How Are Schools Supposed To Work When Everything Else Around Them Is Broken?

Had a discussion with NY Daily News reporter Ben Chapman over the "disruption" that education reformers bring to the education system (and the money they make off of that "disruption") that went like this the other day:

@NYDNBenChapman Cuomo's Smart Schools jive all about "disrupting" system to help marketeers - http://t.co/1wqvQFrqBD
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) September 26, 2014

To which Chapman replied

@perdidostschool Point taken. tricky part to me is that many NYC schools actually could use substantial help IMHO
— Ben Chapman (@NYDNBenChapman) September 26, 2014

@perdidostschool meaning that they look like sufficiently dysfunctional places that significant changes maybe a good idea
— Ben Chapman (@NYDNBenChapman) September 26, 2014

This is the education reformer "change" frame - sure, change is hard and sometimes it hurts, but given how bad things are now, significant change is needed no matter the cost.

But I don't buy that:

@NYDNBenChapman Yes, but as Ravitch points out in Nation piece on Success, changes help only some.
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) September 26, 2014

@NYDNBenChapman Also, chaos brought by constant reforms increases dysfunction in system. Would add, dysfunction in 1/2
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) September 26, 2014

@NYDNBenChapman school system mimics dysfunction in society as whole. Does anything work in America anymore?
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) September 26, 2014

@NYDNBenChapman Banking system, political system, regulatory system - everything is broken - http://t.co/TIXLa6sVu5
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) September 26, 2014

Chapman never replied to my Twitter pushback (and since it was the weekend, I'll assume he had something more fun to do than talk on Twitter with me), but this idea that schools are dysfunctional in isolation of the rest of society is something I want to hit on beyond my conversation with Ben.

Because it's bullshit.

Schools may look like sufficiently dysfunctional places to education reformers but they are no more so than other institutions in American life.

Let's start with the granddaddy of dysfunctional American institutions, the federal government.

In January, as President Obama was set to give his State of the Union address, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found this:

As President Barack Obama enters his sixth year in the White House, 68 percent of Americans say the country is either stagnant or worse off since he took office, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Just 31 percent say the country is better off, and a deep pessimism continues to fuel the public's mood. Most respondents used words like “divided,” “troubled,” and “deteriorating” to describe the current state of the nation.

On the eve of Tuesday’s State of the Union address, more than six-in-10 Americans believe that the nation is headed in the wrong direction and 70 percent are dissatisfied with the economy.

Displayed here are the words and phrases poll respondents most commonly associated with where the country is headed in 2014, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

It’s not just Obama under fire. A whopping 81 percent disapprove of Congress and twice as many Americans now hold negative views about the Republican Party as positive ones.

Democratic pollster Fred Yang, whose firm conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff, compares these findings to the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day,” in which the protagonist finds himself living the same day over and over.

“It seems like we’ve been re-living the same basic dynamics -- a public that is anxious, dissatisfied and dismayed -- in a continuous loop,” he said.

That "continuous loop" of anxiety, dissatisfaction and dismay over the direction of the country and the economy was measured again in the latest WSJ/NBC News poll earlier this month:

The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll says that a clear-cut majority is disgusted with the present political scene and retains little hope that future generations will fare as well as we have. As candidates get down and dirty in the lead-up to midterm elections, 60 percent say the country is in a general state of decline. A mere 19 percent of those polled have a favorable opinion of Republicans in Congress; their Democratic colleagues (or “colleagues”) poll at 31 percent. But the most remarkable number is 79: that’s the percentage of the politicized public that presently voices its discontent with the entire American political system as constituted; and fully half of the respondents said “very dissatisfied.”

79% of Americans polled express "discontent with the entire American political system as constituted," half say they are "very dissatisfied."

This is not a happy electorate, is it?

And one of the things they aren't happy with is the economy and how it seems to be rigged for the top 5%.

Which it certainly seems to be, as Neil Irwin showed in this recent report in the NY Times:

Every year, the Census Bureau delivers a sweeping set of numbers that give the richest annual picture of how much Americans are making, how many are living in poverty, and how many have access to health insurance. The numbers are backward-looking, covering conditions from a year ago. But the new numbers, released Tuesday, in many ways tell us more about how well the economy is serving — or failing — the mass of Americans than data that create hyperventilation in the financial markets.

The census numbers on what American families made last year are as mediocre as they are predictable. We now know that if your household brought in $51,939 in income last year, you were right at the 50th percentile, with half of households doing better and half doing worse. In inflation-adjusted terms, that is up a mere 0.3 percent from 2012. If you’re counting, that’s an extra $180 in annual real income for a middle-income American family. Don’t spend your extra $3.46 a week all in one place.

Going back a little further, the numbers are even gloomier. The 2013 median income remained a whopping 8 percent — about $4,500 per year — below where it was in 2007. The 2008 recession depressed wages for middle-income Americans, and they haven’t recovered in any meaningful way. And 2007 household incomes were actually below the 1999 peak.

...

This simple fact may be the most important thing to understand about today’s economy: Around 1999, growth in the United States economy stopped translating to growth in middle-class incomes. In the last 15 years, median income has been more or less flat while there was far sharper growth in, for example, per capita gross domestic product.

There are various potential reasons. Evolving technology favors those with the most advanced skills and allows companies to replace formerly middle-class workers with machines. Declining union power gives workers less power at the bargaining table over wages. Cultural norms have shifted such that top executives and financiers are paid much more compared with regular workers than they used to be.

But there really is no mystery as to why public opinion has been persistently down on the quality of the economy for years. You can’t eat G.D.P. You can’t live in a rising stock market. You can’t give your kids a better life because your company’s C.E.O. was able to give himself a big raise.

The rubber-meets-road measure of whether the economy is working for the mass of Americans is median real income and related measures of how much money is making its way into their pockets and what they can buy with that money.

And the newest census numbers show that the nation experienced virtually no progress on that frontier in 2013, and remains far behind where we were seven years ago. Americans feel disappointed by the economy; the new data show that they have good reason.

Now why aren't gains from GDP "trickling down" to the middle and working classes instead of squarely going to the top 5%?

Might it be because the economy is rigged in the favor of the top 5% and the regulatory bodies that are supposed to correct this kind of criminality are themselves rigged to favor the rich and powerful?

I think it might:

Secret audio recordings made in 2012 by a former Fed employee of conversations between high-level staffers inside the New York Federal Reserve, the branch that oversees Wall Street, show how the agency was afraid of offending powerful banks, most notably Goldman Sachs. The recordings, detailed in an explosive story on Friday by ProPublica and NPR, are a bombshell that sweeps back some of the veil of secrecy surrounding the Fed’s handling of the financial crisis to expose a culture of deference toward Wall Street, institutional paralysis and a culture averse to speaking up and challenging conventions.

...

Recordings reveal how Segarra tried to persuade higher-ups at the New York Fed that Goldman Sachs needed a firm policy regarding conflicts of interest, one of several negative conclusions she had come to about the bank. She was shot down. “Why do you have to say there’s no policy?” complains Segarra’s unidentified boss in one recording.

Another recording shows how the New York Fed caved to Goldman Sachs’s insistence that it complete a deal with Spanish bank Banco Santander, even though Fed staffer Michael Silva thought the deal was “window dressing” designed to make the Spanish bank appear healthier than it really was.

The recording also suggests how in the fall of 2008, Fed staffers were akin to a deer in the headlights. As Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and a large money market fund, where shares are never supposed to trade for less than one dollar, “broke the buck,” confusion and paralysis reigned. In one recording, Silva, a former chief of staff to then New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, vomited. Silva, according to the recordings, later felt disappointed when Goldman Sachs did not step in to help save Lehman, a hesitance that deterred other banks. 

“It was extraordinarily disappointing to me that they weren’t thinking as Americans,” Silva says in the recording.

Segarra sued the New York Fed last fall in Manhattan federal court over her firing. In the complaint, she says that Silva said during an unspecified meeting that the Fed “possessed information about Goldman that could cause Goldman to ‘explode.’” A federal judge dismissed her claims last April. Prior to the lawsuit’s filing, Goldman Sachs attempted to negotiate a settlement with Segarra for around $7 million, court papers show.

The Fed, which injected hundreds of billions of bailout dollars into Wall Street banks to avert a global financial collapse, and the Justice Department, which has been criticized for not putting any senior executives from banks or lenders in jail, are both increasingly seen as having been too soft on Wall Street.

We have a government that no longer functions (and when it does function, it's only to reward members of the government themselves as well as their corporate backers), an economy that no longer works for the vast majority of Americans (and hasn't for a long time now, though the nadir has been in the post-2008 recession period), a banking system that is rife with criminality and corruption and a regulatory system that is rigged to ignore it (or worse, help hide the criminality and corruption.)

Schools, dysfunctional though some may be, are not dysfunctional in isolation of the rest of America's major institutions.

To think that "significant changes" - Joel Klein's vaunted "disruption" - will fix whatever dysfunction exists in the American education system while the rest of American institutions, many of which have direct power through law and mandate over how school systems run or indirect power through lobbying of those who make the law and push the mandates, is wrong-headed.

What continued "disruption" will continually bring is more chaos, more dysfunction.

We see that already with all the changes wrought since No Child Left Behind, continued through Race to the Top - constant turmoil over the Endless Testing regime, teacher evaluation changes that tie ratings to test scores and cause ever more testing, school "turnarounds" that hand public schools over to private entities to run them as charters, the fights over school closings and co-locations, the fight over Common Core and standardized standards and curricula imposed from afar.

There have been significant disruptions to the American public education system since the Bush No Child Left Behind Era and like the rest of American institutions, public schools have suffered in the esteem of the American public as measured by the latest PDK/Gall-Up Poll on education, with 80% expressing disapproval of the nation's public schools at large even as a majority said they thought highly of the schools in their neighborhoods.

Americans may see schools at large as dysfunctional (though interestingly, not their own neighborhood schools), but no more so than they see the rest of America's institutions.

And the reality is, bringing "significant changes" and "disruption" to the school system developed by the same people who run the dysfunctional government or own banks and/or corporations that wreak dysfunction in society isn't going to fix whatever dysfunction exists in the school system.

Instead it will bring about more dysfunction.

The cynic in me thinks that's exactly what education reform is meant to bring - ever-changing mandates that breed more dysfunction, more chaos, and eventually drive the public school system to dissolution, allowing it to be privatized and owned by the very institutions that cause so much dysfunction and chaos themselves - the banks and the corporations.

It's nice to think that schools can fix themselves when the rest of America's institutions are broken, but it's a fairy tale, no less mythic than the jive we still tell ourselves about having a government "Of the people, By the People, For the people" or an economy in which anybody can succeed through hard work and sweat alone.

Newark Star Ledger: Chris Christie And Cory Booker Share Same Key Donors

The corporate education reformers are coming out for both Christie and Booker:

Five dozen wealthy donors from Wall Street to Silicon Valley have placed their bets on both of New Jersey’s big political stars — Republican Gov. Chris Christie and Democratic Newark Mayor Cory Booker — this campaign season, a Star-Ledger review of state and federal records shows.

When the governor and the mayor hit the fundraising circuit in California this year, they collected maximum donations from many of the same tech moguls at gatherings hosted by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a friend to both men.

When they were home in the Garden State, the two celebrity politicians drew big checks from the same prominent real estate brokers and land developers.

And in New York, Kenneth Langone, the Republican billionaire who pushed Christie to run against President Obama in the 2012 race, has given $5,200 to Booker’s campaign for U.S. Senate this year and $3,800 to Christie’s re-election effort.

In all, 59 people in four states have given to both candidates this year, The Star-Ledger review found. From that donor base, Booker has received $300,550 and Christie has drawn $212,000 — a small portion of their total fundraising hauls: $8.6 million for the mayor and nearly $7 million for the governor.

...

Some of their support seems to be issue-based. Two billionaires — Alan Fournier of New Jersey and John Doerr of California — are prominent backers of some of the education policies Booker and Christie espouse.

"It’s really all about education. They both have very strong track records on education reform and trying to help kids," said Fournier, founder of a multibillion-dollar hedge fund based in Summit and co-founder of the nonprofit education group Better Education for New Jersey Kids. "New Jersey has the worst gap between minority students and upper-class suburban kids in the country, and we spend more in New Jersey than most states on a per-pupil basis, but we haven’t gotten the results."

Fournier, who was in the audience last week for Christie’s speech at a KIPP charter schools conference in Las Vegas, applauded Christie’s work tying teacher tenure to student achievement last year. Fournier, a registered Republican, stressed that education reform is a bipartisan effort and noted he also supports Democrats such as Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) and state Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex).

"If you want to make change in New Jersey, it has to be on both sides of the aisle," he said.

Facebook spokeswoman Sarah Feinberg said Zuckerberg "is a longtime supporter of both Christie and Booker, dating back to Mark’s work with both of them on the issue of education reform."

The three worked on a $100 million education initiative for Newark schools — donated by Zuckerberg — that kicked off when they appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in 2010.

A vote for Cory Booker is a vote for Chris Christie is a vote for hedge fundie-backed corporate education reform as well as Wall Street-friendly policies that steal money from the little people to give it to the wealthy.

Same goes for Steve Fulop, Booker's Goldman Sachs buddy in Jersey City.

What The Testing Game Is All About

Norm Scott:

Well, we know what the testing game is all about and it ain't children. It's about using tests to go after teachers, close schools, end tenure, de-unionize the teaching force so they can lower salaries, and create massive turnover in a temporary teaching force so they will never have to pay pensions.

Is that enough of a mouthful for you?

So will all the sturm and drang over the "failures" of the Bloomberg admin I would disagree. Bloomberg has accomplished exactly what he intended. Sure he may take a temporary hit over the low scores but he can manage the media well enough while keeping his eye on the big prize: undermine public schools (these low test results will provide some assistance) so people will want to leave in drives and head to charters which will glom onto the higher performing students and toss the remains back into what is left of the public schools.

And I don't trust one mayoral candidate to truly resist this trend, even Di Blasio or Liu. Neo-liberalism reigns.

And of course the only thing to add to this is how the union leadership at the AFT, the NYSUT, the UFT and the NEA have "collaborated" with Bloomberg and his fellow deformers to bring us to this moment.

The education deformers and their compatriots in the media are declaring the public school system a failure in New York State today, folks.

The media is not reporting how these new Common Core tests, aligned with the NAEP scoring methodology, are rigged to show 50%-70% failing rates.

They're not reporting how the NAEP scoring methodology is controversial, as Diane Ravitch noted yesterday in this post, with many researchers finding the performance levels "fundamentally flawed" and "unreasonably high."

Nope - they're just reporting that the standards were raised, the scores fell and most New York students, teachers and schools are failures.

This is the end game - to declare the system a failure and call for drastic and disruptive "change" to solve the imaginary crisis the deformers themselves engineered.

You can bet that solution will enrich many of the deformers themselves - from Rupert Murdoch, the owner of a for profit education technology company, to Joel Klein, his henchman who runs that company, to John King, the purveyor of charter schools who no doubt will go back to the sector after he's done with his dirty work at NYSED, to Merryl Tisch, whose family sold their cigarette business and went into the for profit online education company to go along with their other interests.

It's all rigged - and our union leaders, rather than fight this, rather than expose the chicanery of the reform movement, have instead collaborated with the deformers and corporatists and privatizers to negotiate the terms of exploitation and, ultimately, surrender.

To repeat - it's all rigged.

Spitzer Must Be Doing Something Right

The corporate crooks who own this city and the neo-liberal functionaries in the press that shill for them are out for Eliot Spitzer this morning, with all three major daily newspapers attacking Spitzer with all their guns a blazin'.

The Daily News sends out Mike Lupica, Denis Hamill, Bill Hammond, and the editorial staff writer to shoot him down.

The Post puts out the hit on Spitzer with Andrea Peyser, Bob McManus, and the editorial staff writer as well.

Not to be outdone, the NY Times sends out Frank "I Loved 'Won't Back Down'" Bruni, Michael Powell, and the editorial staff writer to shiv Spitzer.

As I posted last night, UFT: A Union Of Retirees President Michael Mulgrew has threatened to personally take out campaign ads against Spitzer himself.

And Kathryn Wilde, head of the corporate criminal lobbying group New York City Partnership, attacked Spitzer in the Times.

Given how much of a reaction Spitzer's announcement to run for comptroller generated from the neo-liberal ruling class and their functionaries in the media, I'm starting to think Eliot Spitzer back with political power is just what we need in this city.

Anybody who upsets Kathryn Wilde, Michael Mulgrew, and the Post, Daily News and Times editorial staff/neo-liberal columnist brigade must be doing something right.

Given the chaotic roll-out of his campaign that makes Weiner's rollout look masterful, they probably have nothing to worry about.

It doesn't look like he's organized enough to get enough signatures to get on the ballot by Thursday's deadline.

But it will be interesting to see what happens if he does.

John Liu scares the neo-liberal ruling class and their functionaries in the media a little bit, which is why they destroyed him with the campaign finance fraud scandal.

But Liu doesn't come close to scaring the corporate criminals, political establishment and media functionaries the way Spitzer does.

Taking a look at the panic Spitzer's announced candidacy is generating in the corridors of power today, I'm starting to think my own initial negative reaction to Spitzer's announcement was a touch misguided.

Anybody who puts this kind of fear into the elite can't be all bad.

Chicago 2013

From The Guardian:

More than 100 demonstrators taking part in mass civil disobedience were arrested in Chicago on Wednesday as several thousand people marched against the largest proposed round of school closings in recent memory.

Many carried placards proclaiming "Strong Schools, Strong Neighbourhoods" and "Protect Our Children" while chanting "Whose Schools, Our Schools" and calling for mayor Rahm Emmanuel's resignation.

"We're signalling that there is going to be a large and determined movement that will use the tactics of civil disobedience and direct action in order to keep these schools open," said Chicago Teachers Union vice-president Jesse Sharkey, who was arrested outside City Hall, one of 131 detained by police. "We see this event as kicking off an extended campaign this spring and we think it was a great success."

The city last week announced plans to close 54 schools affecting more than 30,000 students, primarily in low-income black and Latino areas. The proposals – which had already sparked huge, rowdy protests at hearings throughout the city prior to the announcement – mark Emmanuel's second major confrontation over education in less than six months following the teachers' strike in late August.

 "People have a right to the neighbourhoods in which they live," said CTU leader Karen Lewis at the rally. "Children have the right to a safe, nurturing, loving environment."

 CTU has laid down the gauntlet:

"In the same time these school closings have been taking place over the past decade, the city has opened about 100 charter schools in the very neighbourhoods where they're now closing schools through under-utilisation," said Sharkey. "Meanwhile supports of charter schools have been very open ideologically about making school competition part of the larger picture.

"We have not yet won the argument with the people of Chicago that this is a critical moment to be active. But this was a good start. Four or five thousand people and lots of different schools represented today. The argument can and will be won."

...

The CTU emerged with considerable public support after it blunted Emmanuel's attempts to tie teachers' pay to test scores last year. It has pledged to continue the campaign of non-violent disobedience. "People who work in the schools and rely on public schools will oppose the mass closings by any and all peaceful means," Sharkey has told union members. "[School closings] are not something we are prepared to accept without a fight ... We're going to take this fight as far as we have to, to defend our community schools."

Jesse Jackson was there.

Randi Weingarten was not.

She must have been paling around with her friend Bill Gates, finding new ways to use technology to evaluate teachers via test scores.

Thankfully Lewis, Sharkey, CTU and thousands of parents and concerned citizens from around Chicago did show up to fight this massive privatization of the city's school system.

It's going to be a long, hard fight. 

And as Sharkey said, they haven't gotten all the people in Chicago up in arms that this is critical moment to fight back.

But at the very least, they're trying to do just that.

Two Bloomberg Stories That Should Scare You

The first, from Fred Dicker in the Post, says that Bloomberg is now giving campaign contributions to Shelly Silver and the Assembly Democrats after long shutting them out from his financial largesse.

That ought to open a few eyes - what's Bloomberg going to want in return for the money and the promise of more money?

The second story that ought to terrify you is a puff piece on Bloomberg from the Washington Post where Bloomberg gets to tell us how he's going to single-handedly save us all from the NRA:

On Monday, Bloomberg will headline a summit on guns at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, another opportunity for the outspoken mayor to deliver an indictment of Washington’s failure to do anything meaningful on the issue. Although the Democrat-turned-Republican- turned-indepen­dent says he practices a “noble and practical” brand of post-partisan politics, when it comes to gun laws, he is more aligned with one party than the other.

...

 “I’m going to prove a counterweight” to the NRA, said Bloomberg, who spent about $10 million in five congressional and statewide races against NRA-supported candidates last year, winning four of those contests. “It seemed effective, and I’m certainly going to take a good, hard look at next time. . . . You can organize people, I can write checks.”

Both these articles indicate what Bloomberg plans to do post-City Hall - influence as many policies as he can by throwing around as much money as he can.

Now I understand some of you out there might say, well, the NRA is a toxic organization and we need some counterweight to their money and influence, so even if that counterweight is Bloomberg, it's important on this issue that we have that.

I agree the NRA is a toxic organization that has a lot of money and influence, but I worry when one guy with more money than God suddenly decides he is going to single-handedly buy elections with his cash.

Make no mistake, Bloomberg plans to do this not just with gun laws and the NRA, but also with education reform.

That's why he's funding his lobbying group StudentsFirstNY and that's why he put his former City Hall toadie Micah Lasher in charge.

The plan is to demonstrate to many politicians both here in NY and around the country that the Bloomberg corporate education reform policies are the ones they will hold dear to their hearts or they're going to have Bloomberg throwing millions in cash to their opponents.

Now maybe Bloomberg is suddenly giving cash to Shelly Silver and the Assembly Dems because he wants them to push the gun control issue in Albany.

But you know that he's also going to want to push education reform there too and with Silver and the Assembly Dems on the receiving end of his cash, who knows how that plays out?

As Blowback Against Corporate Education Reform Agenda Gains Steam Across The U.S., The UFT Prepares To Surrender In NYC

B-LoEd Scene points out this morning all the places that the corporate education reform movement is meeting resistance:

It appears the blowback against corporate privatization and for profit education is ON. From the great state of Washington teachers at Garfield High have formally refused to administer another useless standardized test that will once again be used to evaluate teachers, a purpose for which it was not created. And in nearby Ballard High, another Seattle school, teachers have announced that they will be joining their colleagues at Garfield in refusing to participate in the stupidity of administering a weaponized standardized testing instrument.

Closer to home, Hamburg NY teachers have likewise refused to sign off on the APPR mandated by the Ommissioner of NYSED with a $450,000.00 blackmail attached to it. The Superintendent and Board took their sweet old time in settling in for negotiations, an obvious ploy to limit the amount of time left for negotiations hoping to cash in on Mr. King's attempt to make teachers who stand up for themselves look like they are throwing away money meant "for the children." Hamburg's APPR left any final say on a disputed teacher evaluation  completely in the hands of the Super to break the tie. As professionals with a scrap of self respect should do, Hamburg teachers answered with a No in Thunder (nearly 75% of them voted it down).

And in a few days something tells me Buffalo teachers are going to find themselves alongside our brothers and sisters in Hamburg when push turns to shove and the lil Commissioner's ticking clock stops ticking without successfully bullying BTF into signing off on yet another a lousy deal that's intended to facilitate the widespread termination of teachers no matter what their skill level or expertise.
This is the future of ed reform in America friends. It's time David started to loosen up and gather up a few stones. Goliath has had it his way long enough.

Combine this with CTU's victory against Rahm Emanuel in Chicago and the ouster of charter shill Tony Bennett in Indiana. Add the steady gains being made in exposing the true agenda of these phoney ass venture philanthropists and their vulture educapitalism and I bet I could find a physics teacher who'd agree this looks like momentum. It's on bitches.

Not here in NYC it isn't.

Here in NYC, Michael Mulgrew, President of the United Federation of Teachers, sent out an email Friday telling teachers the union was back to negotiating the APPR evaluation system with the NYCDOE even though just a few weeks ago the union was claiming they could not negotiate with the DOE until Bloomberg and Walcott addressed the issue of how the new system would be rolled out.

That issue was never addressed, of course, but the two sides are back to negotiating and are expected to come to an agreement before the governor's January 17 deadline to make an agreement or lose state funding passes.

Mulgrew said in his email that the union will fight any "myths and misinformation" that spread after the union comes to an agreement with the DOE over the evaluation system, which I read as the UFT will attack anybody who doesn't say the new APPR system scrapes the skies and is the bestest thing to happen to NYC teachers since the odious '05 teachers contract.

So while resistance gains steam across the country - even in Texas, the birthplace of the high stakes testing movement - here in NYC, Michael Mulgrew and the UFT leadership plan on capitulating to an egregious evaluation system that will use

1. Value added and growth measurements, otherwise known as "junk science," with margins of error somewhere between 52% and 87%

2. A classroom observation rubric so complex that no one, including the rubric author herself, could get an "effective" rating from it

3. A Student Learning Objectives process that will add hundreds of hours of paperwork to already maxed-out teacher workloads every semester and

4. A rating system that can see a teacher rated "effective" in all three parts of the system - the state test part, the local assessment part and the classroom observation part - and STILL be rated "ineffective" overall

What the UFT is doing here is what is known in Randi Weingarten's vernacular as "solution-oriented unionism" - capitulating to the corporate forces that want to impose top-down "reforms" in order to fire as many teachers as possible, close as many schools as possible, and turn as much education money over to Randi's corporate pals like Rupert Murdoch and the Tisch Family as possible.

I am heartened to see resistance forming all over this country to these corporate education reform forces.

I am heartened to see that people are finally realizing  that we cannot collaborate with these corporate education reform forces because they are out for the total destruction and privatization of the public education system.

It is a pity that the leadership of the largest local teachers union in the country - the United Federation of Teachers - cannot be a part of the resistance rather than a part of the defeatist mentality that there is nothing we can do but try and keep our heads above water while they try and drown us.

But that's how it's always been with the UFT since I started teaching 12 years ago and I suspect that's how it always will be until this leadership is either voted out of power or lose their jobs because the union becomes a meaningless entity for NYC teachers facing right-to-work rules.

Diane Ravitch posted the following from the head of the Rochester union last night:

Adam Urbanski, head of the Rochester (NY) Teachers Union, offers this advice:

“In his letter from the Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King wrote, ‘There are just laws and unjust laws. And we are obligated to disobey the unjust laws.’ A nationwide movement of creative insubordination may be the only way to put a stop to the injustice now imposed on America’s public schools, teachers and especially students.”

Here's the advice we heard from Michael Mulgrew on Friday:

If an agreement is reached, we will need to do a lot of work very quickly to stop the spread of myths and misinformation.

Notice the difference?

While many people in the rest of the country are fighting corporate education reform, the UFT leadership plans on capitulating to it here in NYC and fighting any resistance either inside or outside the union that calls the leadership on this capitulation and points out the horrors of the evaluation agreement that they make.

Isn't it time we get a union leadership that is capable of protecting its members rather than protecting its own interests and leaving the rank and file to the reform predators?

Isn't it time we here in NYC join the fight against corporate education reform, especially the high stakes standardized testing, rather than capitulate to it?

UPDATE: Unity hack Ed in the Apple compares the opposition to APPR to the Tea Party.

Just as the UFT sent Leo Casey out on the attack against Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris last February over their APPR criticism, now Ed in the Apple is here to tell us all not to worry, that APPR will not stand up to litigation but anybody opposed to it is a Tea Partier anyway and should be treated as such.

Clearly even the clueless UFT leadership understands they are going to have some problems after the membership gets a gander at how bad this new evaluation system is going to be.

And so the Vichy leadership is revving up the spin machine and going on the attack even before the evaluation system agreement is announced.

It must really be a bad agreement for them to pull out the Tea Party slander this early in the attack.

Murdoch Looks To Buy LA Times, Chicago Tribune

It's as if the Murdoch hacking/bribery scandal in Britain never happened:

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is looking to bid for the Los Angeles Times, the paper has reported, adding Murdoch is also interested in buying its stablemate the Chicago Tribune from their parent company, the Tribune Company.

The Times said senior News sources confirmed executives had approached the two investment firms and a bank that hold Tribune's debt – the lenders will become its majority owners once it emerges from bankruptcy protection, possibly within months according to the LA Times.

The paper said a deal might require a waiver of federal laws that block ownership of newspapers and TV stations in the same market. Murdoch's Fox network has stations in Los Angeles in Chicago.

Tribune also has interests in television stations, some of which carry programming from News Corp's TV channels or operate as Fox affiliates.

A bid for the LA Times alone could be worth as much as US$400m, the paper said.

As reported earlier this month, Bloomberg is in the market for the Financial Times and the New York Times.

We soon could see two men and the companies they run own the following media outlets:

BLOOMBERG: Bloomberg News, Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg Radio, Bloomberg Views, Bloomberg Businessweek, and either the Financial Times or the New York Times or possibly both.

MURDOCH: FOX News, FOX Business, FOX Sports, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Times of London, The Sun, a large part of BSkyB, the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Two oligarchs owning a large swath of the nation's media (and in Murdoch's case, still owning a pretty large swath of Britain's media too.)

Given that other than the Financial Times, most of these newspapers are losing propositions these days, and given that the economics of the newspaper business do not look like they will ever recover to pre-Internet times, you can bet Bloomberg and Murdoch are in the business of buying up these papers for political reasons, not economic reasons.

Bloomberg has already stated he intends to use a slush fund from his personal fortune to sway political elections by bribing politicians who agree with his "bi-partisan" stances on gun control, education reform, and economic policy.

In truth, Bloomberg's stances on most policies differ little from Murdoch's (or the Kochs' or any of the other oligarchs trying to influence politics with their ill-gotten gains these days) - they're all based on the premise that what is good for corporations and Wall Street is what is good for America.

Add Bill Gates and his "philanthropic efforts" on education policy, food policy, and disease control to the mix and you can see how we have a small handful of very rich, very ruthless and, at least in the case of Murdoch (though I would argue in the case of the Kochs', Bloomberg and Gates too) very unethical men using an incredible amount of money to get the kinds of polices they want.

It surely doesn't help when the major media outlets are owned by some of the same men trying to influence policy with their money.

How do you fight the influence these criminals have over policy and the direction of the country when they can not only buy the politicians who will pass the laws and rules they want but also own the media outlets that cover the politics of it all?

Welcome to neo-feudal 2st Century America, where it's all rigged.

Corporate Education Reformers Looking To Churn Out Obedient Workers And Compliant Consumers

This Alternet article on the connection between behavioralism and consumerism resonates in the day and age of corporate education reform:

Those who rise to power in the corporatocracy are control freaks, addicted to the buzz of power over other human beings, and so it is natural for such authorities to have become excited by behavior modification.

Alfie Kohn, in Punished by Rewards (1993), documents with copious research how behavior modification works best on dependent, powerless, infantilized, bored, and institutionalized people. And so for authorities who get a buzz from controlling others, this creates a terrifying incentive to construct a society that creates dependent, powerless, infantilized, bored, and institutionalized people.
Many of the most successful applications of behavior modification have involved laboratory animals, children, or institutionalized adults. According to management theorists Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham in Work Redesign (1980), “Individuals in each of these groups are necessarily dependent on powerful others for many of the things they most want and need, and their behavior usually can be shaped with relative ease.”

...

Behavior modification is fundamentally a means of controlling people and thus for Kohn, “by its nature inimical to democracy, critical questioning, and the free exchange of ideas among equal participants.”

For Skinner, all behavior is externally controlled, and we don’t truly have freedom and choice. Behaviorists see freedom, choice, and intrinsic motivations as illusory, or what Skinner called “phantoms.” Back in the 1970s, Noam Chomsky exposed Skinner’s unscientific view of science, specifically Skinner’s view that science should be prohibited from examining internal states and intrinsic forces.

In democracy, citizens are free to think for themselves and explore, and are motivated by very real—not phantom—intrinsic forces, including curiosity and a desire for justice, community, and solidarity.

What is also scary about behaviorists is that their external controls can destroy intrinsic forces of our humanity that are necessary for a democratic society. Researcher Mark Lepper was able to diminish young children’s intrinsic joy of drawing with Magic Markers by awarding them personalized certificates for coloring with a Magic Marker. Even a single, one-time reward for doing something enjoyable can kill interest in it for weeks.

Behavior modification can also destroy our intrinsic desire for compassion, which is necessary for a democratic society. Kohn offers several studies showing “children whose parents believe in using rewards to motivate them are less cooperative and generous [children] than their peers.” Children of mothers who relied on tangible rewards were less likely than other children to care and share at home. 

And that, of course, is the ultimate objective of the corporate education reform movement - to develop obedient, compliant, easily manipulated children who will acquiesce as adults to the capitalist punishment/rewards system they have been taught as children in public schools run by authoritarian control freaks like Andrew Cuomo, Michael Bloomberg, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, Eva Moskowitz, Geoffrey Canada, et al.

Evil - truly evil.

Bloomberg Threatens To Lay Off Teachers At The Same Time He Gives Raises To 48 Members Of His City Hall Staff

It's that time of year again, folks - it's time for Mike Bloomberg, the genius fiscal king of New York City, to claim the only way he can balance the city budget is to lay off teachers and other city workers.

I posted about his latest threat yesterday.

This time around, he's threatening layoffs at the same time he's handing out generous raises to his staff at City Hall:

Despite a gaping budget hole that could lead to layoffs of teachers or police officers, Mayor Bloomberg found money in the city budget to give out raises to 48 members of his City Hall staff.

A Daily News review of payroll data found that 10 of those lucky employees got raises that topped 20% since last summer.

“It is hypocritical,” steamed City Councilwoman Letitia James (D-Brooklyn). “It’s just disrespectful to the people who basically make the city run.”

But Bloomberg spokesman Marc LaVorgna said the mayor’s office was paying some employees more because they were performing more work as a result of staffing cuts.

He said the office shrank by 17 workers, going from 484 employees in June 2011 to 467 in June 2012.

“Fewer people on staff means some employees have been promoted or taken on more work, so their salaries increased, but we’ve pushed our overall salary costs down,” he said.

...

Gregory Floyd, head of Teamsters Local 237, which represents 20,000 city workers, was angry about the raises.

“I thought there was no money for raises for any city employee, and the last I checked the people who worked in the mayor’s office were city employees,” he said. “They’re being paid with taxpayer money.”

Harry Nespoli, who heads the sanitation workers union, said every union is working without a contract and being told to inform its members to work harder without any rises.

“He had enough money to give raises to the people in City Hall, but not the people that work for the citizens of New York City on a day-to-day basis?” he questioned. “That is totally unacceptable.”

Yes, you teachers had better work longer and harder for the same money, get those test scores up as measured by the city's jive ass value added measurement system with the 87% margin of error or they will "I-rate" your ass and fire you.

But people on the mayor's staff get a 20% raise for working harder at whatever it is they do there at City Hall (i.e., mostly bullshit political stuff - like looking for ways to spin why the city needs to do layoffs.)

Just another example of the hypocrisy of this mayor and the Ruling Class he represents.

Austerity for the commons, party time for the connected.

Corporate profits reached an all-time high in June 2012.

Corporate tax rates are at their lowest rate in 40 years.

Wages are the lowest they have been in 25 years.

So corporations are making more money than they ever have before, their paying the lowest amount of taxes in two generations, and they've been squeezing wages for the last 25 years and they're STILL telling us there's no money for anything?

It is clear that the Ruling Class have stolen all the of the money, all of the wealth, and have relegated the rest of us to fight it out amongst ourselves for the scraps.

Until they fear that there will be an uprising to take back the stolen wealth, circumstances are not going to change.

We will continue to have the Ruling Class and their corporate media push austerity for the masses and party time for themselves.

This is why the Chicago teachers strike is so important - it's the first popular, member-led uprising in the face of the Ruling Class Austerity Movement.

Make no mistake, education reform is NOT about improving schools, it is about pushing austerity and fear for the masses while opening up $600 billion in new revenues for the Rupert Murdochs of the world.

It is time to fight back against this austerity, call the education reformers the corporate criminals they are and take back what they are stealing.

It is time to fight back.

Believe it or not, this is what the Rahm Emanuels, Mike Bloombergs and Rupert Murdochs of the world fear.

It is true, they've got the guns and the power of the Surveillance State on their side.

But CTU showed how we can get the numbers on our side and stand up to our corporate overlords.

It is time to stand up to Herr Bloomberg.

"The Revolution Will Not Be Standardized" -- Karen Lewis

Yesterday, CTU President said the following about corporate education reform:

“The revolution will not be standardized,” she said. “The assault on public education started here. It needs to end here.”

The corporate media are doing the best to undercut the CTU and smear Lewis.

They're calling her "silly," "bumbling," and other things.

But there's nothing silly about a union standing up for its teachers and a union leader putting the elite on notice that THIS union will NOT collaborate in its own destruction or in the destruction of public education.

The revolution will not be standardized.

Ryan, Romney Stand With Emanuel Against CTU - Obama Remains Mum

Not a surprise, of course, but it's good to get this on record:

There may be no stranger bedfellows than Representative Paul D. Ryan and Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, the former White House chief of staff, but on Monday Mr. Ryan declared his support of Mr. Emanuel in the Chicago teachers’ strike.

“We know that Rahm is not going to support our campaign, but on this issue and this day we stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel,’’ Mr. Ryan said.

Mr. Emanuel and the teachers’ union are at loggerheads primarily over a new evaluation system tied to student test scores and whether laid-off teachers should have priority to fill future job openings.

...

“This does not have to divide the two parties,’’ Mr. Ryan said at a fund-raising event in Portland, Ore., according to a pool report. “And so we were going to ask, where does President Obama stand? Does he stand with his former chief of staff, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with the children and the parents, or does he stand with the union?’’

Mitt Romney also issued a statement condemning the Chicago Teachers Union and accusing the Obama administration of being beholden to unions at the expense of children.

It's nonsense that the Obama administration has been beholden to unions.

This is just another lie from a man who has made a living out of deception and double dealing.

In point of fact, Barack Obama has been as anti-union as many a good Republican, though perhaps not as virulent about it as, say, Scott Walker or Rick Scott.

Just ask the people at the UAW given a 50% pay cut.

Or the teachers Barack had whacked at Central Falls.

Nonetheless Paul Ryan does bring up a good point.

Where does Obama stand in this fight publicly?

Now you know and I know that behind the scenes, he sides with Rahm.

After all, the corporate education reform agenda that Rahm is trying to finish imposing on Chicago students and teachers is Barack Obama's official education policy - school closings, teacher firings, high stakes standardized tests all throughout the year and teacher evaluations tied to those scores.

Indeed, that was the agenda of Arne Duncan, Barack Obama's current Secretary of Education, when he ran Chicago schools back in the mid-2000's and it continues to be Duncan's agenda today.

Obama hired Duncan at USDOE and gave him wide powers to promote corporate education reform because that's the policy he wants promoted.

So it's no real secret where Obama stands on this.

But Obama can't come out and say that's where he stands on this because he needs the unions - particular the teachers unions - for November's GOTV effort as well as fundraising.

So instead the White House and the Obama campaign inhabit some jive ass middle ground that doesn't really exist.

Like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, Barack Obama and Joe Biden stand with Rahm Emanuel against Chicago teachers and union members.

Is that a good enough reason to not vote for any of these people if you're a teacher?

I know it is for me.

Why help out in a campaign or vote for a guy who's just looking to use you until November, then do to you what his buddy Rahmbo wants to do now?

So Obama can remain mum on this strike all he wants - we know where he stands and it sure as hell ain't with the students, teachers and parents of the CPS.

Joel Klein's School Of One Doesn't Work

So reports the Daily News:

Former NYC Chancellor Joel Klein's highly touted School of One math project dropped by 2 of 3 schools in pilot program
Initiative was hailed by Time magazine as one of the 50 best inventions of 2009, but NYU study shows $9 million effort failed to raise test scores more than old-school math classes.

But the DOE is forging ahead with plans to utilize the program anyway - even though all it is, really, is a glorified test prep program.