nowhere in the 74, which is just one more reason there's no link.

Why are the former teachers who run E4E all in a tizzy over the ATR? I can't read their minds or look into their souls (which have likely as not been sold for Gatesbucks anyway). They're probably all excited for the same reason Klein was--this is a key to breaking union and putting us out on our own. One thing UFT leadership did right was hanging tough on giving ATRs a time limit so they'd face dismissal. That happened in Chicago, if I'm not mistaken, and has been a disaster.

We are all ATRs, whether or not you know it. It's just a matter of being in the wrong place at the right time. I work just a few miles south of Flushing High School, and just a few north of what was Jamaica High School. Am I a better teacher because I happen to work at Lewis? Of course not. In fact, I came to Lewis from John Adams High School in 1993. Back then there was a UFT transfer plan and we could pick a new place. Had I stayed at Adams, I'd have had to reapply for my job and quite likely would've become an ATR. It can happen anywhere. You never know. The only thing you can be sure of is that the teachers will be blamed.

There's a reason why reformies are harping on ATRs, and that reason is they want working conditions for union teachers as tenuous as possible. That way they can build more non-union charters and make more teachers work 200 hours a week with no rights. You don't want to teach the extra class? Screw you. You don't want to take parent phone calls until 10 PM? Screw you. You don't want to take a bus trip to Albany in which you teach a lesson on the bus? Screw you. You have no tenure and you're fired. We can always open up another can of teachers, especially now that we don't have to bother with that pesky school certification.

Getting rid of the ATR means fire at will, folks, and it's likely as not that you and I will be the ones fired. Don't buy into the stereotypical nonsense about ATR teachers. It's not their fault their schools were closed. It's not their fault there are cute little academy schools full of newbie teachers where no one wants to take on a veteran salary. It's not their fault that whatever nonsensical charges, likely as not pressed by Bloomberg and his flunkies, failed to stick.

It's certainly not their fault that publications, up to and including the NY Times, choose to baselessly stereotype them. I'm not sure what's happening over at the Times. They just did a feature on a lovable, pasta-cooking Nazi next door type. I do know this, though. We need to protect the ATR with everything we got, because whither they go, so go us all.

That's exactly what the reformies are counting on.

Teacher as Savior

Yesterday I spoke of a forum I attended in the Bronx. An interesting conversation ensued between audience and panel about recruitment for TFA and Moskowitz Academies. Evidently the pitch is that children of color must be saved and only you, the students, can get it done. Oh, and also we can give you a job after you graduate up to your neck in debt.

There are a number of striking points you could make about this particular argument. One is that there are plenty of public schools right there in the Bronx, and if you wish to branch out there are four more boroughs nearby with kids who could use your assistance. Another is that working in an NYC public school still beats the hell out of doing test prep for Eva and watching your hapless kids pee their pants rather than pause one moment from studying. She treats those kids a lot worse than I treat my dog (and in fact I love my dog, treat him well, and take him out whenever he asks).

Then, as one of the panelists pointed out, it's not exactly within our means to change everything. You know, there's poverty, there are learning disabilities, there is environment, and there are newcomers who speak no English. And make no mistake, Eva talks a big ballgame, but she doesn't take the same kids we do. 100% of the students I teach are beginners. They are most definitely not ready for intensive bathroom-free test prep, and that's not to suggest that anyone else is. If Eva takes ELLs, they are certainly on a higher level. Special education runs the gamut as well. Just because someone has an IEP doesn't mean she's alternate assessment, like a group of kids at my school. Alternate assessment kids are not expected to graduate. We take them to worksites and train them for jobs, and their stats count against us at year's end. And, of course, self-purported savior Moskowitz has a reputation for dumping kids that don't help her test-score-based bottom line.

As for TFA, sure you can have them pack you off to anyplace in the country. Sure you can help poor students whether or not you've got training sufficient to work in a public school. Maybe you've seen movies like Freedom Writers, where the actress what's her name (who, in fairness, has been in some good stuff too) singlehandedly inspires kids and saves them from their otherwise miserable destinies. Then there was the movie with Michelle Pfeiffer, where I think she shot a gun off in class, or jumped out a window or something, and didn't get fired.

One really cool thing about these movie teachers is they invariably have only one class. That's convenient, because you can focus on the handful of kids being saved. Most teachers I know have 170 students, and are pretty busy with things like, oh, grading tests and lesson planning. In my school, located on this astral plane, we now have grading policies so ponderous that teachers can barely find time for anything else. And don't get me started on gym teachers who have different classes every other day and are expected to perform this nonsense for 500 kids. I don't know how they even learn student names.

Of course teachers are a positive influence. Of course teachers, next to parents, are often the very best role models for children. And of course sometimes teachers can do incredible things, and there are extraordinary teachers. I know real stories about real teachers who reach out and change lives. I even know one who did this for years, who was threatened with an ineffective rating from a supervisor who appreciated this not at all, and who died alone one weekend only months before his planned retirement. I don't suppose that would make a movie script, as the protagonists tend to be gorgeous young white women.

The really cool thing about the teacher as savior model is it takes almost everyone off the hook for just about everything. Problems with your kids? The teachers suck. Failing the class? The teachers suck. Not graduating on time? The teachers suck. Teacher calling your house? He should handle it himself, that's his job, and he sucks. Why can't he be more like Michelle Pfeiffer or what's-her-name from Freedom Writers?

Not only parents are off the hook, but so are politicians. Arne Duncan, or John King, or Barack Obama, or Michael Bloomberg, or Joel Klein, or Andrew Cuomo (all of whom send their kids to private schools), can get up and tell some story about how a great teacher can change a life. That takes them off the hook for crumbling infrastructure, lack of a living wage or affordable health care, and allowing both parents to work 200 hours a week each to make ends meet. The implication is that a good teacher can change absolutely everything, and politicians are suddenly responsible for nothing, It's a WIN-WIN!

Thus you devise ways to fire teachers, like value-added, you devise ways to vilify teachers, like attacking their unions, and you devise ways to blame them for every ill of society. You even try to make a few films that drop the whole savior routines and stereotype public school, making charters the hero. You gloss over the whole pants-peeing thing because it doesn't make for increased popcorn sales.

Here's the thing--we do the best we can, each and every day, under incredibly challenging circumstances. We choose to go out and work with America's children each and every day, no matter who they are or how they come to us. We're not asking to be portrayed as super-heroes, but we don't deserve super-villain status either.

I want to support kids and help them to be happy, but I can't do everything. Politicians need to do their part too, instead of simply taking money from rich people, making their comfortable lives even more so, and ignoring those of us who actually work for a living. And we need to hold their feet to the fire.

The best idea would be to make folks who run schools patronize them. If the schools you run aren't good enough for your children, they likely aren't good enough for mine either. If Bloomberg or Klein had to send their own kids to public school, they'd eye very different reforms than the ones they ended up enforcing. You wouldn't have kids sitting in trailers, eating lunch before 9 AM, herded like prisoners, running around outside because there is no gym, or going years without glasses because even an eye check is unaffordable.

With Donald Trump as President, with demagogues like Betsy DeVos and Eva Moskowitz pretending to care about all children but giving in to the backward moves of this administration, our jobs become even more difficult.

Maybe we have to be super-heroes after all. Maybe we can. But our super-hero status will have to bring us outside the classroom and into communities, where we will be truth-tellers. Truth-tellers are in very short supply here in 2017.

The Song of the Bigot

It turns out that undocumented immigrants are not the scourge Donald Trump says the are after all. In fact, over the last decade, there have been fewer and fewer of them. That need not bother the Donald, for whom objective reality has little or no meaning. He can still hate them, and his supporters appear more than ready to do so, particularly if they're Muslims. There aren't ever enough forums for people longing to hate, and now Donald's got Sarah Palin, you betcha, to urge them along with him. After all, you can't expect Ann Coulter to do that job all by herself.

In fact it's gotten to the point where so-called mainstream Republicans are trying to distance themselves from overt bigotry. David Brooks, evidently, is reveling in trying to blame Trump and Cruz for the natural evolution of the GOP. Brooks, evidently, thinks the old-fashioned unspoken kind was preferable. Brooks' column more or less sings to me:

Gimme that ol' time racism,
Gimme that ol' time racism,
Gimme that ol' time racism,
It's good enough for me. 

Let's keep our hatred under wraps, pretend it doesn't exist, use the same old code words we've been using since Nixon. Let's talk about law and order instead of actually calling out those groups we hate so much. After all, it really pisses us off to be working crap jobs and have huge medical expenses. In fact, even if the medical expenses have gone down somewhat due to Obamacare, let's keep calling him a Muslim and a traitor. Let's work, therefore, to repeal Obamacare even if it hasn't hurt anyone.

Sadly, the Democrats are not much better. Bigotry flourishes in an atmosphere of oppression, and we always need someone to blame for it. Obamacare, though far from perfect, was the best the President could get in a Congress with obstructionist Republicans who would rather accomplish nothing than help the American people. But Obama didn't take much of a stand for working people, and sat in his office while they were screwed in Wisconsin and all over the country. Now SCOTUS, at the behest of their corporate overlords, is about to deal a blow to public union from which it will be very tough to recover.

Hatred is easily redirected, as Orwell was fond of noting. If you're comfortable because you're white, because you're born in the United States, and you aren't a member of a currently embattled religion, don't get all that comfortable. Another group that repressive societies like to go after is teachers. After all, they're out there telling the truth, no matter how inconvenient that is. In fact, there are a whole lot of teachers right now failing to accept the ideas of Bill Gates. Well, not all of them, but Diane Ravitch, the American Statistical Association and a lot of teachers reject his value-added mantra as junk science.

Make no mistake, we are also a target. We have been, we will be, and things can always get worse. No bigot is a good bigot, and we support the likes of Trump and Cruz at our peril. When Hillary babble inanities about closing schools that aren't "above average," I'm not convinced she's a whole lot better. She's certainly not a whole lot better informed.

When in Doubt, Double Down

I am always amazed by those who exclaim we're in crisis, that our teachers suck, that our schools suck, and that we must act now. In New Jersey, because everything sucks, because the reading scores are too low for the pols' comfort level, they've decided that the suckiness must end now. In their particular case, they've decided the conclusive way to end it is to blanket the state in even more suckiness by extending the school day.

That way, surely poverty will end, and by the time these kids get home they will have forgotten that no one paid the electric or heat bill. After all, what with mom and dad working 200 hours a week each at minimum wage, there's no one they can tell about it anyway.

So the kids will sit in the cold and the dark, forget absolutely that the last good meal they had was hours ago in school, and do their homework via telepathy, which they will have acquired via those extra hours in school. This, of course, also applies to the kindergarteners, who will magically learn to read via those two and a half extra hours sitting in that terrible school with the terrible teacher who caused all those problems in the first place.

The important thing to note is it isn't the fault of the people who administrate said schools. From the hyper-local level up, they are blameless. After all, haven't they come out every single year with a new program to lessen the influence of those awful teachers who caused poverty the problem in the first place? And from the state right down to the school, each and every administrator has worked hard to enforce every new policy, every year, and they've worked just as hard to bury last year's failed policies, the ones that were indispensable at the time.

So basically, it's a WIN-WIN. We've done the charter schools, the school closings, the Common Core, the mayoral control, the new evaluation system, the newer evaluation system, the newest evaluation system, and you betcha we're gonna do the one after that as well. We've done just about everything we've been asked, and we've made sure not to engage the rank and file teachers at all, since they suck.

And now, right here in New York, there's some new committee that Andrew Cuomo started, and folks like Mulgrew are kvelling about what great work they do, even though the changes are decidedly superficial, unlikely to change anything, and certain not to discourage opt-out as intended. Now Mulgrew's got street cred, because he endorsed and approved absolutely every piece of crap reform cited in the last paragraph. And after all, why should school administrators listen to teachers when the most powerful union president in the country can't be bothered?

This is a top-down mistake that's passed from the national level, where Mulgrew's AFT endorsed the reformiest President in history for re-election, to the state level, where we couldn't even be bothered to oppose a governor who ran on a platform of going after unions, to a local level, where alleged commie Bill de Blasio managed the lowest pattern bargain in my living memory (with the explicit help of Punchy Mike Mulgrew).

And, of course, this attitude trickles down to your school and mine, where teacher voice is roundly ignored. It's unfortunate that no one thinks to consult with us, the people who actually spend time with kids each and every day, but I understand the phenomenon. There's the widely accepted premise that teachers and students are somehow in opposition, that our goals are somehow antithetical to theirs, and that teachers care only about themselves. That's absurd, of course. Our teaching conditions are their learning conditions, and what we gain or lose is what our kids will have when they grow up.

It's important for us to reverse the reformy canard, but it's an uphill battle to turn around such a widely accepted myth. What we want is for our kids to be happy. It's bizarre that it's so important for so many people on so many levels to spend so much time ensuring that we (and they) are not.

And if we aren't, what the hell sort of role models do they expect us to be? It's a shame our voices are neglected in favor of those of reformies. Between us, reformies are pretty much the worst role models for children I can imagine.

The Moskowitz Anomoly

Eva says the "got to go" list was an anomaly, one of those wacky things that happens once in a blue moon.  Yet there have been stories for years of kids pushed out of Moskowitz Academies, for inconvenient behavior, low test scores, whatever. Eva is now demanding public funding for the Moskowitz pre-K but refusing to submit to required oversight by the city. Rules are for the little people, and that would be us, the people who serve all children.

If there's an "anomoly," it's the fact that this particular list was placed in writing.

@campbell_brown @SuccessCharters @NYCSchools next time they will not make the mistake of leaving a paper trail.

— Gary Rubinstein (@garyrubinstein) October 30, 2015

Eva's test scores are no miracle. They're a product of the drill and kill method she favors that values test scores over children. How else do you explain children soiling themselves as a matter of course under the abusive leadership she fosters and defends. In a public school, this would be considered child abuse. If you didn't allow a child to go to the bathroom and that child soiled herself, you'd be guilty of corporal punishment under CR A-420. When my dog asks to go out, I jump up and take him. Therefore I treat my dog better than Moskowitz treats the children under her care.

Anyone who tells you Moskowitz is an amazing success story is ignorant, willingly or otherwise. There is no way I'd subject my kid or yours to the ridiculous and joyless discipline inherent in her test factories. There is also no way I'd equate a Moskowitz Academy with "Success." In my view, success entails a certain degree of happiness. Creating compliant drones is great for companies like Walmart which pay poorly for lives of drudgery. Doubtless that's why the Walmart family is all in for charters. Nonetheless I want something much better for the children I serve.

That's just one reason I don't work for the likes of Eva. A better reason is I have a better job. I serve all high-needs kids, none of whom will get a great standardized test score, and none of whom would be accepted into a Moskowitz Academy. Despite recent reforminess, I still have better working conditions than Moskowitz teachers ever will. I want my kid and yours to have better working conditions and therefore reject the preposterous claims that we somehow oppose "excellence." If "excellence" entails forcing working people to demonstrate publicly against their own interests, like Eva just forced her teachers to do, who needs it?

Moskowitz Academies take public money, but are not public schools. Public schools serve the public, and do not discriminate against ELLs or kids with disabilities. They don't write "got to go" lists about kids whose scores will hurt the bottom line. The stakes attached to scores are there because Eva and her BFFs are waging war against us, the last bastion of unionism in these Unitied States.

It's an important war, because if we really cared about "excellence," we'd want our kids to have excellent lives, as opposed to excellent test scores. Hobbling union deprives our children of opportunity and makes it more likely they'll spend years of drudgery in service of Eva's BFF the Walmart family.

Moskowitz is a demagogue and I applaud NY Times reporter Kate Taylor for shedding further light on her misleading and unethical practices.

MaryEllen Elia--One, Needy Kids--Zero

Showing all the sensitivity of a sledge hammer, MaryEllen Elia demonstrated forcefully that all her talk about meeting with concerned parties and listening was just that. Otherwise, why would she threaten to withhold Title 1 funds from the neediest students in the state for the offense of opting out of state exams?

This comes just after Elia met with a group of activist parents and Diane Ravitch. So clearly she's willing to sit down and listen. Unfortunately she has a corporate agenda and doesn't give a golly gosh darn about common sense. In Spanish, actually, there's a saying that common sense is the least common of all the senses.

I'm not sure what sort of a person would take money away from the poorest students in the state simply because parents from their school, maybe theirs, maybe not, would see fit not to make their kids sit through largely meaningless tests. But it's absolutely clear Elia is that person.

And Elia does not need any sort of extensive program to determine who does well on tests. The trend is clear, and it has been ever since we've embarked upon this nonsensical program of making all kids college ready, whether or not they intend to go to college. It's been clear ever since we decided that all kids, no matter what their disabilities, no matter what their backgrounds, no matter whether or not they knew English, were going to take the same tests no matter what.

That pattern is this--where there is high income, there are high grades. Where there is low income, there are low grades. Where there are few disabilities, there are few low grades. Where there are many disabilities, there are many low grades.

What Elia proposes to do, of course, is to take money away from districts. This money is specifically earmarked to help kids who need it most. Any person who actually cared about the progress of our neediest students would never, ever consider such a thing.

Last year, there was a resolution in the UFT Delegate Assembly to vote no confidence in MaryEllen Elia. It failed. This year we know that MaryEllen Elia is capable of threatening the most vulnerable of our children. I now have no confidence in her whatsoever and frankly, I question why anyone who cared about children would.

Of course if I were Andrew Cuomo, bought and paid for by the reformies, I'd be jumping up and down. If I were Bill Gates, who gave her a ton of money back in Hillsborough, I'd be doing cartwheels. If you want to decimate union, reforminess is just fantastic. If you want to privatize education and make money for your hedge-funder BFFs, reforminess is a bonanza.

But if you want what's best for the neediest children in NY State, you don't want MaryEllen Elia's ideas anywhere near a public school.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

For years I've felt the NYT has provided us with the very worst education reporting in NY. There have been exceptions, like Michael Winerip, but in general they seem way too highfalutin' to bother with what's actually happening in NY. I first noticed this years ago, when some genius reporter criticized us for the February break, saying the city didn't want it. Actually the city wanted non-attendance days for kids and us in school, and had the reporter bothered to speak with a single teacher to prepare his article, he'd have known that.

Occasionally, though, there's a ray of sunlight in the morass of nonsense and reforminess. In fact, this particular ray of sunlight focuses on a truth many teachers know--that it is income and not teacher quality that is a general predictor of standardized test scores. Not only that, but the gap has widened considerably since Ronald Reagan became union-buster in chief. In fact, this disparity affects not only test scores:

These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.

So if we're really serious about helping kids, perhaps we ought to address poverty and income disparity. Maybe we should, you know, help struggling families rather than just spouting the same old reformy talking points. Maybe the fact that, after decades of reforminess, we still have all these so-called failing schools indicates that we ought to try something new. Instead, we hire MaryEllen Elia, who walks around pretending to listen to people and promises more of the same anyway.

On the other hand, there's this article marveling at the impending teacher shortage. They're looking everywhere, they're taking anyone, they're lowering standards and you don't even have to bother with credentials, you know, like a degree. Learn as you earn. Who cares?

It is mind-boggling to me that a reporter for the paper of record fails to account for the reforminess that's led to an unprecedented attack on teachers. I see this ignorance amplified over at Eduwonk. Nothing to see here, it's the economy. All this reformy stuff we're doing has no effect whatsoever.

They're wrong, of course. Teachers are being judged by test scores. There is no reliable research to suggest that standardized test scores reflect teacher quality. In fact, the American Statistical Association suggests teachers have precious little to do with these scores. But what's a reformy to do? Bill Gates has invested a gazillion dollars in a Measures of Effective Teaching study. UFT leadership supported it, told us how important our participation was, but its result was a nation of teachers judged by junk science.

There are few things I find more inspiring than seeing my former students become teachers. One of them is now teaching math in my school, and I could not be prouder. I love this job and it's brought me great gratification. I can't promise, though, that it will be the same for my students. We're on the third new evaluation program in three years, and I see no evidence of improvement. Teacher morale is the lowest I've seen in 30 years, bar none.

We are regularly trashed in the media. NYT's Frank Bruni likens us to pigs at a trough as his BFF Campbell Brown attacks our tenure. (In fairness, Bruni's job entails coming up with 800 words not once, but TWICE a week, so who can find time to do fundamental research?) SCOTUS is now looking to break our union.

We are standing against a wall with targets on our backs. The ignorance of professional reporters who don't know that is simply mind-boggling. If they're purposely wearing blinders, that's even worse. Either way, it is them, not us, who are incompetent.

Of course, it's easier to forget about the truth and blame teachers. Bill Gates said poverty was too tough to deal with, so he, along with the happy NYT reporter, ignores it and goes on his merry way. And you can't fire parents or children, so why not just blame the teachers and whistle a happy tune?

This is the new paradigm in education. We need to change it. And if leadership just keeps going along to get along, we need to change them too.

We Never Learn Anything

We keep voting in the same people, they keep doing the same things, it failed before, it's failing now, and it will fail in the future. Yet we hope against hope that this time it will work. We give the reformies a little bit to show them how flexible we are. We buy into one of their awful ideas, and then another. Then we sit and wait for them to say thank you. But that just doesn't happen. The time we let Bill Gates keynote and AFT convention, he thanked us, walked out, and then started attacking our pensions.

Now the UFT and AFT are waist deep in this PROSE program, the one that enables huge class sizes. It's the bestest thing ever. It means, instead of that silly old contract we negotiated, we can run schools like charters. How cool is that? Maybe once the Post columnists read about that, they'll say, "Hey, those union leaders are not so bad. Maybe we should give them a shot at running the Moskowitz schools."

Only that's not the way it works. Every time you give the reformies a millimeter, they want a kilometer. That's why there are multiple suits attacking tenure. That's why the Supreme Court is now eyeing a suit intended to pretty much crush public unions as we know it. And that's why you'll find this piece, in the NY Post, ridiculing Weingarten and Mulgrew as self-serving clowns.

Basically, the piece moves from the absolutely false premise that charters are a solution to the low test score issue to the conclusion that the PROSE program emulates them. Maybe it does. And it's been bandied about as a solution to various problems by not only Mulgrew, but also Weingarten. Now here's the problem--the low test score crisis is caused NOT by the UFT Contract, but rather by high concentrations of poverty and high needs students. Charter schools tend not to take severe special ed. cases or beginning ESL students, and have various screening methods to ensure they don't just take everyone (like we do). They also dump kids and don't replace them. This system is hardly a miracle.

By being flexible we buy into the false assumption that it is the teachers and schools failing the students. That's problematic because it gives our enemies more ammunition to attack us and our schools. We also allow Post polemicists to write pieces like this, telling the public the privatization schemes are the obvious solutions. How does he thank the helpful union leaders?

It’s not really about education, then. It’s about control — top down, contractually mandated control. Put another way, “We’re fine with innovation, as long as it’s our innovation. We’re good with bureaucratic flexibility, as long as we say it’s OK. And anybody who tries to do this without approval shall face our wrath!”
 
This is progress?

Thus, Weingarten and Mulgrew receive no credit whatsoever for their willingness to compromise on our Contract. The writer throws in a nice little strawman about how reformies will face the wrath of union leaders if they don't cooperate. Not only did Weingarten and Mulgrew fail to say any such thing, but the assumption they even implied it is preposterous. UFT supports charter schools and has done for years. UFT runs charter schools, though one failed rather spectacularly last year, and has even co-located them. UFT proudly brought the odious Steve Barr's Green Dot to NYC. We're up for anything! We're the cool kids! We do charters, mayoral control, co-location, two-tier due process, whatever!

Here's the thing though--whatever we do, they want more. Even when we stand up for reforminess instead of common sense, we are reviled. These people hate us and everything we stand for. We are the last bastion of vibrant unionism in these United States and they mean to destroy us. We have seen over and over that it's not only counter-productive, but simply idiotic to play nice with these folks.

Yet this is what we do, again and again. We endorse presidential candidates, and ask nothing in return. We hear our presidents say, "This candidate said this and that." And then when they fail to do this or that, when they work against us, they talk to us like Squealer from Animal Farm. "Strategy, comrades, strategy."

How many times does the strategy have to fail before we at least try out a new one?

MaryEllen Elia, Magician

It's fascinating to read about NY State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia and her listening tour. "Fix your schools or I will," sayeth she. There are a whole bunch of schools on the list. In Long Island, where I live, there are several districts facing receivership. Here they are, along with the percentage of students poor enough to qualify for free lunch.

Central Islip - 91%
Roosevelt - 91%
Wyandanch- 80%
Hempstead - 78%

Do you see a pattern here? I do, and the pattern is replicated all over these United States of America. For some odd reason, every time there are large percentages of impoverished children, there are also large percentages of low test scores. What can we conclude from that? Well, MaryEllen Elia, like Governor Andrew Cuomo and his Heavy Hearted Assembly, has concluded there are two fundamental issues.

1. The schools suck, and
2. The teachers suck.

This is why we now have a system that rates teachers based on the student test grades. You see, if I spend 40 minutes a day with Johnie, and he doesn't learn English instantly, and he can't answer Common Corey questions, I suck. If Arwen teaches a student with no food at home, and the student has issues staying awake in class, Arwen also sucks. The only solution, in the view of geniuses like Andrew Cuomo and MaryEllen Elia, is to test the kids, and based on their scores, get rid of teachers like us who suck.

Because NY State knows what to do with a troubled school district. Well, they've never actually been successful, because they spent a decade in Roosevelt and Roosevelt is still on the list. But MaryEllen Elia knows what to do. She has a secret plan, you know, like Nixon did when he was gonna win the Vietnam War. OK, really it's not a secret. She's gonna fix everything.

Here's the thing. I've never heard of anyone doing that. Green Dot failed in their much-vaunted school takeover in LA. As far as I know, there is one way to be successful in raising test scores. You start your own school, cherry pick the kids, get rid of the ones who don't perform, don't replace the ones who leave, and then grease the governor's palm so he makes laws for you. (There are, of course, the alternate models of lying about the stats or changing the scores yourself.)

All MaryEllen has is a list of schools. She has no plan other than getting rid of teachers and placing new people in charge. But hey, that's the law. The Heavy Hearts passed the law and Michael Mulgrew thanked them for it.

A lot of people will suffer. Teachers will be fired and the hearts will be ripped right out of communities. But hey, their test scores suck, so the teachers suck, the schools suck, and the communities must suck too. That's pretty much what the law says.

Time for MaryEllen Elia to wave her magic wand.

Working for Free--Another Charter "Innovation"

Some charter schools are looking to unionize. That's not a bad thing, and I'm certain it would benefit not only the teachers, but also the students. I'm not remotely persuaded that people living in fear of being fired for a bad haircut are the best role models with which we can provide our children. Nor do I want our children to grow up and be in jobs like those.

For those of you who hope we lose Friedrichs so you can save a few bucks on union dues, take a gander at the thought processes of non-union bosses:

I spoke with someone, and he articulated the core of the tensions quite well. He said, “look, if KIPP decides that teaching on a Saturday is what’s best for the kids, and that’s going to get the best result, then they should just be able do that without having to go through a teachers union and negotiate and/or pay them more to do so.” I think that’s the core of these issues, which is that you can do all these things, but should you have to actually engage with these workers to make these decisions?

In other words, why should we have to pay people to work? Why can't we just tell them, "If you don't come in Saturday, don't come in Monday." Why should they have to negotiate anything? Why should working people have any voice at all? I'm pretty surprised that anyone who cared in the least for school employees would take an attitude like that, but even in charters that are unionized, it's apparently not uncommon.

@TeacherArthurG @rweingarten @UFT @uftacts @AFTunion that's what they say at bargaining table all the time

— Miles Trager (@TragerUFT) July 19, 2015

Now in fairness, when negotiating with management, it's your job to get as much as possible and theirs to pay as little as possible. But regardless of what you think of union contract negotiations, I wouldn't think there was an expectation of people working for free. It's very hard for me to accept that as a charter "innovation." It's not all that innovative to move labor back to the 19th century, at least not in my view.

But when you get in bed with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Here's a little flaw in the article:

And if you happen to think of teachers unions at some point during this education policy reverie, you’ll probably have them in the role they’re traditionally assigned by the media — as anti-charter and anti-reform. Just like Israelis and Palestinians, Crips and Bloods, Yankees and Red Sox, teachers unions and the charter movement simply don’t like each other. That’s just the way it is.

Actually, it isn't. UFT and AFT have supported charters and enabled this situation. UFT has gone so far as to open a few charter schools and indulge in the colocation so many of us find odious. The article also indulges in this nonsense:

A powerful narrative that has developed over the past decade and a half says that the reason we have these great disparities in our education system — huge, growing gaps between the rich and poor; etc. — is in large part because of bad teachers in the classrooms and the teachers unions fighting to keep bad teachers in the classrooms. So both liberals and conservatives have seen charter schools as a way in which they can either weaken the power of teachers unions, or just bypass teachers unions altogether.

It's remarkable that all the so-called bad schools full of so-called bad teachers are located in areas full of high poverty, high needs, or more likely both.  By ignoring that, someone's headed for failure, and inevitably schools and teachers will be blamed. I'm a bad teacher because my students, who speak no English, get low test scores. How many of my students could pass the Success Academy assessments? How many beginning ESL students do they accept? How many alternate assessment kids do they take? I'd wager zero. Therefore, there are no bad teachers like me.

Let me be very direct--lack of English is not a defect to be corrected. These are children, not defective used cars, and it's our job to help and guide them. We take everyone. That is not a flaw, but rather a quality to be emulated. It's pretty easy to pick and choose kids, eliminate the ones who don't work out, and then call yourselves geniuses because you got higher test scores. Oddly, a whole lot of charters cannot even manage that.

Charters are a band-aid on a gaping wound. If we really want the best for our kids, we'll help all of them, and that includes making sure they don't grow up in misery and poverty. It worked out very well in Finland.

Why can't we model our system on one that works, rather than one that puts more money into the pockets of the likes of Eva Moskowitz?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The King Is Dead. Long Live the King.

In one way, the list to the left rings true, but  in another, King has personally accomplished quite a few things. I've always been fascinated, for example, by the TV show The Sopranos. There you will find grown men sitting in lawn chairs at construction sites, and getting a pretty good salary for doing so. Beats working, you might say. And John King, while he didn't sit in a lawn chair, managed to spend his entire tenure not representing our children. Rather, he represented the moneyed interests that got him his job in the first place. While he didn't actually do his job at all, he did accomplish a few things.

For one, after facing the public for the first time, he labeled parents and teachers "special interests," canceled all future meetings in a snit, and managed to keep his job. Can you imagine what would happen to you if you decided your students didn't have valid concerns, canceled all your classes, and walked out? Do you think you'd get that commendation letter you've hoped for all these years?

For King, it was no biggie. So he made a mistake, He didn't face 3020a removal hearings as you would if you were outright derelict in your duties. That's for the little people. Forced to reconsider and actually face the public, he failed to say a word when a real special interest group monopolized one of the so-called public hearings:

In short, no one at the forum engaged in critical thinking about the new educational standards that are, purportedly, all about critical thinking.

He also got away with an outright lie, contending the Montessori schools his kids attend actually utilize the nonsense he advocates for ours. Clearly they do not. The "Do as I say, not as I do" mantra is a common one among the reformies, from King, to Bloomberg, to Klein, to Rhee, right up to and including our own President Barack Obama, he of the hopey changiness that has completely eluded American schools during his tenure.

John King taught a whopping one year in a public school, and went on to teach two years in a charter. How that qualifies him to head education in NY State I have not the slightest idea. Of course, people with money value reforminess far more than actual experience. That he managed to corral his NY State gig with such paltry experience and hold onto it despite his remarkably thin skin and outrageous hypocrisy is an achievement in itself.

Finally, despite his inability and unwillingness to sustain an argument against a thoughtful opponent, resorting to name calling rather than the critical thinking he claimed to be modeling, despite his woefully meager tenure as an actual teacher, despite his utter lack of helping our kids, he managed to wrangle a promotion. His credentials as relentless fanatical ideologue were sufficient for equally unqualified Arne Duncan to offer him a prestigious federal gig. One might assume he actually had achieved something beyond advocating for those who want to test our kids to death and destroy my chosen profession.

One would be laboring under a misconception, of course.

The Deformer Formula for "De-Motivating" Kids

In all the discussion of higher standards, I doubt the "reformers" have given much consideration to the complexities of motivation.

Some "reformers" seem to think that students who fail will seize the day.  They will harness their inner grit, work harder than ever and power their way to success.  Some may.  Most will not.  Many will wonder what is the purpose of trying.  Many will grow resentful.  Some will shut down their young minds.  These tests and the people who make them do a disservice to humanity.

I learned my first year on the job that a classroom test which fails nearly everybody represents a failure on the part of the teacher who created the test.  Teachers must deal in realities, meet students where they are and try to raise them up.  It is no good to aim far over students' heads to try to smugly prove one's own "smarts."  When NY State sets cut scores to fail 70% of its 2013 Common-Core test takers, the State turned a blind eye to reality and, itself, failed.

Some reformers seem to think that everything meaningful must be measured under conditions of time-pressure.  They think students will be motivated to show off their best stuff.  But, many kids can't sit for that long, let alone, for six days of testing.  They have young minds that wander and sometimes their legs need to do so, also.  Words and numbers may swim on the page.  Kids may over think some questions and tune out others.  They may grow nervous, agitated, fidgety and uncomfortable.  The classroom teacher best understands a child's academic strengths and weaknesses, not a cold, cruel and calculating standardized test.  These tests and the people who make them do a disservice to humanity.

Some "reformers" think that students will be motivated by the promise of becoming "college and career ready."  With the price of college and the lack of meaningful careers, however, the promise may prove false.  Reformers tout their own definition of success, measured primarily in terms of test points and, ultimately, salary figures.  It fails to motivate me.  I don't deal in their definitions, nor do most of the people I know.  To do so would be a disservice to humanity.

Rick Hess Chides Corporate Reformers for Too Much Reforminess

Today's Daily News features reformy Rick writing of regrettable ramifications of uber-reforminess. Unfortunately, and perhaps even deliberately, he misses the point altogether.

There’s good reason to regularly test students in reading and math, and to use those results to inform judgments about how well schools and teachers are doing.

What reason is that? In fact, there is good reason to test students in English and math, but not to see how schools and teachers are doing. There's no scientific basis for that, and Hess doesn't bother to provide one, primarily because there isn't one.

As an English teacher, I regularly test my students to find out how they are doing, and I use these tests to inform my teaching. If a large number of students fail, I need to teach the topic again, differently perhaps, and write another test. Of course, if they're taking some multiple choice extravaganza from Pearson, while I will grant this enriches the all-important Pearson coffers, I fail to see how this will help my kids.

Hess fails to acknowledge the massive time devoted to tests that students will never see again, will never learn from, and which will be used to determine the quality of schools and teachers. Oddly, we already know there is a direct correlation to high-needs, high-poverty, and so-called failing schools. If the goal is to fire teachers, well of course the grades may prove useful.

A few years back, the entire staff of a Rhode Island school was fired, and corporate reformers everywhere rejoiced. This would help the children, they argued. Arne Duncan and Barack Obama were thrilled. But what if we had taken that staff, the one largely serving kids who didn't know English, and swapped them out with the staff of a more middle-class suburban school with higher-achieving students? Would the staff magically become excellent? Would the suburban staff magically turn incompetent?

We'll never know, since the aim of reforminess is to close as many public schools as possible, and replace them with schools that get more money into the pockets of more people who don't really need it. Thus you have districts in which kids are being "educated" via cyber-charters, which not only perform miserably if you judge by test scores, but also deprive students of the sort of role models that could potentially change their lives.

Were these things not true, Hess might have some sort of argument. Considering reality, inconvenient though that may be, he's just spouting the same nonsense we hear from every corporate reformer from Gates on down.

Related: Perdido Street School

Student Lobbyist Andy Cuomo Is a Moron

Well, perhaps that's strong language, but the Andrew "I am the government" Cuomo is floating a merit pay scheme of "up to" $20,000 for the best teachers. Personally, I'm not persuaded Governor Cuomo would know a good teacher if one were beating him over the head. Nonetheless, were that to happen, it probably wouldn't change anything.  For one thing, the governor can't be bothered to do basic research. Merit pay has been around for a hundred years, and it has never worked.

For another thing, "up to" $20,000 means a number somewhere between zero and $20,000. While there are reports that a lot of teachers around NY State have been rated "highly effective" based on junk science VAM, that's no assurance formulas can't or won't be revised so as to not pay out.

Newark, for example, adopted a merit pay scheme. 190 of Newark's 3200 teachers got bonuses. That's fewer than 10%. Of course, 80% of Newark teachers chose not to give up tenure in order to participate. And those teachers, being smarter, were more likely to have been rated highly effective. Personally, I would question the competence of any teacher who gave up anything to be thrown upon the tender mercies of Chris Christie. It appears there's a whole bunch of money in Newark, but it does not appear the teachers are going to be receiving it.

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio has come out and stated flatly that he does not believe in merit pay. Perhaps the mayor actually reads the research. Perhaps the mayor knows that any teacher who's holding back waiting for merit pay is incompetent and ought to be fired. I can't really say why the mayor believes this, but it's certainly refreshing to see a rational opinion in City Hall, rather than fanatical ideology based on whatever came out of Bill Gates' hind quarters this morning.

And here's the truth--city teachers have been without a compensation increase for five years now. We aren't looking for a tip.

We want the same raise that NYPD and FDNY got, and I don't know a single non-E4E teacher who says otherwise.

Edfluenza

I was pretty surprised to read that, in the United States, if you're rich and you kill four people you suffer from "affluenza" and aren't guilty. After all, if you have the handicap of growing up with all that money, how are you to know that common people are not dispensable and ought not to be murdered? Mater and Pater never had time to tell you that, what with their high-powered jobs and gala luncheons. And they let you know early it was OK to accuse nanny of stealing the jewelry and have her deported back to the foul region from whence she came.

I've just been alerted by someone on Twitter that there is another little known malady called Edfluenza. Symptoms include imposing untested and/ or failed notions on national education systems. For example, you might wish to rate teachers by their test scores and fire the bottom 5% or so. You would do this even though it failed miserably in your own company, and caused failure after failure.

Or you might decide that the way to help schools is to close them and replace them with smaller ones. Of course, you would say nothing to the many districts that have adopted this practice even after it was pretty much established to be an abysmal failure. After all, by this time not only you, but also cash-strapped municipalities had been pouring millions into this program, and you couldn't just say, "Hey, I'm sorry you wasted all that money." After all, being reformy means never having to say you're sorry.

Or maybe you'd spent hundreds of millions designing a set of standards that had never been tested anywhere. Maybe you didn't bother to substantively consult with educators and had no idea whether or not it would work. Perhaps you decided to test kids extensively on topics for which they'd never prepared and parents got all up in arms about it. The only thing you could do, really, is pepper the genuine speakers with members of the various reformy groups you supported, hand them identical talking points, and make it appear that they were somehow grassroots. Make sure they get every spot on the speaker list and you should be in good shape.

Finally, you may notice that you have so little faith in these programs that you yourself have no idea whether or not they will work. You decide you won't actually know this for ten years. Yet you subject an entire nation's children to these programs, because you figure what the hell, your kids go to private schools anyway.

While you claim to be a passionate supporter of child health, you invest in companies like Coca Cola and McDonald's, which sell some of the most unhealthy products on earth to the children you claim to love so. Just for good measure, you also invest in Walmart, which has a business model that insures many of these kids you love so much will be doomed to crappy subsistence jobs rather than rewarding careers.

Then you go home and wonder why the hell no one wants your crappy Windows phone.

Lie Down with Dogs...

...and wake up with fleas. That's what we're getting as a result of our partnership with Steve Barr. Barr is affiliated with some ex-Green Dot school that rose up as a partnership with the UFT. He boasts of being a union school with a 30-page contract, and sets that forward as an example.

Here's what he didn't mention in his piece--Green Dot Schools have neither tenure nor seniority rights. Layoffs are done by virtue of perceived merit of said teachers. How many times have they fetched the principal's dry-cleaning? Who did the dogsitting for the AP when she took that fact-finding tour to Bermuda? Who brought the biggest cake to the principal's 50th birthday party? Did that person forget to come?

These and other questions could be considered with a thin contract. And when you don't have due process, there's no hearing to prove you're actually incompetent. I understand there is some "just cause" process over there, but when I asked various UFT reps whether or not it's ever saved a teacher position, no one was able to tell me. A prominent reformy friend of mine told me they never had to use the process and were generally able to "counsel out" anyone they didn't care for. I find it likely Green Dot, or whatever they're calling themselves, can fire teachers "just cause" it tickles their fancy.

So now, with a new progressive mayor, Barr is in the Daily News urging a new contract "compromise." Essentially, he wants to use his contract as a model for the city. Let's assume everything he says about his school is true, though I don't trust him for a New York minute. Does his charter take absolutely everyone? Are the ESL students abject beginners, or fairly advanced? Do they have as many high-needs students as neighborhood schools? And when they talk special education, do they have the same sort of kids public schools do? Have they got alternate assessment kids?

Clearly they don't have alternate assessment students if Barr claims a 100% graduation rate. Alternate assessment students are not on a path for diplomas.

Barr is a big mover and shaker in the "parent trigger" movement, the one represnted in the reformy box-office stinker Won't Back Down.. He took over Locke High School in LA, based on a faculty vote, then, by way of saying thank you, fired 70% of them. As a thank you for the UFT partnership, he's now saying we have to take ideas from both sides, but proposing only the same reformy nonsense we've been getting from Bloomberg for over a decade.

Barr says you can't argue with Bloomberg's "achievements." On that, he's dead wrong. Plenty of people argue with Bloomberg's achievements and that's precisely why Quinn and Lhota went down in flames. People in New York want to revisit democracy. They're sick and tired of the autocratic nonsense trickling down from the diminutive billionaire who makes the rules. They're sick and tired of a fake school board where the mayor holds the majority of votes.

If Bill de Blasio wants to be a successful mayor, he'll ignore the newspaper editorials and Steve Barrs urging him to maintain the status quo. He'll work with the union rather than vilifying us in the press. He'll keep his promises and back away from the school closings that devastate neighborhoods.

And if the UFT wants to be successful it will start standing up for teachers and our students rather than partnering with disingenuous demagogues who will stab us in the back at the earliest opportunity.

Arne Duncan Sics His Flying Monkeys on Diane Ravitch

I'm often shocked by what passes for argument nowadays. I don't suppose it's big news that Diane Ravitch has an impending book release. While I can't wait to read it, I follow her blog, and am well aware of her point of view. So, too, is the White House, as represented by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Duncan failed miserably to help Chicago schools, and thus was called upon by our President to work his magic on the rest of the country.

Former Duncan assistant Peter Cunningham tells us how our tax dollars were being used:

...one of my jobs was to monitor criticism of our policies and develop our responses. 

In other words, he sat around reading blogs and news articles. Nice work if you can get it. And the salary surely must beat that of us lowly teachers.

Cunningham saw fit to attack now, rather than bother to actually read the upcoming book. At some point, the administration was actually communicating with Ravitch.

Over the years, her criticism of the administration became more and more strident. It was increasingly clear that she was not interested in a genuine conversation with us but rather was interested in driving her anti-administration message, even if it meant resorting to tactics that are beneath someone of her stature: ad hominem attacks on the secretary, cherry-picking data, setting up straw man arguments, taking language out of context and distorting its meaning, and ignoring sound evidence that conflicts with her point of view. 

Note that Cunningham does not offer a single example of anything of which Ravitch is accused. We are, I suppose, to simply take him at his word. I'm puzzled as to how accusing her of all these things with no evidence whatsoever is not in itself the ad hominem attack that he deems so distasteful. If there is evidence, or indeed a single example, why doesn't Cunningham share it with us?

Cunningham then quotes Ravitch, who says Common Core standards are too high. There is, in fact, evidence that this is absolutely correct. For one, there is the massive failure rate in NY State. For another, there is evidence that the benchmark is fatally flawed. It's shocking that someone who, at least ostensibly, represented us and our children, cannot be bothered to do such rudimentary research.

This is followed by an excursion into other-worldliness as Cunningham ventures to read Ravitch's mind. Ravitch says not everyone needs to go to college, and Cunningham informs us of who Ravitch has in mind:

When Dr. Ravitch says, "But maybe they don't need to go to college," who exactly is she referring to? It's certainly not rich white kids. 

Yet I don't actually see that specified in Ravitch's comments. Doubtless there is no such thing as a rich white plumber or business owner. Cunningham continues:

I know she has repudiated many of her earlier views on reform and I respect her right to change her mind. But openly and unrepentantly calling for low standards and implying that whole segments of the student population are not college material is indefensible.

Here, Cunningham refers to Ravitch's former position supporting national standards. I'd presume it would go without saying that an acceptable national standard would be researched, field-tested, and established as having validity. Common Core is none of the above. And yet, Duncan himself claims these are not national standards. It's remarkable that Cunningham hasn't even got the talking point right.

Worse, is his baseless accusation that Ravitch calls for low standards. I've never seen her call for any such thing. Cunningham would have us assume that any of us who fail to support his unproven "reform" oppose high standards for kids. He would have us assume that saying some kids don't or won't need college is an insult on some group. His citation of white kids would have us assume some covert racism on Ravitch's part, an implication for which he, again, offers no evidence whatsoever.

I understand that Dr. Ravitch is about to publish another book attacking education reform. She will go after my good friend Arne Duncan. She will attack alternative educational approaches such as charter schools -- even if they are successful. She will attack well-meaning and hard-working organizations like Teach for America. She will attack foundations and organizations she disagrees with, regardless of the benefits they provide to educators. She will lump them all together as one big corporate conspiracy aimed at privatizing public education.

Again, we are to take Cunningham's word Ravitch will "go after" his "good friend." First of all baseless personal attacks, like Cunningham's column, are very different from reasoned criticism of policies or actions. Second, it's pretty clear Duncan is the very same good friend who bribed cash-starved states to accept his baseless and unproven policies.

If some of these efforts are moving too fast for some and are off-base for others, we can discuss it like adults with intellectual rigor and mutual respect and adjust accordingly. 

Yet Cunningham himself does none of this as he launches yet another thinly-veiled and utterly baseless attack.

But we can never, ever retreat. 

No matter how hurtful, misguided or ineffective our policies are, we must continue. With all due respect, Mr. Cunningham, that notion is nothing short of idiotic. If that's the best argument you can muster, the title of this piece is surely an offense to flying monkeys everywhere.

Common Sense Says Reformy John King Must Go (Diane Ravitch Says So Too)

If you haven't read Diane Ravitch today, it's time. She's calling for the resignation of NYS Education Commissioner Reformy John King. Ravitch is a voice in the education wilderness demanding we base decisions on research and practice. This flies in the face of common practice, which is to do whatever the hell Bill Gates wants and hope for the best.

He has imposed an evaluation scheme that no one understands, but which he famously described as “building a plane in mid-air.” He doesn’t realize that no one wants to ride on a plane that is being built in mid-air—not students, not teachers, not principals, not parents, not superintendents.

Not anyone with the remotest instinct for survival, when you get right down to it. But Reformy John is not about supporting the system. He's all about giving it away to his charter BFFs who got him the gig in the first place. This should be obvious to anyone observing the debacle that is the Common Core tests.

John King is the guy who singlehandedly imposed the insane system that will cause city teachers to be fired based on test scores. Of course, our union is complicit in this, as we took part in negotiations to enact the preposterous law that enabled it. Nonetheless, why isn't Reformy John judged by the scores of the very test he imposed?

If we are to judge teachers and principals by the rise or fall of student test scores, as King wishes, then so too should he be judged.

I don't personally favor such a system, but Reformy John certainly does.  Isn't accountability one of the reformiest things there is? On that basis alone, it's time to fall on the reformy sword being used against teachers. After all, Reformy John was a teacher for a few minutes.

Let the NY State Board of Regents know it's time to stand with science. We are teachers, and ought not to be tossing our lot in with climate change deniers and flat earthers. It's not good enough for us, our kids, or our state to have an educational leader who makes decisions by consulting his magic mirror.

Schools as Big Business

If you don't think our corporate pals are gunning for your job, take a look at this lineup from the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation. By their name, you might assume they are some branch of government. While they aren't, considering the likes of Arne Duncan and Corey Booker, they may as well be. After all, it's important that someone represent the interests of Walmart, to wit, low-wage replaceable employees.

For their annual summit, they've got legal expert Campbell Brown, who's very vocal on the point that teachers should be fired on the basis of unsubstantiated or refuted allegations. To join her, they've got Amanda Ripley, the cheerleader for corporate reform who thinks students ought to determine whether or not teachers keep their jobs. I've actually worked at a place where student ratings determined my status, and quickly learned that not insisting on things like homework or passing tests went a long way in getting me that great rating. The cherry on the top of the cake is a faux-liberal Fox News correspondent who gets nervous when he's on planes with Muslims.

With such a stellar group of speakers, you'd better believe that big business will continue giving millions to scab groups like TFA. It's also good business to run front page headlines about demagogues like Michelle Rhee, while claiming revelations about her are not newsworthy.

It's a tough year for those of us who, unlike the "experts," are actually involved in the work of teaching children. With a press corps that can't be bothered finding the truth of things, we tend to get total crap in the newspapers and a lot of Americans have no idea how counter to their interests the goals of these reformy folks are.

And, given that our unions have agreed to and enabled quite a few things reformy, particularly the junk science observations that are the crown jewel of Bill Gates' quest to degrade our profession, it's tough to know who to believe. While public schools are closed for no reason, charters have their corporate pals change their ratings and they do fine.  Fortunately, there are sometimes reporters who check the facts, and sometimes consequences for criminals.

And it's our job to keep telling the truth about this nonsense, no matter what the odds.