Brexit Redux

Dem elites and Clinton shills are already taking aim at Sanders people or Greens, blaming Trump's victory on them.

As usual with the elites and their functionaries, they miss the truth.

This is Brexit Redux:

It's not a "stunning upset," as NYT says. It's elites' continued failure to understand the trauma people experienced during and after 2008.

— Nicole Gelinas (@nicolegelinas) November 9, 2016

And just so we can get the "The Greens did this!" bullshit out of the way:

Take Jill Stein out of the equation, Trump still wins. Hillary get's MI and WI, but not PA, FL, OH. Anyone telling you others is uninformed pic.twitter.com/Xj1jY9tXX5

— Benjamin Dixon (@TheBpDShow) November 9, 2016

And anyone saying Gary Johnson voters would have ever voted for Clinton has never met libertarians. Run from their commentary. Run quickly

— Benjamin Dixon (@TheBpDShow) November 9, 2016

Clinton shills did a lot of mocking this year, first the Sanders people during the primary, then the Trump supporters during the general.

One thing Clinton and her shills never did - try and understand the real pain and terror many in this country feel over their economic futures.

A lot of those people sent a big "Fuck You!" to the elites last night, though I think that will come back to bite them in the end.

A Republican president with a Republican Senate and a Republican House is going to do a lot of damage in the short term.

Add in all the crazies Trump is sure to bring along - Rudy, Christie, maybe Palin - and it's even worse.

As for the Supreme Court, that strategy Obama pursued doesn't look so hot now either - the chance to transform the Supreme Court is now lost to Dems.

Remember that union case that ended up 4-4 after Scalia died?

You can bet another case like that one is going to rear sooner rather than later and those automatic dues the union elites lap up will go out the window with Clinton's electoral map to victory.

It's going to be a very tough few years.

The "Fuck you!" sent last night, as with the one the British sent with Brexit, is going to be a costly one in the end.

But I blame Dem elites for this mess - this loss is squarely on HRC and her neoliberal cohorts.

This ought to be a wake-up call to Dem elites that neoliberalism must go and the party needs to embrace a true populist agenda.

But I'm under no illusions that Dem elites will learn the correct lessons from this.

They'll continue with the elite circle jerk and furiously blame "Bernie Bros" or Greens or "deplorables" instead of looking into the mirror and saying "Why have we embraced neo-liberalism, bringing about the de-industrialization of the country, the financialization of the economy and Trump to the White House?"

John Flanagan Looks To Stick It To Schools, Make Tax Cap Permanent

From Joseph Spector at Politics on the Hudson:

The state’s property-tax cap expires next year, and new Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan introduced legislation Friday to make it permanent and decouple it from rent-control laws in New York City.

The move by Flanagan, R-Suffolk County, and Senate Republicans is their latest attempt to make the tax cap, put into effect in 2011, a permanent law amid protests from schools, unions and local governments.

Flanagan said in a statement Sunday that the Senate would act as early as this week to approve the bill.

More mandates on schools, less money to carry those resources out.

That's the neoliberal game here.

Flanagan's game.

Cuomo, Legislature Destroy State Pension Funds

New Jersey here we come:

ALBANY—State lawmakers are moving ahead with a plan to defer more than $1 billion in pension payments over the next five years, arguing it will help them hold the line on spending increases even as critics warn of long-term risks.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, proposed another five years of “pension amortization” in his proposed $141.6 billion budget, the state's most recent financial plan shows. He's continuing to utilize a program first enacted in 2010, when the state government and municipalities were socked with a spike in required pension obligations to make up for stock market losses related to the 2008 stock market crash.

In New York, public employee pensions are paid from a handful of funds managed by Comptroller Tom DiNapoli. (A separate fund handles teacher pensions.) Employers—a village, county, or the state itself—are required to pay a contribution that is inversely related with the fund's performance, rising after years when the $181.7 billion fund posts a piddling return.

The amortization program lets them defer a portion of their bills and pay them back over 10 years, at interest rates between 3 percent and 5 percent, a move critics say is akin to borrowing. Dozens of municipalities have used the program, holding their short-term costs down to prevent tax hikes or reductions in other services.

The state has deferred $3.2 billion in payments since 2011, and was set to stop borrowing this year. The budget division reversed course in October, after DiNapoli's office announced it was adjusting the way contributions are calculated to reflect longer lifespans.

Cuomo's spending proposal includes another five years of amortization, including $395.1 million in the upcoming fiscal year. Members of both the State Senate and Assembly accepted the idea in their one-house budget resolutions.

So what's the problem with this plan?

This:

Critics said there was no reason to borrow the money this year because the state has gathered a $5.4 billion cash surplus from one-time settlements with major financial institutions.

Elizabeth Lynam, director of state studies for the Citizens Budget Commission, said use of the program was no longer warranted.

“It's a bad idea,” she said. “Anything we do to postpone payment, to defer payment, puts those funds in jeopardy. New York is a bright spot—we're pretty well funded—and we don't want to start down the slippery slope to a situation like New Jersey or Illinois where we don't have the funds to meet our obligations.”

And this:

The C.B.C., a business-backed group, estimated that the state's deferrals have already resulted in $144 million in interest costs. That figure will run to $780 million if the borrowing continues.

They're setting up where pensions are going to cost a lot more than they would if they just made the pension payments rather than deferring them and paying nearly a billion dollars in interest.

You can bet we'll hear in about five to ten years how pension costs have skyrocketed, funding ratios have plummeted and cuts will need to be made to existing and future pensions in order to handle the shortfalls.

That's the goal behind this plan from Cuomo - to manufacture a "pension crisis" and force drastic cuts to the pension system in future years.

And our "friends" in the legislature are happily going along with it.

Stephanie Miner: Cuomo's Reforms "Scapegoat Teachers"

From Syracuse.com:

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Mayor Stephanie Miner has once again challenged Gov. Andrew Cuomo, this time by demanding more money for poor school districts like Syracuse.

Saying Cuomo's educational policies "scapegoat teachers'' for the problems of failing schools, Miner said many failing schools do not get as much state aid as they are entitled to by law.

Miner today joined forces with another occasional Cuomo critic, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, to demand better school funding.

They issued a joint news release calling on the state to honor a 2006 decision by the state's highest court, which held that the state had provided inadequate financial support to New York City and other poor school districts.

In an interview today, Miner said she understands Cuomo's effort to reform schools and to weed out bad teachers, but she said money must be part of the discussion.

"You cannot scapegoat teachers, then say 'We're going to give them more tests and more evaluations,' and walk away from the significant constitutional underfunding that's been going on in this state for years,'' Miner said.

It is good to see someone of Miner's stature call Cuomo out on his jive.

Cuomo likes to use the average per pupil amount New York spends on education to say we spend too much on education with too little in the way of results.

But that number is deceptive - as a commenter at the Syracuse.com story points out:

The Governor's office is misleading people: "New York today spends more per pupil than any other state in the nation -- $19,552-- nearly double the national average of $10,608 per pupil. Over the last 15 years, spending on education in New York has more than doubled, from $28 billion to $58 billion, and we spend more per pupil than any other state in the nation, yet our students remain in the bottom half when it comes to results."  This quote is misleading.

The governor is simply overlooked the higher average costs of operating a school in NYC (one of the most expensive places in the world) and mixes the number in with the figures for the rest of the state. If you just used Upstate NY alone, then he'd see the rate is much, much lower.
He also ignores the actual rate of inflation over the past 15 years in his numbers. If he adjusted his numbers to include the actual rate of inflation then the "spending" he claims to have doubled is much closer to being "FLAT" and not increasing!
Even his own numbers do not show NY education at the bottom. NY is, at worse, in the middle.

He also leaves out the fact that much of the "public school" spending has been slipped over to charter and private schools. 

In short, Cuomo is lying through his teeth in order to push his destructive privatization agenda.

SUNY Professors: Cuomo, NYSED Setting Up Teachers To Fail

 From the Capital New York Education update:

UNION: CUOMO SABOTAGING PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS—Capital’s Jessica Bakeman: “A union representing SUNY professors, along with a member of the Board of Regents, accused Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State Education Department on Thursday of intentionally sabotaging prospective teachers in order to justify shutting down colleges’ teacher preparation programs.

“Fred Kowal, president of the United University Professions, which represents professors and other employees at SUNY’s 29 state-operated campuses, 17 of which have teacher preparation programs, [said,] ‘S.E.D.’s certification exams are invalid and deeply flawed ... There is a reason why: it was done on purpose. This is failure by design. Simply put, New York’s student teachers have been set up to fail by S.E.D. and Governor Cuomo. The governor has made no secret of the fact that he wants to close teacher preparation programs. Now he wants to justify that decision.’” [PRO] http://bit.ly/1AMjEOG

This is of course the strategy of the reform movement - to undercut what is "public" in order to eventually "privatize."  

To that end, they've created the public school crisis by cutting funding, increasing mandates, rolling out new standards before there was any curricula for them, tying those new standards to tests that nobody was prepared for, then setting the failure rates for those tests at 70% in order to be able to declare the public education system in "crisis" and in need of "dramatic reform."

Now they're aiming at teacher preparation programs too in order to prove those "failures" and impose "dramatic reform" on that sector of education.

It's a classic neoliberal blueprint being carried out here in New York State, one of the so-called "bluest" states in the nation, but really, just a playground for the Milton Friedman acolytes at this point.

Cuomo Creates Pension Crisis In NY

From Bloomberg News:

ALBANY – New Yorkers are living longer, which is good news for the state’s 19.7 million residents. For Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, it’s triggering a budget headache.

...


 The longer lives raised the $176.8 billion fund’s liability, boosting the 2016 pension bill to $355 million more than Cuomo had projected.

The added cost has Cuomo tapping a program allowing the state and its municipalities to borrow part of their annual pension bill from the fund with interest. Since 2011, Cuomo has used the tool to defer about $3.2 billion in payments. While he’d planned to exit the program in 2016, the budget he introduced last month includes borrowing $395 million for that year.

“Amortization takes volatility out of the state’s pension contribution costs and helps us maintain stability,” Morris Peters, a spokesman for Cuomo’s budget division, said via email.

Since Cuomo took office in 2011, he’s closed more than $12 billion in budget gaps, capped annual spending growth at 2 percent and won the state’s first four consecutive on-time budgets since 1977. The moves spurred Standard & Poor’s to award the state a AA+ mark in July, its highest since 1972. 

Yet the company also said the pension borrowing is swelling the state’s unfunded retirement liability.

And what's the goal of creating unfunded retirement liability?

Destroying the public pension system, of course:

While only seven states had stronger pensions than New York as of 2013, its funding ratio isn’t as robust as it once was. The fourth-most-populous state had 87.3 percent of assets to meet obligations, down from 105.9 percent in 2008, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

See the trajectory?

From 105.9% of assets to meet obligations in 2008 to 87.3% now.

Sure, there was the Great Recession during that time frame, but that economic downturn ended years ago and Cuomo's still draining the pension system of strength.

See New Jersey for what happens when governors underfund pension systems.

An accident that the NY pension system has been drained during King Andrew I of Wall Street's reign?

Nahh.

It's classic neo-liberalism.

Create the problem (underfund the pension system), set hair on fire over the problem (scream long and loud that the pension system is going broke), declare that we simply MUST make changes (i.e., cut pensions for current and future employees, retirees), repeat until system is busted

Cuomo, Ever The Neo-Liberal, Pits Seven Struggling Upstate Regions Against Each For Development Money

That was a statement Cuomo made today concerning competitive economic development grants he is proposing for upstate, but the statement works as an overall philosophical motto as well:

Seven regions would compete for a $1.5 billion pot of money aimed at stimulating economic development in upstate New York under a plan proposed on Thursday Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Under Cuomo’s plan, three regions would ultimately be eligible to win $500 million each.
...

The seven regions that are eligible for the granting funding are the Mid-Hudson, Capital Region, Mohawk Valley, Central New York, North Country, Southern Tier and Finger Lakes.

The competition will be formally launched on April 15. Submissions are due by July 1 and winners will be announced in the fall.

It’s not the first time Cuomo has turned to a competitive grant process in order to encourage economic development and force different regions to compete with one another.

Over the last four years, Cuomo has turned to Regional Economic Development Councils that compete annually for a package of grants and incentives aimed at stimulating job growth.

...

the upstate regions will be in a dash to win the cash, a process that Cuomo said will produce the best plans.

“I believe in competition,” Cuomo said. “‘Well, just give us the money.’ No. No, no, no.”

Classic neo-liberal "Let's pit everybody against each other" move from Cuomo - we simply cannot help everyone, so we're going to dangle out money to seven economically struggling regions, three will win the cash and the other four can go screw themselves.

Cuomo's working the same way with his education policies proposals, where he also said "I believe in competition" as he talked about the need to "break" the public school "monopoly" and bring more "competition" to education via charter schools.

Yes, a classic neo-liberal "Divide and Conquer" strategy to keep everybody at each others throats instead of at the throats of the elites of this nation who are sucking up more and more of the wealth and resources.

It's just too hard to help everybody, so we'll go with the competitions instead.

Governor Cuomo And The NY Post - In Search Of A Pension Crisis That Doesn't Exist

Guest Post By Harris Lirtzman, former Director of Risk Management for the New York City Retirement Systems in the NYC Comptroller's Office from 1996-2002 and former Deputy State Comptroller for Administration from 2003-2007.

A few fun pension facts may be useful before teachers all over the City start pulling their hair out over comments made recently by Governor Cuomo or the New York Post about teachers' pensions.

New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan and Rhode Island are the states with the most significant actual pension problems, verging on "crises," caused almost entirely by years and years of the state failing to make mandated minimum employer contributions to keep their pension systems solvent.  New York State and New York City are awash in cash as tax revenues from soaring sales of residential and commercial properties roll in and personal income and sales tax proceeds exceed every recent projection and are making current contributions to their pension plans.

In 2013, the New York City Teachers Retirement System (TRS) was funded at approximately 63% of accumulated retirement benefit obligations and earned 11.9% on its $38.3 billion investment assets.  In 2013, The New York State Teachers Retirement System was funded at approximately 88% of accumulated pension obligations and earned 13.7% on its $82.7 billion investments assets.  There is no pension "crisis" in New York City or New York State that would warrant, even by the Post's own credulous standards, the sort of panic that such an article will engender.

No politician in New York City or New York State will take on public pension fund systems directly by attempting to reduce the benefits paid to current retirees or accruing to current employees.  They cannot do that because pension benefits are a constitutional obligation of the State of New York and a contractual obligation of the City and State as employers.

The only time that a state constitutional protection has been abrogated other than by some change in the constitution itself occurred two years ago in Detroit, when a federal bankruptcy judge, relying on long-standing precedent, ruled that the Michigan State constitutional protection against the diminishment of already accumulated pension benefits does not apply when a municipality of the State, in this case, Detroit, declares bankruptcy.

We all need to remember that even during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, New York City did not go bankrupt.  It came very close to missing a payment that would have triggered a default on its bonds (which is very different than bankruptcy) but it did not miss that payment partly because the City's very own pension funds agreed to help the City make that payment and avoid bankruptcy.

There is some concern that our pensions will be put at risk if the referendum in 2017 about convening a state constitutional convention passes but the referendum in 1997 failed 62-38% and there are other reasons to doubt that the next referendum will succeed—the primary one being that even the folks whose purposes may be served in part by calling a convention are likely to fear the larger damage that a convention might cause them.

The really important question that New York City teachers should be asking themselves, and should be asking the three UNITY members who sit on the TRS board, is why the City and State funds, both operating under the same state laws and regulations, have such different funded ratios and investment returns.  A teacher who works for the City has a pension benefit that is only three-quarters as secure as a teacher who works anywhere else in the State and belongs to a pension system that earns 13% less a year less on its investments than does the State system.  The answer is complex but in its simplest form will be instructive to anyone who wonders exactly how the UNITY caucus manages the oversight of our pension plan: the UNITY board members agreed fifteen years ago to a pension accounting gimmick that allowed the Giuliani Administration to grab some of our pension funds in return for a short-term gain for members but which put the City TRS at a long-term structural disadvantage compared to the State TRS where no pension grab ever occurred.

The argument will now regularly be made, and the Post, as usual, is in the vanguard, that there is a "pension crisis"--just as the education reformistas set up the public for their privatization of the public education system by creating an "education crisis" as far back as 1983 with the publication of "A Nation at Risk."  The "pension crisis" will be framed as "You, the people of New York City and State, have a 'pension crisis'.  You cannot afford to pay both the annual employer contributions required to keep the pensions of your greedy public employees agreed to by your grasping public officials funded at reasonable levels and the current costs of government, especially police, fire, sanitation and other public health and safety obligations.  You must now make a choice and you must choose your own current welfare." 

Short of the bankruptcy of the City or the State, those of us who already belong to anything up to Tier 4 have a full defined benefit pension plan.  Tiers 5 and 6 have all the trappings of a defined benefit plan but are not nearly as comprehensive.  The next two or three tiers, which will come in rapid succession, are likely to begin the transition from defined benefit to defined contribution retirement plan so that the unlucky new employee covered by a Tier 10 will have nothing to show for 40 years of public employment.

The "pension crisis" generation machine is revving up.  If teachers and other public employees and their unions are as feckless in the protection of their pensions as the UFT and NYSUT now are in their battle with Andrew Cuomo and the "reformistas" then they will deserve to lose their pensions and they will lose them.

Daily News Hawks Merryl Tisch As Part "15 For 2015" List, But Carol Burris' Assessment Much More Accurate

It's so interesting to see the selective writing of the functionaries for the oligarchy at the Daily News when it comes to Merryl Tisch.

They have a "15 For 2015" fluff piece out today that promotes the usual neo-liberal claptrap you get from the Zuckerman Daily News -and Regents Chancellor Tisch is on that list:

MERRYL TISCH
Mayor de Blasio has often accused his predecessor, Mike Bloomberg, of hastily abandoning failing schools in favor and closing and reopening them as clusters of new, small schools.

Although the evidence shows that the smaller schools have well served their students, de Blasio has done his own quick abandonment — of the reform strategy.

He and schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña say they will turn around 96 struggling campuses with new money and services, firing staff only as a last resort.

But state Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch is unlikely to let the experiment play out — and with good reason: The schools "have failed for generations now," she says.

She has the power to effectively order them closed if de Blasio and Fariña fail to sufficiently overhaul teaching staffs.

Meantime, Tisch will be at the center of negotiations to toughen teacher evaluations, with Gov. Cuomo breathing down her neck.

She'll continue to champion the worthy Common Core standards, which remain under siege across the state. In 2015, they will get weakened for good — or be cemented in classrooms from Brooklyn to Buffalo.

All that is after she finds a likeminded state education commissioner to replace the outgoing John King. Josh Greenman

What's missing from Josh Greenman's paean to Tisch?

Lots of stuff, including the awful Common Core implementation (which Governor Cuomo himself criticized, calling it "chaos") and Tisch's refusal to take responsibility for handing over a charter school to a con man named "Dr" Ted Morris Jr.

Carol Burris had a much more accurate assessment of Merryl Tisch at The Answer Sheet.

Here it is, in full:

The hallmark of a corporate reformer is an undying belief that numerical measures of accountability are the primary lever of school change. New York State Schools Chancellor, Merryl Tisch, is just such a reformer — a true believer in “what gets measured gets done.” From school, teacher and principal evaluation systems, measurement by the numbers distinguishes the focus of Tisch’s school reforms.

In describing her rollout of Common Core testing, Tisch said, “we jump into the deep end,” using the royal “we” to obscure the fact that kids were taking the jump. She also rejected the notion that school and educator ratings be put on hold during the rollout, stating that “we cannot have the implementation of Common Core that is isolated from an accountability system.”

Despite the repeated use of “we,” Tisch has excluded herself, her state commissioner of education and her Board of Regents from the ratings. Accountability is for students, educators and schools, who have little to no input into the commanded change.

Although I do not suggest we subject Tisch to the silly number ratings given to teachers and principals, I do think it is fair to review New York student growth under her leadership. Tisch was selected as chancellor in the spring of 2009. Since 2010, New York’s graduation rate increased only 1.5 percent, which includes two years of no growth at all. In looking at graduation data, one will note that prior to 2010, state graduation rates were climbing, even as graduation standards (meaning the required passing of Regents exams), were increasing. In addition, the earning of the Regents Diploma with Advanced Designation, a consistent bar with no change in standards, has been flat since she became chancellor.

In 2009, the average New York SAT scores were 485 (reading), 502 (math), and 478 (writing). In 2014, they were nearly identical—488, 502, 478 —no improvement there to show.

Tisch “raised the bar” for Grade 3-8 proficiency in 2010, and in 2011 and 2012, there was little or no growth in student achievement. In 2013, the Common Core tests were given and proficiency rates dramatically dropped. Though the chancellor promised that scores would improve the second year of the Common Core tests, there were no improvements in English Language Arts scores and minimal improvement in math.

If teachers and principals are to be judged by score growth, what growth has the chancellor created after nearly six years at the helm? The whirling dervish of change in standards, tests, diploma requirements and accountability measures, has produced no discernible increase in student performance. Perhaps the hope is that if you change everything else, no one will notice that no progress has been made.

The fascination with holding teachers and schools accountable by the numbers has generated an endless (and expensive) stream of data from the New York State Education Department, which she oversees. One of the most recent measures was a report entitled “Where Are They Now?” described in an New York State Education Department slide show that makes claims about the percentages of New York public high school students who enroll in college.

In conjunction with this report, the state Education Department posted school by school figures, purporting to show how many graduates were attending college, with data that they claimed came directly from the National Student Clearinghouse.  The data are fraught with error and under-reporting of college enrollment, which I wrote about here. What I did not know when I wrote the blog was where the error originated. Since that time, I have received access to the database of my school’s graduates at the Clearinghouse level, and have determined that the vast majority of the under-reporting errors, (22 of 31 in a class of 261), were made in the generation of the State Education Department report. Meanwhile, Westchester and Rockland county districts are finding even greater rates of error than my school’s 12 percent, with some schools’ rates at over 20 percent.

What is remarkable is that the chancellor has yet to admit these errors, or even ask the department to take down the public reports, which can still be found here.

In the past month, other examples of serious error on the part of the New York State Education Department have come to light regarding charter school approval and regulation. Tisch has been part of a public campaign to increase charter schools, with the chancellor asserting, “I believe in opening them aggressively.”

Part of the aggressive campaign was the approval of the Greater Works Charter School by her Board of Regents. The leader of Greater Works was 22-year-old  Dr. Ted Morris, Jr. When it came to light that that his resume was a collection of lies and misrepresentations, Tisch not only deflected the blame but said that the charter school, whose board was recruited through Craig’s list, should still open. Following continued accounts in the press, New York State Education Department finally asked the charter to withdraw its application.

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters provides an excellent account of that and other New York charter scandals here. She concludes her blog by asking in reference to the State Education Department and Tisch, “where is the accountability for them?”

Given the current system of appointment, Merryl Tisch, who has wealth and deep political connections, will likely remain in power. She is married to billionaire James S. Tisch, the CEO of the Loews Corporation, and has been a friend since childhood of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who controls the appointments through the votes of the Assembly. The people of New York have no direct mechanism to have her removed.

In her oversized influence on the fate of public school children, Tisch is hardly alone. Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton family, Rupert Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg are but a few of the other billionaire reformers who have managed to bend public education to their will, while absolving themselves from any accountability for the damage their policies have wrought. They are socially buffered by surrounding themselves with like-minded individuals who are insulated from bad educational policies because their children and grandchildren attend private schools or sycophants who tell them only what they want to hear. Public school educators and parents are caricatured and dismissed as either self-interested or ignorant and misinformed.

Healthy democracies infuse accountability throughout the system–from the bottom to the top. We cannot afford a governance system where those who assume positions of power–whether elected or appointed–escape responsibility.

This year, six Regents are up for reappointment. Given the past year of discontent — during which the majority of New York voters have rejected the Common Core, high-stakes standardized testing and the evaluation of teachers by test scores, polls shows — it is time for the Democratic Assembly to be accountable to the public by appointing Regents who more closely reflect the views and experience of their constituents. If they are not willing to assume that responsibility, then the public should demand a direct voice either through Regent or State Commissioner election.

Amazing how Daily News editor Josh Greenman managed to ignore all of the points Burris raised + the "Dr" Ted fiasco.

Par for the course, though, at both the Daily News editorial board and in the corridors of power.

Accountability is for the little people, skirting accountability is for the powerful and the Daily News editorial pages are there to spread the neo-liberal claptrap and propaganda.

Why Is Randi Weingarten Willing To Fight TIME Magazine For Teacher Bashing, But Not Andrew Cuomo?

For the past couple of weeks, AFT President Randi Weingarten has been fighting the good fight against TIME Magazine for running this cover:

Weingarten fumed on social media over the TIME cover and mobilized her union cohorts and followers to try and force TIME to "apologize" for the cover. Weingarten, who also loves to write letters, wrote TIME a letter to tell the editors just how wrong they are about teachers. You can see that letter here.

This was a whole lot of time, energy and activity Weingarten devoted to fighting a magazine few people read anymore - TIME averages less than 60,000 copies sold on the newsstand a week (at its height, it sold over 400,000 copies a week on the newsstand and even in 2005 it was selling 150,000 copies a week) and it's subscriber base has fallen from 20 million to a little over 3 million (see here for that story.)

Much of the subscriber and newsstand customer base was lost years ago, but even in the past seven years TIME has shed nearly a million subscribers, going from over 4 million a week to just over 3 million a week.

This is not a news magazine that anybody is actually reading anymore, though Weingarten certainly did them a favor by publicizing the "Rotten Apples" cover and providing them some click bait that might have translated into a few extra ad dollars and maybe a subscription or two from some ed deformer fans.

As for what harm Weingarten's campaign against TIME did to them, well, perhaps her attacks against the magazine caused some teachers to cancel their personal or classroom subscriptions although to be honest, I don't know any teachers who have either of those.

In the end, it was probably a wash for TIME and the Rotten Apples Apology Movement Weingarten led - TIME perhaps gained a bit of ad revenue from the extra clicks, perhaps lost a few subscriptions from some teachers.

One thing they did get that they haven't had for a while - people talking about TIME Magazine as if it mattered in any substantial way.  That may not have been Weingarten's goal in the battle, but that certainly was one of the consequences.

Now I must admit, I didn't actually pay much attention to any of this.

As I noted earlier, from the time TIME Magazine first ran their infamous Michelle Rhee broom cover in 2008 to now, they've lost a lot of circulation and subscriptions, so my feeling was, whatever shows up on their cover doesn't really matter much anymore.

TIME Magazine is a lot like the Sunday news shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and FOX - there's a lot of bluster going on, a lot of "serious people" doing some "serious talk" about "serious issues" that nobody outside of the Beltway and their own insular circle is seriously listening to.

As Weingarten's social media campaign against TIME's cover assault against teachers was going on, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo launched his own assault against teachers - and unlike the TIME Magazine assault, Cuomo's had real import.

Cuomo told the New Daily News Editorial Board the following:

ALBANY — Vowing to break “one of the only remaining public monopolies,” Gov. Cuomo on Monday said he’ll push for a new round of teacher evaluation standards if re-elected.

Cuomo, during a meeting with the Daily News Editorial Board, said better teachers and competition from charter schools are the best ways to revamp an underachieving and entrenched public education system.

“I believe these kinds of changes are probably the single best thing that I can do as governor that’s going to matter long-term,” he said, “to break what is in essence one of the only remaining public monopolies — and that’s what this is, it’s a public monopoly.”

He said the key is to put “real performance measures with some competition, which is why I like charter schools.”

Cuomo then doubled-down on those "monopoly" comments later:

A firestorm ignited between several state public education advocacy groups and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo over remarks he made to the New York Daily News editorial board published Monday—in which he threatened to “break” what he deemed “one of the only remaining public monopolies,” New York’s public school system—grew hotter Wednesday, with more groups joining in his criticism.

Cuomo vowed to offer competition to public schools in order to raise the bar on the current education system via an expansion of charter schools and punitive teacher evaluation systems if re-elected. He dismissed educators’ and parents’ concerns about tying teacher evaluations to standardized test scores—a practice that has come under enormous scrutiny since the botched roll-out of the Common Core curriculum two years ago.

Despite the initial backlash, Cuomo reiterated the controversial statements later that day during a tour of Mineola Middle School intended to showcase his Smart Schools Act proposal, which would provide up to $2 billion in tech funding for schools throughout the state if approved by public referendum on Nov. 4.

 “As governor, I’ve probably spent more of my time trying to change the education system than anything else,” Cuomo told reporters after a briefing on the funding plan. “Why? It is very hard to change the education system. When you think about it, it’s probably the single-largest public monopoly in the United States of America.”

Cuomo also attacked teachers in his initial comments to the Daily News Editorial Board:

Cuomo said he will push a plan that includes more incentives — and sanctions — that “make it a more rigorous evaluation system.”

Cuomo expects fierce opposition from the state’s teachers, who are already upset with him and have refused to endorse his re-election bid.

“The teachers don’t want to do the evaluations and they don’t want to do rigorous evaluations — I get it,” Cuomo said. “I feel exactly opposite."

Cuomo's teacher evaluation system is a disaster, with superintendents in the Lower Hudson Valley saying it takes too much time, energy and resources to implement and does nothing to improve teaching and learning.

From the perspective of teachers, the system does much harm since no matter how excellent a teacher you are, you can be found "ineffective" in this system. 

The first lawsuit against the system was launched this past week by a widely respected teacher whose students all passed their state tests but was nonetheless deemed "ineffective" by Cuomo's evaluation system based upon her students' test scores:

Sheri G. Lederman has been teaching for 17 years as a fourth-grade teacher  in New York’s Great Neck Public School district. Her students consistently  outperform state averages on math and English standardized tests, and  Thomas Dolan, the superintendent of Great Neck schools, signed an affidavit saying “her record is flawless” and that “she is highly regarded as an educator.”

Yet somehow, when Lederman received her 2013-14 evaluation, which is based in part on student standardized test scores, she was rated as “ineffective.” Now she has sued state officials over the method they used to make this determination in an action that could affect New York’s controversial teacher evaluation system.

How is it that a teacher known for excellence could be rated “ineffective”?

The convoluted statistical model that the state uses to evaluate how much a teacher “contributed” to students’ test scores awarded her only one out of 20 possible points. These ratings affect a teacher’s reputation and at some point are supposed to be used to determine a teacher’s pay and even job status.

...

Lederman filed her lawsuit against New York State Education Commissioner John King Jr., Assistant Commissioner Candace H. Shyer and the Office of State Assessment of the New York State Education Department, challenging the rationality of the VAM model being used to evaluate her and, by extension, other teachers. The suit alleges that the New York State Growth Measures “actually punishes excellence in education through a statistical black box which no rational educator or fact finder could see as fair, accurate or reliable.”

The lawsuit shows that Lederman’s students traditionally perform much higher on math and English Language Arts standardized tests than average fourth-grade classes in the state. In 2012-13, 68.75 percent of her students met or exceeded state standards in both English and math. She was labeled “effective” that year. In 2013-14, her students’ test results were very similar but she was rated “ineffective.”  The lawsuit says:

This simply makes no sense, both as a matter of statistics and as a matter of rating teachers based upon slight changes in student performance from year to year.

This is the system that Cuomo plans to revise so that it has "sanctions," the system that Cuomo claimed in a 245 page campaign policy document was one of the best teacher evaluation systems in the nation, though he did complain last month that it needed to be revised because not enough teachers were being found "ineffective."

Imagine that - Cuomo wants to strengthen a system that rates one of the most widely respected teachers in the Great Neck School District "ineffective" based upon some voodoo value-added measurements because not enough teachers are being rated "ineffective."

Now you'd think after Andrew Cuomo twice attacked the public school system as a "monopoly" that he planned to "break" in his second term and threatened to "strengthen" his teacher evaluation system with "real sanctions" for teachers even though it's a disaster that unfairly rates teachers, Randi Weingarten would have put down her TIME Magazine for a minute and joined the outrage many New York educators expressed on social media over Cuomo's comments.

But you'd be wrong about that - instead Weingarten defended Cuomo:

ALBANY—American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten attributed Governor Andrew Cuomo’s characterization of public education as a “monopoly” to last-minute campaign rhetoric and called on teachers angered by the governor’s comments not to vote for G.O.P. candidate Rob Astorino as an alternative.

“We’re in the political season. At the end of the day, … I’ll chalk it up to politics,” Weingarten told Capital on Friday when asked about the governor’s comments earlier in the week to the Daily News' editorial board.

Now as I noted above, Cuomo doubled down on his "monopoly" comments later, so it's difficult to see how Cuomo's threats to "break" public schools is anything but a threat, but Weingarten managed to do so in an interview with Capital NY's Jessica Bakeman.

Weingarten says she wrote Cuomo a letter:

"I decided I would actually write him a letter explaining why public education isn’t a monopoly but a public good, a moral imperative and a constitutional mandate in New York,” she said. “I really decided to spell that out, not in the high-pitched moment of the last few days of a gubernatorial election, but privately, in a letter. Because the values of public education are so important that we really have to have a real conversation about it.”

More jive from Weingarten here - if ever there was a time to go public with a conversation about public education, it's now, during the heat of a campaign, when a politician still has to worry about his re-election numbers.

But instead of taking Cuomo on the way she took on the TIME cover, Weingarten defends Cuomo's comments as nothing more than "campaign rhetoric" and says she's having a "private conversation"  with Cuomo about this matter.

One thing I've noticed about Weingarten over the years - if there's ever a symbolic fight she can take on that will have little-to-no impact on the damages being done to public schools, teachers and the teaching profession by the ed deform movement, Randi is all in.

But whenever there's a moment when she can fight to defend public schools, teachers and the teaching profession from politicians who are doing real damage to all three, she's instead defending those politicians, or robocalling for them, or diverting attentions from the damage they're doing.

That's EXACTLY what Randi Weingarten is doing here - happy to take on TIME in a symbolic fight that is essentially meaningless while declining to fight - nay, worse, defending - a neo-liberal politician like Andrew Cuomo who plans to "break" the public school system in his next term.

Why not fight both fights - the symbolic fight against TIME and the real fight against a politician with a personal vendetta against teachers and public schools who plans to destroy both in the next few years?

Clinton Gets Orwellian In Defense Of Cuomo

Ross Barkan at Politicker:

Recasting Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s race as a bellwether of the left’s ongoing struggle with conservatives nationwide, former President Bill Clinton told a crowd of union members tonight that Mr. Cuomo would be a bulwark against the “last gasp of trickle-down economics.”

“He has made this a more progressive, more fair, more forward looking state–and it’s turned out to be good for the economy,” Mr. Clinton said at the headquarters of 1199 SEIU, the powerful healthcare workers union, in Manhattan. “This team of Andrew and Kathy [Hochul] will do more.”

He said that Mr. Cuomo, facing a conservative, under-funded rival in Republican Rob Astorino, was all that stood between progressives and a possible Reagan revolution-like redux: “This election is about the last gasp of trickle-down economics,” he charged.

What the hell is Clinton talking about?

Cuomo has demonized the "extreme left" and pushed again and again for tax cuts for rich people and corporations while attacking unions and unionized workers.

What's "Democratic" about this record?

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo , whose center-right policies have alienated him from much of his party’s progressive base, attacks the “extreme left of the Democratic Party” in his new memoir, according to a report in the New York Times.

While his father Mario Cuomo’s 1984 address at the Democratic National Convention served as a liberal rallying cry, Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly found himself starkly at odds with the liberal wing of the party. Although the governor signed marriage equality and gun safety legislation into law and has staked out a robustly pro-choice position, he has also slashed corporate taxes, capped property taxes, maneuvered to keep his own party from controlling the New York State Senate, lent conditional support to fracking, and earned plaudits from the right-wing National Review for his conservative economic agenda. There’s also the federal probe into Cuomo’s disbanding of his much-heralded anti-corruption commission, which Cuomo had touted as evidence of his commitment to good government.

Capitalizing on progressive discontent with Cuomo’s policies and his sudden dissolution of the Moreland anti-corruption commission, challenger Zephyr Teachout managed to secure 34 percent of the vote against Cuomo in New York’s Democratic primary last month.

Given his center-right track record, it’s hardly unsurprising that Cuomo is no fonder of the left than the left is of him. According to the Times – which got its hands on a copy of his new memoir, All Things Possible: Setbacks and Success in Politics and Life – Cuomo rips the “extreme left” in the book, particularly for what he depicts as its hostility to the rich. Leftists, Cuomo writes, “speak of punitively raising taxes on the rich and transferring the money to the poor” and seek to “demonize those who are very wealthy.”

Dunno why Cuomo felt the need to bring Clinton in as closer for the campaign - the latest Marist poll shows Cuomo up 36 percentage points, with 56% support in the election - so he's going to win on Tuesday no matter what.

But for Clinton and Cuomo to make believe like he;s some great progressive - please!

Remember When Frank Bruni Thought "Won't Back Down" Was A Great Movie?

Food writer Frank Bruni has written another teacher-bashing column, a habit of his ever since they gave him op-ed real estate at the NY Times, though to be fair, there are quite a few other teacher-bashers on the Times op-ed page as well, so maybe Frank's just trying to fit in with his more famous compatriots in neo-liberalism.

In any case, NYC Educator dispensed with Frank's argument here and I don't think I can improve on it, so I'm going to let that stand for dealing with Frank's current nonsensical teacher-bashing and remind everyone of a few years back when Bruni, a food writer by trade, got into movie reviews and told us how great the teacher-bashing picture "Won't Back Down" was.

Remember that travesty?

I do - and I like to remind people of it every time Frank Bruni writes some more nonsense about public education, public schools, teachers or Common Core.

I think it's important to remind people just how poor Frank's judgment is when it comes to what he writes about education, schools and teachers (as well as movies):

"Won't Back Down" Getting Savaged By Film Critics (UPDATED)

Frank Bruni loved the parent trigger propaganda piece "Won't Back Down, but movie critics for Salon, NPR and the Associated Press did not.

First, NPR's review:

 All cynicism aside, the movie taps a rich vein of accumulated public frustration at the continued failure of government to provide decent access to public schools for all American children. Aside from religion itself, no subject lends itself more to arm-waving entrenched positions than education. And perhaps a movie aimed at a mainstream audience can't help but distill the discussion into culture-war sound bites.

 For all its strenuous feints at fair play, though, Won't Back Down is something less honorable — a propaganda piece with blame on its mind. Directed with reasonable competence by Daniel Barnz from a speechifying screenplay he co-wrote with Brin Hill, the movie is funded by Walden Media, a company owned by conservative mogul Philip Anschutz, who advocates creationist curricula in schools. Walden also co-produced the controversial pro-charter school documentary Waiting for Superman, so the outfit is not without axes to grind.

...


In fact, it's nuance and reason that fall by the wayside amid the sloganeering rhetoric of Won't Back Down. Like most large institutions with interests to protect, the unions could use some reforms, especially when it comes to shielding bad teachers from scrutiny and discipline.
But if you were to wave a magic wand that replaced unions and bureaucrats with a rainbow coalition of local parents and educators coming together to create the kind of school they want, the result would be chaos, not to mention an end to the tattered remains of our common culture.
"We need to start somewhere," comes a stern, God-like voice in Won't Back Down, waving off all talk about the role of poverty and inequality in under-resourced schools and underachieving pupils. We do indeed. Just not here.

 Next, David Germain of the Associated Press pans the movie:

 Despite earnest performances from Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis as a pair of moms leading the fight, "Won't Back Down" lives down to its bland, us-against-them title with a simple-minded assault on the ills of public schools that lumbers along like a math class droning multiplication tables.

Director and co-writer Daniel Barnz ("Beastly") made his feature debut with 2009's "Phoebe in Wonderland," an intimate story of a troubled girl aided by an unconventional teacher. Here, Barnz gets lost in red tape as "Won't Back Down" gives us the inside dope on the teacher's lounge, the union headquarters, the principal-teacher showdown, the hushed halls of the board of education.

Theaters should install glow-in-the-dark versions of those old clunking classroom clocks so viewers can count the agonizing minutes ticking by as they watch the movie.

 ...

 And it's the children who suffer in "Won't Back Down." Other than some token scenes involving Jamie and Nona's kids, the students are mere extras in a drama that spends most of its time prattling on about how the children are what matter most.

 And finally, saving the best for last, Andrew O'Hehir

So teachers’ unions don’t care about kids. Oh, and luck is a foxy lady. This is what I took away from the inept and bizarre “Won’t Back Down,” a set of right-wing anti-union talking points disguised (with very limited success) as a mainstream motion-picture-type product. Someone needs to launch an investigation into what combination of crimes, dares, alcoholic binges and lapses in judgment got Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal into this movie. Neither of them seems likely to sympathize with its thinly veiled labor-bashing agenda and, way more to the point, I thought they had better taste. Maybe it was that actor-y thing where they saw potential in their characters – a feisty, working-class single mom for Gyllenhaal, a sober middle-class schoolteacher for Davis – liked the idea of working together and didn’t think too much about the big picture.

Perhaps that was a mistake, because the big picture is that the movie is unbelievable crap and the whole project was financed by conservative Christian billionaire Phil Anschutz, also the moneybags behind the documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” which handled a similar agenda in subtler fashion.

...

 “Won’t Back Down” was reportedly inspired by a California law that allows parent-teacher takeovers of failing schools under certain circumstances. Again, that sounds like a fascinating premise, albeit one that’s highly likely to go in unforeseen “Animal Farm” directions. But all we get here is the most blithe and moronic kind of “let’s put on a show” magical thinking, in which ripping up the union contract and wresting control of the school from the bureaucrats becomes an end in itself, and what happens later is shrouded in the mists of an imaginary libertarian paradise. There are attempts at Fox News-style balance here and there, as when someone observes that most charter schools fail to improve outcomes and when a bombastic union exec played by Ned Eisenberg delivers a monologue about the current assault on labor (right before announcing that he couldn’t care less about children).

...

 Most people still understand, I believe, that teachers work extremely hard for little pay and low social status in a thankless, no-win situation. But this is one of those areas where conservatives have been extremely successful in dividing the working class, which is precisely the agenda in “Won’t Back Down.” Breeding hostility to unions in themselves, and occasionally insinuating that unionized teachers are a protected caste of incompetents who get three damn months off every single year, has been an effective tactic in what we might call postmodern Republican populism, especially in recent battles over public employee contracts in Wisconsin and elsewhere. It works something like this: 1) Turn the resentment and frustration of people like Jamie – people with crappy service-sector jobs and few benefits, whose kids are stuck in failing schools – against the declining group of public employees who still have a decent deal. 2) Strip away job security and collective bargaining; hand out beer and ukuleles instead. 3) La la la la, tax cuts, tax cuts, I can’t hear you!

On the plus side for "Won't Back Down", NY Times food critic Frank Bruni loved the movie so much that he decided to devote an entire column to how much teachers unions and unionized teachers suck and how much better we would all be if teachers would just mindlessly accept whatever "reforms" the education reform movement wants to impose on schools.

That Bruni thought enough of "Won't Back Down" that he used it as a springboard for his teacher attack column makes you wonder what he was watching.

Maybe Bruni wasn't watching the same "Won't Back Down" as the critics for NPR, Salon, and the AP?

Maybe he was watching the video to Tom Petty's "Won't Back Down."

Or, more likely, Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More."

Hey, Frank, stay away from the magic mushrooms when you're writing about education, okay?

UPDATE - 3:01 PM: Critics from Variety, the Arizona Republic, the Hollywood Reporter and the Village Voice also think "Won't Back Down" sucks.

Maggie Anderson in the Voice writes:

The fat, lazy public school teacher who can’t be bothered to stop diddling with her phone or shopping for shoes online while her second-grade class erupts into mayhem in the opening scene of Won’t Back Down isn’t the most despicable entity in this tearjerker. That would be the union that protects her, the same malevolent force in Davis Guggenheim’s horribly argued pro-charter-school documentary from 2010, Waiting for Superman (both films were funded by Walden Media, led by a conservative billionaire).

...

 Viewed solely as maternal melodrama, Won’t Back Down succeeds; its actresses, as they spearhead the takeover and work through “personal demons,” rouse, rage, and rue admirably (though in Davis’s case, marveling at yet another fine performance doesn’t stop you from wishing that her first leading role was in a worthier vehicle). But there’s no prettying up the movie’s vilifying of teachers’ unions, which here resort to dirty tricks and smear campaigns—an easy enough scapegoat for the larger, more intractable economic problems also ignored in Guggenheim’s film and by most politicians of any stripe.

And David Rooney of the Hollywood Reporter writes:

The jury is still out on a solution to the national education system crisis, but the verdict is delivered with a heavy hand and a stacked deck in the formulaic Won’t Back Down. Simplifying complex school-reform hurdles into tidy inspirational clichés while demonizing both teachers’ unions and bureaucracy-entrenched education boards, the movie addresses timely issues but eschews shading in favor of blunt black and white. It’s old-school Lifetime fodder dressed up in Hollywood trappings.

Peter Debruge of Variety writes that the film takes its audience "for dummies" by "grossly oversimplifying the issue at hand" while Barbara VanDenburgh of the Arizona Republic writes that

Oversimplified politics undermine the film at every turn. The shrill preachiness reaches a fever pitch by the film's climax, a schoolboard hearing that takes place under the watchful gazes of a muralized Abraham Lincoln and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and in which the deciding vote is cast by a man named -- what else? -- Mr. King, who monologues against a backdrop of the civil-rights leader to thunderous applause.

The movie doesn't just shriek its point to you through a megaphone -- it beats you over the head with it.

And it doesn't matter which side of the debate you land on; two hours of schmaltz mired in bloodless policy debate just doesn't make for good movie watching. Even if you stripped the film bare of political pretensions, you'd still be left with unabashed, hokey sentimentality where such feel-good adages as "Change the school, you change the neighborhood" are sprinkled on complex problems like so much fairy dust.

There's a real conversation to be had about the sorry state of the public-school system, but all this movie is going to trigger is a lot of screaming.

Looks like there will be no Oscar for the ed reform movement again this year.

They were dying to get an Oscar win for Davis Guggenheim's "Waiting for Superman," but not only did "Superman" not win an Oscar, it wasn't even nominated.

Judging by the reviews of the heavy-handed, badly written "Won't Back Down," the reform movement is going to have to hope the third time is a charm when it comes to winning an Oscar and promoting their message via pop culture.

Wonder what they'll try next?

An animated Disney education reform picture (Donald Duck can be the lazy, nasty, unionized teacher.)

Maybe an updated Boston Public mini-series that promotes privatization, charterization and high stakes testing?

Or maybe they can stop trying to fool people with propaganda and engage on the issues for real.

Improving the education system is not as easy as firing all the teachers, closing all the schools, and turning the entire public school system to charters.

The economic conditions that kids face at home matter when they come to school.

The movie critics get this.

Why can't the education reform community and the politicians?

Why can't President Obama?

That Bruni loved the teacher-bashing movie that all these critics savaged gives you some insight into how poor this dude's judgment is.

Given how bad his judgment is on public education, schools, teachers and movies, I wouldn't take his restaurant reviews at face value either.

That Bruni also was a guest at teacher-baser Campbell Brown's wedding to Dan Senor gives you some insight into why he wrote this teacher-bashing column just after Brown launched her anti-tenure lawsuit in New York State.

Bruni's got an anti-teacher ax to grind, facts (or taste) be damned.

Here's Part Of Mayor Bloomberg's Legacy

This is it, in a nutshell:

The city's poverty rate sat at 21.4% in 2012, barely unchanged from a year earlier, according to a report released by Mayor de Blasio's office and the Center for Economic Opportunity on Wednesday.
The rate increased across nearly every demographic group between 2008 and 2012, the report found.
Notably, New Yorkers of Asian descent saw the rate rise 6.6% to 29% and non-U.S. citizens experienced an increase of 5.3% to 29.9%. About a third of the city's Asian-descent residents are also non-citizens.

Eight percent of adults between the working ages of 18 and 64 lived in poverty in 2012, up 1.8% from 2008. Among families with two full-time workers, the rate increased by 1.3 percentage points to 5.2%.

Conditions in the city improved after the 2008 recession, but -- using the CEO's metrics -- 45.6% of New Yorkers continued to live near the poverty line in 2012, the report says. The standard federal measure set the rate at 30.7%.

Almost half of all New Yorkers live either in poverty or near-poverty.

You know whose fault that is?

Teachers, that's who!

If more of these lazy, pension-sucking, tenure-loving, test-hating teachers could just be fired, and more failing schools closed, we could address this poverty issue and - oh, wait, no, that's not actually right.

You see, middle class jobs have disappeared at an alarming rate over the past decade and they aren't coming back.

As Gothamist noted:

New York's reality mirrors what the country is experiencing. Per another report on the meager wage job boom in the Times:

The National Employment Law Project study found that there were about a million fewer jobs in middle-wage industries — including parts of the health care system, loan servicing and real estate — than there were when the recession hit. 

Economists worry that even a stronger recovery might not bring back jobs in traditionally middle-class occupations eroded by mechanization and offshoring. The American work force might become yet more “polarized,” with positions easier to find at the high and low ends than in the middle.

Now you can blame schools and teachers for this mess, as Mayor Bloomberg and so many of the education reformers like to do, but the truth is, the plutocrats running things (including Bloomberg himself) are sucking up more and more of the economy, they're paying less and less in taxes, and even when they engage in so-called "philanthropy" to "help others," it's more often than not a way to a) lower their tax bills and b) make money for other parts of their conglomerates.

That's why Bloomber is worth five times as much now as when he became mayor, it's why Bill Gates has more money than he ever has even as he claims he wants to give most of his fortune away in philanthropy.

It's one big racket, folks, and it's rigged for plutocrats.

You can blame teachers and schools, government workers and pensions or whatever, but the truth is, the economy and government policy are now rigged for the 1% and that ain't changing unless people take to the streets and make it change.

Cory Booker, Mitch McConnell Have Same Donors

If you're even dimly aware of the fevered ego that is neo-liberal Senator Cory Booker, you're not surprised by this news:

Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) share at least one thing: campaign donors.
Booker, a Senate newbie, and McConnell, the Senate minority leader, show up dipping into the same donor pool more than any other opposing-party members of Congress.

They shared 74 donors in the first year of this election cycle.

...

Predictably, the list of Booker and McConnell crossover donors includes powerful names at Fortune 500 companies, like  Lawrence J. Salva, senior vice president of Comcast, William Lauder, chairman of Estée Lauder Companies, and Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google.

Cory Booker, the hedge fund managers favorite former Newark mayor, still lapping up the Wall Street and corporate largesse.

New York Goes From 8th To 20th In Education Performance Under Andrew Cuomo

Interesting piece of data in Pedro Noguera's Time-Union opinion piece decrying the Cuomo budget:

With Gov. Andrew Cuomo emerging as a champion of charter schools, what does it mean for the 97 percent of students in New York who attend public schools?

Outside major cities, most people have never heard of a charter school. They are focused instead on their local public school, where the situation is often quite disturbing.

There are a lot of problems, including the botched rollout of the common core standards, but the key problem is funding. More than 90 percent of school districts now receive less operating aid from the state than they did five years ago. Some wealthy school districts are able to cope with less funding, but most districts have had to increase class size and make cuts to cuts to art, music and foreign language, as well as advanced placement and honors courses.

We now have two systems of education in New York: In prosperous communities, we have well-funded, high-performing schools; and in less prosperous communities all across the state, we have under-funded schools and struggling students.

This widening gap is the main reason New York's ranking for overall education performance has dropped from 8th in the nation when Cuomo took office to 20th today.

No one in Albany has a plan to address the funding inequality that is the root of this problem. Instead, the governor has chosen to focus on charter schools as if they were the answer to all problems.

In fact, Cuomo is exacerbating the problem with budget after budget, sticking districts with more and more mandates even as he starves them of more and more money.

And don't think this is a mistake on Cuomo's part - he is quite literally the governor of charter schools only and his plan is to make as many traditional public schools fail as he possibly can and hand them off to his charter school operator buddies and his Wall Street/hedge fundie buddies.

I think this is the piece that some people are missing with Cuomo's budgets and mandates - they're part of an intentional strategy to undermine and destroy the public school system in the state and bring privatization to areas outside of NYC.

De Blasio Uses Ed Deformer-Tied Consulting Group For Transition Team

That story that Dana Rubenstein broke at Capital NY about Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio using a Bloomberg-funded consultant group suggested by Rahm Emanuel to run his transition team in secret just gets worse and worse:

Civic Consulting Alliance role in Chicago schl closings & charter expansion; now working w/de Blasio transition team http://t.co/jOzzb5IIWt
— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) December 17, 2013

Dunno if it's coincidence or not, but Eva Moskowitz has gotten a bit quiet lately about de Blasio.

One wonders if Civic Consulting Alliance helping to run things behind the scenes hasn't assuaged some of her concerns.

None of this is much of a surprise.

Bill de Blasio is a politician who made his bones in the Clinton administration.

This jive about de Blasio's election being the dawn of a new progressive era and de Blasio driving Cuomo and Obama to the left - it's pure fantasy.

No politician that came of age in the Clinton administration, is friends with Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emanuel and happily (and secretly) uses Bloomberg-funded consulting groups to run their transition teams is going to be anything other than another destructive neo-liberal.

Should Bring Them To A Public School Too

From the DN weekend news round-up:

With his two daughters in tow, President Obama visited popular D.C. bookstore “Politics and Prose” Saturday to encourage holiday shoppers to support local businesses. (NYDN)

Great, Barry, now bring them to a public school and show them what a mess you've made of the public education system with your Racing to the Top and No Child Left Behind waivers that have brought us high stakes standardized tests in every grade in every subject, teacher evaluations tied to those tests, badly designed national standards that are boring students to tears in English class and confusing them in math class, and a data collection program that encourages states to hand over sensitive student information to Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch.

I mean, so long as you're using your daughters as political props.

Sick Of Self-Serving Celebrities, Politicians And Media

Errol Louis patting himself on the back for serving food at a mission on Thanksgiving

Comptroller @JohnCLiu and I both brought our sons to serve meals this morning. 10 am seating was full. pic.twitter.com/ISgwzdbUTd
— Errol Louis (@errollouis) November 28, 2013

My response:

@errollouis @LindseyChrist @JohnCLiu We need a society where people have jobs that allow them to feed themselves
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) November 28, 2013

I'm so sick of these politicians, celebrities and media figures using their charity work for these self-serving p.r. opportunities.

Hey Errol, want to help the people you were serving at the mission today?

Stop shilling for the neo-liberal project that fetishizes the market above all and commodifies every part of human existence.

Help build a world where no one has to go to a Bowery Mission on Thanksgiving and have some fevered ego like yourself feed them.

Your ladling out gravy today did nothing in the grand scheme of things except give you the opportunity for some p.r.

Better When Bush Was President

"Frankly, the public education system was better off when George W. Bush was president because Democrats fought him." ~ Diane Ravitch
— TCBGP (@TCBGP) November 12, 2013

Indeed.

They would have fought Bush on NSA spying and the drone bomb slaughter Obama has ordered in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere too.

Alas, because a Democrat has ordered these things, many partisan Dems fall all over themselves to explain why these policies are not really totalitarian and murderous.

Same goes for many of the Daily Kossacks and the like on the blogosphere.

Here at Perdido Street School, we don't teach blind fealty to party, nation-state or ideology.

We teach staying true to principle, truth and honor.

That's a lesson that rarely gets taught these days and it's one that is sorely needed.

I voted for Obama first time around,

I did not vote for him in 2012.

I wouldn't have voted for him if my vote was the one vote standing between some hanging chads and a Romney presidency.

I will not be threatened into voting for the lesser evil anymore - the lesser evil is still, in the end, evil.

Christie, Cuomo, Booker - All The Same

Mark Naison points out Chris Christie is not the only local teacher-basher and destroyer of public education:

 As we watch, with excitement and some trepidation, how our Hero-BAT Love Light is being given national exposure because of her campaign trail encounter with Republican Gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie, let us remember that there are two other Presidential aspirants in the New York Metropolitan area- both of them Democrats-whose positions on education issues are indistinguishable from that of Christie: New Jersey Senator elect Cory Booker, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. They may not engage in the kind of theatrical display of teacher bullying that Governor Cristie gave us, but attacks on teachers and teachers unions are integral part of the political formula they hope will elevate them to the White House and they draw funds and advisors from Astro Turf school reform groups the same way Cristie's does.

Indeed, Cuomo and Booker, like Barack Obama before them, can be more dangerous than a virulent and violent anti-unionist and teacher basher like Christie because as Dems they can push through much more harmful anti-labor initiatives then Republicans like Christie would get away with.

Hell, the unions here in NY State supported Cuomo's anti-teacher initiatives.

The (D) after Cuomo's name gave them the cover to do it, just the way the (D) after Cuomo's name gave him the cover to shove through a radical privatization agenda for the public school system.

So yes, Christie is dangerous and must be stopped.

But the same goes for Cory Booker and Andrew Cuomo.