Why Wasn't Michelle Rhee Investigated For Taping Children's Mouths?

From the Daily News:

A New Jersey substitute teacher is in a sticky situation after she allegedly slapped tape across loud-mouthed third-graders as part of something she called the “quiet game,” school officials said.

The teacher has been removed from a list of possible substitutes used at Winfield Scott School No. 2 in Elizabeth after the May 29 incident, when five children told their parents, who told school administrators, of the cruel “game.”

"We consider this serious," Donald Goncalves, spokesman for the school board, told The Newark Star-Ledger. "We took the teacher out of the classroom and she will no longer be working for us."
The unnamed teacher allegedly used “a pink, fabric-based tape” to cover the kids’ mouths, according to the newspaper.

"I don't understand what she was thinking," the girl’s father, Munford Henderson, told WNBC-TV. "We're talking about kids. You're sworn to protect and teach, not to hurt them and put them in fear."

Elizabeth police and the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency are both looking into the allegations.

 It's interesting how a substitute teacher in New Jersey is under fire for taping the mouths of students shut but education reformer Michelle Rhee was feted for the same thing:

Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's talk to the new DCPS teachers Wednesday included two anecdotes I had not heard before -- one remarkable for its content, the other for its delivery. They described her struggles 18 years ago as a fledgling second grade teacher at Baltimore's Harlem Park Elementary.
"The worst and in many ways definitely the toughest year of my entire life," she said.

Rhee had poor class management skills, she said, recalling that her class "was very well known in the school because you could hear them traveling anywhere because they were so out of control." On one particularly rowdy day, she said she decided to place little pieces of masking tape on their lips for the trip to the school cafeteria for lunch.

"OK kids, we're going to do something special today!" she said she told them.

Rhee said it worked well until they actually arrived at the cafeteria. "I was like, 'OK, take the tape off. I realized I had not told the kids to lick their lips beforehand...The skin is coming off their lips and they're bleeding. Thirty-five kids were crying."

Rhee walked that story back after Bill Turque published it in the Washington Post

Rhee said in an e-mail Friday that the students' mouths weren't covered. "I was trying to express how difficult the first year of teaching can be with some humor. My hope is that our new teachers will bring great creativity and passion to their craft while also learning from my own challenges." Still, it's difficult to imagine a DCPS instructor, first-year or tenth-year, surviving the masking tape stunt without suspension at a minimum.

The story, like many stories about Rhee, is clouded in mystery and myth.

Did Rhee really tape students' mouths shut?

Did she really eat a bee to garner her students' attention?

Does she really not remember being informed about widespread cheating at Noyes when she was DCPS chancellor?

Or how she tried to convince young women who were alleging her fiance at the time, now her husband, Kevin Johnson, had engaged in unwanted sexual contact with them to drop their stories?

Why is Rhee still celebrated in the culture when so many of these questions circulate about her?

Anthony Weiner's Lucky He's Not A Teacher - Ben Chapman Would Have To Write About Him

@leoniehaimson Wiener's lucky he isn't a teacher, or it would be him on cover of Daily News.
— Arthur Goldstein (@TeacherArthurG) June 26, 2013

I eagerly await Ben Chapman's Daily News article investigating Anthony Weiner's Twitter communications with a seventeen year old female two years ago.

You see, Ben specializes in writing sensationalized articles in the Daily Mirror, er, News, on "pervert teachers" - even one's who have been cleared of wrongdoing.

But who cares if these teachers were cleared of the allegations?

For Ben Chapman and his corporate masters at the Daily News, the allegations alone are enough to prove guilt.

But while Ben's on the "pervert teacher beat" again, I suggest he ought take a closer look at former Congressman Anthony Weiner and his Twitter communications with a then-seventeen year old two years ago.

Weiner was communicating with this seventeen year old via Twitter at the same time he was sexting with other women and sending them pictures of his penis over his Twitter account.

Weiner claimed he never sexted with the seventeen year old, sent her any photos of a sexual nature or had any inappropriate communications with her, but he said the same thing about Ginger Lee, the porn actress who did indeed receive sexual communications and photos from Congressman Weiner.

When one of those photos was sent out to his entire Twitter feed, Weiner tried to get Ginger Lee to lie about the matter, even offering her his p.r. team to help her craft lies to feed to the media.

Lee declined that help and told the truth, helping to put an end to Weiner's Congressional career.

Given how Weiner tried to get Lee to lie about their sexual communications on Twitter and continued to lie about the matter himself until no one believed his b.s. anymore and he was finally forced to tell the truth, the claims Weiner has made about his Twitter communications with the seventeen year old bear some scrutiny.

Weiner's now running for mayor and has placed first in the latest Marist poll for the Democratic primary and second in the latest Quinnipiac poll.

If Weiner were elected mayor, he would be the head of the NYC school system.

It is quite possible that the head of the NYC school system could be a man who sexted with a seventeen year old a few years ago.

Seems to me this would be a story right up Ben "'Pervert Teacher' Beat" Chapman's alley, but so far, he is too busy going after teachers who have been cleared of wrongdoing to look into the Weiner matter.

The DN covered the Weiner/17 year old story a little a few years ago.

How about getting Ben Chapman and Campbell Brown back on that beat and getting to the bottom of that story?

Indiana Sues McGraw-Hill Over Online Testing Debacle - Why Won't NYC?

McGraw-Hill, as incompetent as Pearson when it comes to pulling off high stakes standardized testing systems, really screwed up the state tests in Indiana and now that state wants damages:

INDIANAPOLIS — The superintendent of Indiana’s public schools announced Friday she would seek more than $614,000 in damages from CTB/McGraw-Hill, the same day company President Ellen Haley apologized to lawmakers for failures in online standardized tests that caused chaos at the end of the school year.

Superintendent Glenda Ritz said the money she’s seeking would cover fines laid out in the state’s $95 million contract with the testing company and pay for an independent review of the test’s validity and improved reporting data. Department of Education staff said the fines could easily grow to millions of dollars.

Indiana’s troubles have punctuated a nationwide shift from pencil-and-paper tests to online exams. Troubles earlier this year disrupted high-stakes testing in Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota and Oklahoma. A bank of “overwhelmed” servers in New Jersey caused students in Oklahoma and Indiana to be consistently booted from the online test over two days at the end of April, McGraw-Hill executives said Friday.

“The consequences of CTB’s server failures were real and significant for Indiana schools,” Ritz said in a news release issued before McGraw Hill executives spoke to lawmakers.

Here in NYC, McGraw-Hill, aided and abetted by the geniuses at the NYCDOE, made a similar mess of things on the state tests:

Hundreds of seniors graduating this week across New York City have yet to receive their high school diplomas because of problems in the city’s new high-tech system of grading state Regents exams.

In the past, teachers graded their own students’ tests, spending days poring over questions about “King Lear” and the French Revolution. 

But the state, concerned that some teachers might be grading too easily, recently ended that practice, and city officials turned to a modern solution: scanning the finished exams and sending them randomly to teachers throughout the city to grade. 

The computer system, created by McGraw-Hill Education as part of a $9.6 million contract over three years, broke down this week, leaving students and teachers anxiously awaiting results. Passing grades on Regents exams in English, science, math and history are required for graduation in most public high schools. Students can retake an exam even after the school year ends in order to get a diploma; the next round of tests is given in August. 

...

The problem occurred as teachers began grading essay questions for a science exam known as Living Environment and two social studies tests, Global History and Geography and U.S. History and Government. (Not every Regents exam is required for graduation.) 

The exams were shipped to Connecticut to be scanned, where a computer system experienced “intermittent slowdowns,” a spokesman for McGraw-Hill, Brian Belardi, said. He said the company had been working “around the clock” to remedy the issues. 

The city comptroller, John C. Liu, said he was considering an audit. Mr. Liu, who is running for mayor, said that the city should recoup the $3.5 million it had already paid McGraw-Hill this year and that the exams should be invalidated. 

“It is unconscionable that students, families and schools should suffer through fake graduations because their Regents grades are unknown,” Mr. Liu said in a statement.

Ernest A. Logan, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, the city’s principals’ union, said the city needed to improve its oversight of outside contracts.“Once again, they’ve messed up, and now we’re left to clean it up,” Mr. Logan said. “This should be a time of celebration for our students.” 

Mayor Bloomberg, an oligarch who never met an outside consultant contract he didn't like and never met a government employee he trusted, will never sue McGraw-Hill to recoup the money the city paid for the company's testing system and scanning services.

And to be fair to McGraw-Hill here for a moment, the incompetence of the Tweedies who signed off on this contract must be taken into account as well.

They okayed the system McGraw-Hill proposed to use for the grading, including the company's driving exams to Connecticut to be scanned and uploaded to its computer servers.

There's plenty of blame to go around in this mess, from McGraw-Hill to Tweed to Chancellor Walcott to Mayor Bloomberg himself, but there will be no accountability for any of these players - not here in NYC, where the only accountability measures we get in education are the ones Bloomberg and his minions use against teachers and schools.

Why Does Michelle Rhee Protect Sexual Predators (AKA, Her Husband, Kevin Johnson)?

Seriously.

I assume Campbell Brown will get right on this and write an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal calling for the firing of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson.

A Two-Tiered Justice System

Glenn Greenwald has a book out called With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful that looks at the dual justice system we have in the United States - one for the elite and one for everybody else.

Here is how the book is described:

From "the most important voice to have entered the political discourse in years" (Bill Moyers), a scathing critique of the two-tiered system of justice that has emerged in America

From the nation's beginnings, the law was to be the great equalizer in American life, the guarantor of a common set of rules for all. But over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been effectively abolished. Instead, a two-tiered system of justice ensures that the country's political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, licensed to act without restraint, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world.

Starting with Watergate, continuing on through the Iran-Contra scandal, and culminating with Obama's shielding of Bush-era officials from prosecution, Glenn Greenwald lays bare the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite from accountability. He shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying, and financial fraud.

Cogent, sharp, and urgent, this is a no-holds-barred indictment of a profoundly un-American system that sanctions immunity at the top and mercilessness for everyone else.

I couldn't help but think about Glenn's book as I watched the merciless treatment of teacher Christine Rubino by the system.

For those of you who don't know the case, Assailed Teacher has an excellent round-up here.

Rubino made inappropriate remark about her students on her Facebook page.

This remark came out of the day-to-day frustration she felt as a teacher.

She took that remark down soon after she posted it and expressed remorse for having made it.

Sometimes this kind of thing happens - people say things they don't mean out of frustration, then express remorse for them.

And yet, the justice system put in place to handle circumstances like this treated her mercilessly.

At first she was fired.

She appealed and was instead given a two-year suspension without pay.

As this process played out for Rubino, I couldn't help but think about Mayor Mike and the EEOC case that was brought against his company Bloomberg LP as well as several other sexual discrimination cases that had been brought against his company in the past.

It seems Mayor Mike has a track record of saying inappropriate things to female employees even as his company has engaged in harassment and discrimination against women that come awfully close to looking systematic.

In one instance, Bloomberg told a female employee of Bloomberg LP who was pregnant that she should "kill" the baby if she expected to remain with the company, adding "Great! Number 16!", a statement that referenced the number of employees out on maternity leave at the company.

According to court documents brought during a lawsuit, Bloomberg denied making the statement "Kill it!" to the employee but was heard to acknowledge in a voice mail that he had upset this employee with something he had said to her and he never meant anything by it.

Here we have Mayor Mike, our intrepid leader in NYC, the man who wanted Christine Rubino fired for posting an inappropriate remark on her Facebook page, making a venomous statement to a pregnant female employee that comes pretty close to being an actual threat ("Abort the fetus or be fired!"), then refusing to admit he had made the statement even as he acknowledged that he had upset the woman.

Of course Bloomberg never apologized.

Michael Bloomberg NEVER apologizes.

Bloomberg LP eventually settled the case without admitting any wrongdoing and put a non-disclosure clause in it so that the former Bloomberg LP employee could not talk about the case.

The EEOC case brought against Bloomberg LP for systematic sexual discrimination was dismissed by a judge.

This seems like a clear example of the double standards we see in America today, the two-tiered justice system that allows the rich and powerful like Mayor Mike to skirt accountability and the mercilessness with which the rest of us our treated.

If you are rich and powerful, you can say whatever you like and pay off the people you hurt and hire enough high powered lawyers to get a federal case against you dismissed.

And if you're a working class teacher, you can scrape together the money you need to appeal an unfair and unjust decision from a NYCDOE kangaroo court and see your job dismissal "lightened" to a two year suspension without pay.

Welcome to 21st century America where the police fire rubber bullets against Occupy protesters armed with chalk even as the bankers who fixed LIBOR walk away relatively unscathed, with non-prosecution agreements in their pockets.

All the bank had to do was a pay a fine that comes from money they stole anyway.

America - Land of the Not-So-Free, Home of an Unaccountable Elite.

NOTE: You can help Christine Rubino out here.