Will The Families For Excellent Schools Race Baiting Ad Hurt The Charter Movement?

Michael Fiorillo on the Families for Excellent Schools race-baiting ad:

Regarding FES's charges of racism against De Blasio, see Projection, Psychological, defined as the psychological phenomenon where humans (or, in Moskowitz's case, a rather toxic facsimile thereof) denies some aspect of their behavior or attitudes, and assumes instead that others are doing or thinking the same thing.

Everything about this episode, from the planning and marketing of the demonstration itself, to this ad, shows how so-called education reform is an ethical Black Hole, where the gravitational pull of greed, power hunger, hypocrisy and manipulation seek to suck in all public resources within reach, while emitting no light whatsoever.

These are bad people, brazenly performing shameful acts. It's fortunate that, after so many years of their vicious lies being given a free pass in media and political circles, they're starting to meet with more exposure and pushback.

I also get the feeling that the other big charter chains are probably not too happy with this. It's long been rumored/reported that they too loathe Eva (though for their own venal reasons) and they clearly like to operate in a less confrontational, faux-friendlier and behind-the-scenes manner. They worry that she'll fuck up their sweet deal with her compulsive belligerence. That's the difference among these characters: KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Democracy Prep are aggressive, but smooth enough to not be compulsively belligerent (as opposed to strategically aggressive, which is what they do try to be), which they know in the long run to be unprofessional and dangerous.

Eva is kind of the Raging Id of the local charter school movement, and that makes for volatile situations, including possibility of the narrative turning against her.

Last year, Families for Excellent Schools spent more money on lobbying than any other entity - $9.7 million dollars - with record expenditures in September and October of 2014.

Here we are again in the September/October period and their lobbying expenditures are ratcheting up once more.

Only this time, they have gone with some overt race-baiting in their ads for extra-added outrage.

But as Michael notes in his comment, this act isn't helping the charter movement any.

Witness how the press treated FES head Jeremiah Kittredge at FES's March rally in Albany.




A few years ago, members of the press would have been dutifully writing down Kittredge's lies without pushback.

But not any longer.

This is the unintended consequence from the FES outrageousness.

Their credibility gets tinier and tinier.

Same goes for charter operators/chains associated with FES.

Maybe Jeremiah Kittredge and Eva Moskowitz think this belligerence will help them, but I think there's already some evidence this strategy is backfiring on them and will, in the end, hurt their beloved privatization, er, charter school movement more than help it.

Cuomo's School Receivership Program Is "Stack Ranking" For Schools, Designed To Break Up The System

Fred LeBrun in the Times-Union dissects Cuomo's vaunted school receivership program:

In the Capital Region, only Albany's William S. Hackett Middle School is on the persistent list, but if a handful of schools in Albany, Troy, Schenectady and Amsterdam, including Albany High School, don't show appropriate progress, they will join Hackett next year.

What happens now for schools like Hackett is as complicated as directions to Atlantis, and about as reliable.

Albany school Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard becomes the acting school receiver, with broad powers, for the next year. A required community engagement team composed of the principal, staff, teachers, parents and even students from Hackett will forward recommendations for improvements to the superintendent, who will use them to help create her intervention plan to turn the school around. The plan is due at State Ed for approval by the end of this month. Over the next year, the community team will look over her shoulder as the intervention plan unfolds.

In the meantime, the school receiver can do pretty much what she wants (with approval from State Ed): change the curriculum, replace teachers and administrators, increase salaries, reallocate the budget, expand the school day or year, turn Hackett into a community school, even convert to a charter school. Although there's enormous rigmarole attached to much of it, including going charter. Remember, the receiver in this case remains the superintendent for the rest of the district, so she is answerable for any wild and crazy ideas to the voters through the school board.

Anyway, to help start the process, Vanden Wyngaard can apply for a grant from a $75 million pot set up by the state, although she'll have plenty of competition from other "persistently struggling" school receivers in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Yonkers, New York City and elsewhere. She has a year to do her turnaround. Or the hammer falls and we are off to Neverland.

Then the state would appoint an independent receiver who is answerable only to State Ed. At which time the process of community involvement, an intervention plan, and the rest are repeated, only now change is apt to be far more radical, with wholesale staff firings. An independent receiver can be a person from an approved list that doesn't yet exist, or an institution or charter school. Although charter schools upstate have been mostly a bust, as Albany well knows. Middle school charters in Albany could not save themselves, let alone others.

So. If you're getting the idea that this receivership idea seems like a plan designed to fail and thus prepare the way for school privatizers to make a bundle, move over.

For one thing, the state has yet to give school receivers a clear idea of what would constitute appropriate progress to avoid an independent receiver. Presumably, we'll know by the end of the month when intervention plans have to be approved. What is expected and how reasonable it is will answer a great deal.

Because just a year to show any marked improvement on any front for a school like Hackett, no matter how thoughtfully considered, broadly accepted by the community, or earnestly pursued, is absurd. Real change needs time for all stakeholders to become invested. Teachers at Hackett today are still complaining that attendance and discipline as major problems, just as it was when I substituted there, oh, a half century ago. These are, after all, manifestations of the poverty and despair underlying most of Hackett's problems; they don't go away. They are the community's problems, not just Hackett's.

The school can be taken over in a year if it doesn't "improve," but the state still hasn't explained what that "improvement" will look like.

Yeah, that's a plan designed to "fail" schools and hand them over to the privatizers, profiteers and/or charter operators.

LeBrun's writing about a school in Albany, but Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Farina have a lot riding on this too, since the city has 62 schools in the receivership program, with six deemed "persistently struggling" and having only one year to improve (the seventh is already closing.)

As with Hackett, these schools don't know yet what will constitute "improvement," which is a problem since the deadline for that "improvement" is fast approaching.

The cynic in me wonders if a side benefit to declaring all these schools "failing" and handing them over to the privatizers, profiteers and/or charter operators isn't another opportunity for Governor Cuomo to declare his "friend" bill de Blasio a loser too.

Governor Cuomo promised the Daily News and a Forbes forum he would "break" the public school "monopoly" before his re-election in 2014 and it certainly looks like the receivership program is part of that plan.

After the state gets through privatizing these 144 schools, the next slate of so-called "struggling" schools will be added to the receivership list - this will be an ongoing program:

The program was one of several education reforms hammered out during budget negotiations this spring. Under the deal, schools are placed into two categories, “struggling schools,” those in the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state for three years, based on measures like test scores and graduation rates, and “persistently struggling schools,” which have been in that bracket since 2006.

What we have here is "stacking ranking" for schools, with the state playing rank and yank every year, adding schools to the privatization, er, receivership list, setting them up to "fail" and then handing them over to the privatizers, profiteers and/or charter operators.

Just as with stack ranking for employees, the program will disempower, demoralize and ultimately destroy the system (this is also the same rationale behind Cuomo's APPR teacher evaluation system, btw - ranking teachers every year and declaring 7% "ineffective" no matter what.)

Just ask Microsoft, which used stack ranking as its evaluation system for employees, how well that worked for them as Apple was kicking them to the wayside in competition.

But of course if you're Andrew Cuomo, you want to destroy the system - that's exactly what he promised to do in 2014 and that's the plan he's been carrying out since.

What A Real Solution To "Failing Schools" Would Look Like

A commenter named Dutch left this at the Capitol Confidential piece about NYSED announcing 144 schools going into "receivership":

All urban school districts. All in poverty stricken communities. None of the problems are with the schools per se but with the communities which they serve. Solutions must be sought outside of the school districts. Intensive economic redevelopment in the neighborhoods. Massive infusion of community/social services to help struggling families. Mergers between city and suburban school districts. “Receivership” is nonsense. Changes within the schools won’t ameliorate the problems because schools can’t change the underlying social dysfunction.

Dutch is absolutely right, of course, but the receivership program isn't meant to fix any problems - it's meant to exacerbate them.

The ultimate goal of corporate education reform is the privatization of public education.

In order to get to that goal, education reformers look to destabilize the system as much as possible, create as much churn and burn as possible, in order to spread problems as far and wide as possible.

That's why they shoved through radical changes to the state's standards and state's testing regime before they rolled out any curriculum to go with those changes, that's why they shoved through a radical change to the teacher evaluation system at the same time they brought radical changes to the standards and the testing.

The goal was to create chaos, to take schools that had not been "failing" and suddenly declare them "failing" when the new rigorous test scores, rigged for high failure rates, came through on their promise.

The goal of the receivership is the same - spread chaos, privatize what they can, destroy everything else.

You can bet these receiver schools, once they're controlled by an independent entity, will get to cherrypick their students, just as the charter schools do now, so that the "receivership" program can be deemed a "success" and public schools can be branded "failing."

It's all rigged for a pre-determined outcome and that outcome has nothing to do with the public good and everything to do with private gain and power.

NYSED Threatens To Close School That's Already Being Phased Out (UPDATED)

Classic NYSED:

SED puts Bronx's PS 64 on its list of "persistently struggling" schools. But DOE says the school is already being phased out. #coordination

— Eliza Shapiro (@elizashapiro) July 16, 2015

Ben Chapman nails it with this response:

not the kinda thing that inspires confidence in the state's plans for troubled NYC schools https://t.co/AVk1LbiIqz

— Ben Chapman (@NYDNBenChapman) July 16, 2015

Indeed it doesn't.

And yet, NYSED has been given an awful lot of power for a state entity that doesn't seem to know which way is up:

The state Education Department has just put out its list of failing, or what they call struggling and persistently struggling schools under a new program, thanks to legislation passed with the budget in the spring.

The program creates carrots and sticks and sets out the possibility that the poorest performers could in a year’s time end up under outside receivership, that is, they could be taken over by an independent entity, such as a college or even a charter school operator.

There are 144 struggling schools statewide including 20 that are ”persistently struggling.”

...

The stick includes some potentially harsh measures, although it’s unclear how they will play out. In persistently struggling schools, for example, a superintendent acting as the local or in district receiver could conceivably fire teachers and administrators regardless of tenure. The superintendent also can change curriculum and institute a longer school day and school year.

As for the carrot, a superintendent can increase pay for teachers and administrators. The law includes a $75 million pot of money to be divided up over the next two years to help with the improvement programs.

Most of these schools will get sticks, of course, that goes without saying.

The goal of education reform is to slowly but surely privatize the school system, fire the unionized teachers, and replace schools with non-union charters.

That's what Cuomo devised here with the budget legislation that allows for state receivership of so-called "failing" schools, but as is usual with the incompetents at NYSED, they screw stuff up and threaten to close a school that's already closing.

Nice work, MaryEllen.

Just a couple of days under your tenure at NYSED and you've already picked up from the previous incompetent in Albany.

UPDATE - 5:25 PM: Looks like the stick use is starting:

D.O.E. confirms they will NOT be able to re-hire staffs at all 62 struggling schools designated by state.

— Eliza Shapiro (@elizashapiro) July 16, 2015

SECOND UPDATE - JULY 17: 10:55 AM :

From the Capital NY Morning Education Email:

The announcement—some version of which was expected after a deal in the state budget to create a receivership program—means that the de Blasio administration has an extra layer of pressure to turn around the city's struggling schools quickly. Of the 55 schools identified by the state as ‘struggling,’ 44 are Renewal Schools, part of de Blasio's initiative to improve low-performing schools. All the ‘persistently struggling schools’ are Renewal Schools, except for one, P.S. 64 in the Bronx, which is already being phased out and will close by next year.” A spokesperson for the D.O.E. said Thursday that the department has the option of re-hiring staff at all 62 schools, but is still in talks about how that would work. Capital’s Eliza Shapiro [PRO]: http://capi.tl/1gE8sSm

Lots of uncertainty with this receivership plan - which is of course the point.

As I've written over and over, reformers want to destroy public education for fun and profit and the easiest way to get to that goal is to destabilize as much as possible.

53 Assembly Dems Push For Carl Heastie To Back De Blasio Over Cuomo On School Reform

From Ken Lovett at the Daily News:

ALBANY — Dozens of Assembly Democrats are pressing Speaker Carl Heastie to side with Mayor de Blasio over Gov. Cuomo on the issue of school reform, the Daily News has learned.

Fifty three Democrats, led by Assembly Education Committee Chairman Catherine Nolan (D-Queens) and Speaker Pro Tempore Jeffrion Aubry (D-Queens), have signed onto a letter to Heastie urging him to reject Cuomo's push for the state to be able to take over failing schools during the ongoing budget negotiations.

"This proposal would wrest struggling schools away from local control and subject them to oversight by outside individuals or organizations, thereby interfering with the reforms municipalities are already implementing at the local level to strengthen schools and boost classroom achievement," the letter states.

The Democrats say putting the worst schools into state receivership has had a "mixed record at best" in other states.

"As we confront the challenges of providing our children with a great education, it is important that we keep in mind what works when it comes to supporting our public schools," the Assembly members say.

The letter does not specifically reference other Cuomo initiatives that would reform the teacher evaluation and tenure systems and increase the number of charter schools — all issues typically opposed by the Assembly Democrats.

The 53 Dems did write they support the reform agenda of de Blasio and his Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña. They specifically referenced the mayor's call to increase community school services that deliver mental health, extended day learning for failing schools, expanded summer school, and greater access to math and technology programs.

Cuomo's state receivership plan is simply a privatization plan - declare individual schools and whole districts failing, then hand them over to the charter operators.

I'm glad to see that Assembly Dems are pushing back against that.

That these same Dems didn't push for Heastie to fight Cuomo on other Cuomo initiatives on teacher evaluations, tenure changes or the charter cap should worry you if you're opposed to them.

That's a sign that there will be a compromise on all three coming.

Daily News Carries Andrew Cuomo's Education Reform Water

No links to these stories (they don't need the extra traffic) but the Daily News is doing a five days "New York's Schools In Crisis" extravaganza that is intended to help Governor Cuomo push through his education reform agenda - including "toughened" teacher evaluations, a lifted charter cap, more money for charter schools and state takeover of "failing" schools and districts.

The stories use the same frame that Families For Excellent Schools uses for their "Schools In Crisis" meme, the same frame Governor Cuomo has used in speeches and his budget proposal - public schools suck and it's the fault of the teachers.

They use the new Common Core test scores - the ones the state deliberately set for 70% failing rates - to prove that NYC schools are failing and something dramatic needs to be done.

The stories have parents directly blaming the teachers at their children's schools for why the scores are so low, why the schools are struggling (one parent blames her child's public school for "destroying" his whole outlook on school and life.)

This is "New York Schools In Crisis" extravaganza isn't journalism, it's advocacy intended to push a set of policies the owner of the Daily News, Mort Zuckerman, and his editors want.

The DN claims this is "comprehensive" look at what's working in the system and what isn't, but as far as I could tell, this was a propaganda piece to highlight the worst parts of the system and ignore everything else.

The Daily News itself is a newspaper in crisis - it loses $20 million a year and is up for sale - so this ed deform extravaganza is just another way they're trying to drive some traffic, sell some papers and pick up a little advertising revenue.

It certainly is NOT a fair and honest look at the city school system, however - not when they use the same misleading stats that FES and Cuomo does (like the rigged Common Core tests) and ignore the many great schools in this system to focus on the one's they call most "dire," all in order to prove the system is failing and needs to be dramatically overhauled.

Make no mistake, this five part series coming right as budget talks in Albany are heating up and just two weeks before the deadline for an on-time budget is meant to help Governor Cuomo get his education reforms enshrined into law.

Time For An Education Summit That Doesn't Emanate From The Governor's Office

Ken Mitchell, former superintendent of the South Orangetown school district and current associate professor of education at Manhattanville College:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has called for another overhaul of the state's flawed teacher evaluation system. The current model was rushed into place so New York could qualify for federal Race To The Top dollars, and has failed to gather accurate information about teacher quality. If Albany's efforts to wrest control from local districts to advance a politically motivated education agenda are successful, the results will be damaging to students and fiscally wasteful, while offering no credible information about teacher performance. It is time for an education summit, but not one that emanates from the governor's office.

The governor has appointed commissions on mandate relief, school reform, and Common Core, naming members who often lacked expertise or objectivity. This time we need a summit involving stakeholders: teachers, principals, superintendents, parents and school boards. We need a de-politicized venue to ensure an objective analysis of the evidence behind current and proposed reforms related to assessment, teacher evaluation, Common Core and charter schools. If policymakers continue to mandate without evidence and allow profiteers to influence educational decisions, children will be harmed and public education ruined.

Read the whole piece - Mitchell asks the right questions about Cuomo's agenda, including:

What is the evidence for using student test results to rate teachers?

Only 20% of teachers teach subjects with yearly state tests - will the state need to develop more tests for all disciplines and grade levels? If so, what would be the cost?

While the public is told that charters are the "solution" to failing schools, what is the evidence? Have charters helped children with significant learning challenges succeed? Why should the public subsidize privatization?

What is the evidence to support that state or private takeovers succeed? What did New York learn from taking over the the Roosevelt School District on Long Island? What did Louisiana learn from the New Orleans charter school takeover?

What was the empirical basis for the Common Core and associated tests? Do they consider the cognitive development of children?

Mitchell concludes:

It is time for a summit. New York would serve as a model to the nation by developing an objective, comprehensive, research-rich analysis of its school reform agenda to ensure that we are helping, not harming, the children in our schools.

 That sounds right to me.

Small Coterie Of Hedge Fundies Have Bought New York State And Governor Cuomo

Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News:

Hedge fund executives have unleashed a tsunami of money the past few years aimed at getting New York’s politicians to close more public schools and expand charter schools.

They’ve done it through direct political contributions, through huge donations to a web of pro-charter lobbying groups, and through massive TV and radio commercials.

Since 2000, 570 hedge fund managers have shelled out nearly $40 million in political contributions in New York State, according to a recent report by Hedge Clippers, a union-backed research group.
The single biggest beneficiary has been Andrew Cuomo, who received $4.8 million from them.

...

But the direct donations don’t tell the full story.

In this era after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United case, the indirect contributions are even more astounding.

Take, for example, a group called New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany. It financed a massive advertising campaign late last year aimed at keeping the state Senate in Republican hands, largely by blasting upstate Democrats as tied to Mayor de Blasio.

That group received $3.5 million from just six hedge fund backers of charter schools.

...

Two other pro-charter groups, Families for Excellent Schools and the political arm of Students First New York, spent more than $10 million last year on their lobbying effort.

If you're a reader of this blog, you know that Andrew Cuomo was on the take from the hedge fund managers long before he became governor.

As the NY Times reported in 2010, Cuomo met with these same hedge fundies who have donated so much money to these pro-charter front groups in a hotel room and took a suitcase full of campaign cash and promise for even more future campaign cash back to the office with him:

When Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo wanted to meet certain members of the hedge fund crowd, seeking donors for his all-but-certain run for governor, what he heard was this: Talk to Joe.

That would be Joe Williams, executive director of a political action committee that advances what has become a favorite cause of many of the wealthy founders of New York hedge funds: charter schools.

Wall Street has always put its money where its interests and beliefs lie. But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laserlike focus in the political realm.

Hedge fund executives are thus emerging as perhaps the first significant political counterweight to the powerful teachers unions, which strongly oppose expanding charter schools in their current form.
After hearing from Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Williams arranged an 8 a.m. meeting last month at the Regency Hotel, that favorite spot for power breakfasts, between Mr. Cuomo and supporters of his committee, Democrats for Education Reform, who include the founders of funds like Anchorage Capital Partners, with $8 billion under management; Greenlight Capital, with $6.8 billion; and Pershing Square Capital Management, with $5.5 billion.

Although the April 9 breakfast with Mr. Cuomo was not a formal fund-raiser, the hedge fund managers have been wielding their money to influence educational policy in Albany, particularly among Democrats, who control both the Senate and the Assembly but have historically been aligned with the teachers unions.

They have been contributing generously to lawmakers in hopes of creating a friendlier climate for charter schools. More immediately, they have raised a multimillion-dollar war chest to lobby this month for a bill to raise the maximum number of charter schools statewide to 460 from 200.

The money has paid for television and radio advertisements, phone banks and some 40 neighborhood canvassers in New York City and Buffalo — all urging voters to put pressure on their lawmakers.
...
The financial titans, who tend to send their children to private schools, would not seem to be a natural champion of charter schools, which are principally aimed at poor, minority students.

But the money managers are drawn to the businesslike way in which many charter schools are run; their focus on results, primarily measured by test scores; and, not least, their union-free work environments, which give administrators flexibility to require longer days and a longer academic year.

It also does not hurt that the city’s No. 1 billionaire, Mr. Bloomberg, is a strong charter school supporter. He is the host of the fund-raiser for Mr. Hoyt, and at times, Democrats for Education Reform seems an extension of the mayor’s own platform.

Besides more charter schools, the group and the mayor have called for ending the use of seniority as a basis for layoffs and for granting principals more power to fire teachers they consider ineffective.

Mr. Cuomo also has expressed support for charter schools. A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo declined to answer questions about the breakfast at the Regency, but Mr. Williams said it had gone well.

“We said we were looking for a leader on our particular issue,” he said, and as a result, when Mr. Cuomo is next required to disclose his contributors, “You will see a bunch of our people on the filing.”

Same old story with Cuomo - hedge fundie cash goes into his coffers, education reform policies come out of his office and (almost always) into law.

Former Assembly Speaker Silver has been indicted for monetizing his office and taking $4 million in kickbacks and bribes.

Governor Cuomo, who has taken even more than Silver from the hedge fundies to push their privatization plans, remains free and clear to continue to push for his donors' policies.

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.

NY Post Tells Lies Around Wall Street And Education Reform

Bob McManus in today's NY Post:

New York’s education cartel has been set back on its heels by a new breed of reformers, and the unions need someone to blame.

The result?

Anti-reformers have trotted out the hoariest bugbear in New York politics — the evil of Wall Street — and constructed a hilarious lie: that the education reform movement is actually camouflage for a hostile takeover of the city’s public schools.

...

But here are the questions that need to be asked:

• Why would greed-driven money moguls want New York’s schools in the first place? And, if once they took title, what would they do with them?
  Set up a market in graduation futures?
• Short-sell dropout rates?
• Or is it all a paranoid Occupy Wall Street fantasy?

Especially given that the market is already doing nicely off the teachers-unions’ $35-billion-dollar pension-fund equity investments. This eye-poppingly significant sum underscores what should be obvious: There really is no significant money to be made by tipping over New York’s public-school lunch coach.

Rupert Murdoch, Bob McManus' boss and the owner of the NY Post, in a November 2010 press release announcing his purchase of Wireless Generation, an edu-tech company handed million dollar contracts by former NYCDOE chancellor and current Murdoch employee Joel Klein:

“When it comes to K through 12 education,” Murdoch said in a statement about the Wireless Generation purchase, “we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.”

No money to be made by Wall Street in education, Bob?

Tell that to your boss, Rupert Murodch - I bet that'll come as a surprise to him.

McManus isn't the only Murdoch minion to be hawking this line - so is Fred Dicker:

BobMcManus @rlmac2 : The unions' latest lie: Wall Street trying to 'take over' NYC schools http://t.co/kuRwYkLlqt via @nypost
— Fredric U. Dicker (@fud31) February 22, 2015

Here was my reply:

@fud31 @rlmac2 @nypost And yet your boss, Rupert Murdoch, said it's a $500 billion $ sector waiting to be tapped.
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) February 22, 2015

@fud31 @rlmac2 @nypost If no $ to be made, why did News Corp hire Joel Klein, buy Wireless Gen, and pursue ed business?
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) February 22, 2015

Cuomo Calls For Privatization Of "Failing" Schools

From the NY Post:

Gov. Cuomo, at another Bronx event, said 44 of the 178 schools in the state labeled as failing are in the borough. And 20 of those have been in the dismal category for a decade.

“You want to talk about a failure of government?” Cuomo said. “You want to talk about a scandal in government? To me that’s the scandal. It’s a total abrogation of the responsibility of government.”

He said schools that fail three straight years should be taken over by “a not-for-profit, another school district or a turnaround expert.”

Cuomo's call came after Ruben Diaz Sr., the only crook of the Four Amigos not in prison, said the NYCDOE dumps the "worst teachers" into his borough and called for Cuomo's education reform agenda, including a raising of the charter cap, to be passed in order to remedy that situation.

The Bronx has the highest rate of poverty in the nation, and there is plenty of research to show that the higher the rate of poverty, the more schools struggle.

Let's say Cuomo and Diaz get their way and huge swaths of the public school system are privatized, charters sprout up all over the place and "turnaround experts" pop up in every neighborhood to work their magic on failing schools.

Do Cuomo and Diaz really think the problems facing the public schools in the Bronx will be alleviated?

If so they should look at New Orleans to see how large-scale turnaround efforts go:

Post-Hurricane Katrina the Louisiana Department of Education (LDE) took over more than 107 public schools in New Orleans claiming that they were failing. Post–Katrina Education Reform has drastically rebuilt the public education system into practically an all charter system creating the largest percentage of charter schools than any city in the country. In developing reforms to rebuild New Orleans public schools, the state attracted more than three billion dollars from the philanthropic community, charter school proponents, foreign countries and the federal government. Over the last six years, numerous reports have been written citing the RSD with unprecedented success while proclaiming it as the national model for turning around urban school districts. Despite these reports of the miracle s in New Orleans, the reality is that the reform school district in New Orleans (Recovery School District) is one of the worst performing school districts in the state of Louisiana. In its recent assessment, the Louisiana State Department of Education ranked the Recovery School District academically 69th out of 70 school districts in Louisiana. Despite the billions of dollars, despite all of the media spin, and despite claims from state education officials, the education reforms in New Orleans have failed (Deshotels) 

But I don't think Cuomo and Diaz really believe in turnaround miracles - this just about the payoffs they're getting from the charter industry and their hedge fund and Wall Street backers to privatize as many schools as they can

Because both Cuomo and Diaz are on the charter payroll, that's for sure.

And there's lot of money to be made working that angle.

Public Schools Outperform Charter Schools In Minnesota

From the Star-Tribune:

Students in most Minnesota charter schools are failing to hit learning targets and are not achieving adequate academic growth, according to a Star Tribune analysis of school performance data.

The analysis of 128 of the state’s 157 charter schools show that the gulf between the academic success of its white and minority students widened at nearly two-thirds of those schools last year. Slightly more than half of charter schools students were proficient in reading, dramatically worse than traditional public schools, where 72 percent were proficient.

Between 2011 and 2014, 20 charter schools failed every year to meet the state’s expectations for academic growth each year, signaling that some of Minnesota’s most vulnerable students had stagnated academically.

A top official with the Minnesota Department of Education says she is troubled by the data, which runs counter to “the public narrative” that charter schools are generally superior to public schools. ... 

“Schools promised they were going to help turn around things for these very challenging student populations,” said Kyle Serrette, director of education for the New York City-based Center for Popular Democracy. “Now, here we are 20 years later and they’re realizing that they have the same troubles of public schools systems.”

More than half of schools analyzed from 2011 to 2014 were also failing to meet the department’s expectations for academic growth, the gains made from year to year in reading and math.

... 

Just like traditional public schools, the highest-performing charter schools tend to serve students from more affluent families, the analysis shows.

Some of the comments are interesting as well:

I wish the media would do more investigation into charter schools. A friend teaches in one that doesn't have a school nurse, so they have the IT guy administer meds to students. Seems like that would violate some sort of regulation somewhere.

...

I'm sorry but I just have to comment here.  I am a former LoveWorks Academy teacher.  First of all, several years back, this school actually got into trouble because they had unlicensed teachers; problem number 1.  Also, the people running that school, are not qualified to do so. Executive Director? No qualifications to be in that position; no principal/administrative license, no teaching license, nothing.  Teachers had administrators who did not even have a current teaching license, or had never even taught elementary school evaluating them and telling them how to "teach" properly.  For example, I actually had an "administrator" tell me after an evaluation that I should be giving students candy after each right answer they give, and that classroom management is like "training a dog" (direct quote).

My main goal every single day was to motivate those kids and to get them to progress; but every day the teachers were shot down.  Admin and behavior specialists constantly took the sides of the kids and never followed through with expectations.  Teachers had strict consequences in their classrooms, but anytime students were sent out of the room because of severe behavior issues, it was handled poorly by our behavior specialist and the students would just come back to the room to continue to disrupt.  In a way, this article is accurate.  No, teachers aren't teaching what they should be, but it's because they can't.  I was constantly breaking up fights; I was shoved by students trying to leave my classroom, called names like "wench" and "bitch", and was regularly yelled at by students and told to shut up.  Did I ever get any back up from administration? NO.  I was told to keep the kids in the classroom and to only send them down for severe behavior.  And when I did send kids out, I was questioned by the behavior specialist because the kids would of course make up a story to favor them, and admin would of course take their side, no question.

I am not, by any means saying this is all charter schools.  However, is it any wonder LoveWorks had over half of their staff leave on their own accord?

...

As a number of other posters have pointed out, the basic problems are not in the schools; the basic problems are social issues.  I've never been able to figure out why the schools are expected to leap the tall buildings of our many social problems with a single bound, and somehow get many students struggling with the consequences of those social issues to the same level of achievement as those who have all the advantages of stable homes, safe neighborhoods, and first and foremost, parents (and maybe a whole culture) committed to education.  Granted, the schools need to do their best for every child, but to blame them for outcomes so many of whose determinants are beyond their control doesn't help the situation.  Perhaps now that we can clearly see that charter schools which are supposed to be designed to help these kids aren't doing better than the public schools, we can widen the discussion to include the real problems.

...

 

But wait, I thought charter schools were the answer to everyone's problems? No??

Looks like charters are not doing as well as you would be led to believe they would be doing in the state that is the birthplace of the charter movement.

It will be interesting to see what happens in New York as Governor Cuomo and the charter operators continue to increase the number of charters, because at some point New York's charters are going to find it hard to select the best students for their schools, push out/counsel out the low-performers dragging down their stats and staff their schools with enough 20-somethings willing to work 12 hour days and be available for homework help for 3 hours after the workday is over.

Independent Democratic Conference Unveil Backdoor Voucher Plan For Private Schools In New York

The Independent Democratic Conference released an agenda today and this was in it (emphasis added):

Creating an Education Investment Tax Credit (EITC) for Public and Private Schools

When it comes to effectively educating our children, New York’s schools need every dollar they can get. The IDC believes in rewarding New Yorkers which opt to voluntarily donate to their local public or private school by finally making these donations tax deductible. In order to make sure every dollar is spent fairly and effectively, tax deductible donations made to private schools must be used to fund scholarship opportunities that qualify.

They can call it an "Education Investment Tax Credit (EITC) for Public and Private Schools" or "scholarship opportunities" or whatever they want.

In effect, it's a backdoor voucher plan to steer tax money away from public schools to private schools and further undercut the public school system.

If enacted, that's how the program will work and you can bet that's the intent.

LoHud Editorial: What Really Needs To Be Done To Fix New York's Teacher Evaluation System

The LoHud editorial board nailed the APPR teacher evaluation sham Cuomo's pushing in this editorial that just went up.

Here's the crux:

If Cuomo really wants to improve teacher evaluations, he should stop talking about the results. That's the easy part.

Instead, Cuomo needs to address the complex questions raised by school districts about the inner workings of the state-imposed system. Are ratings tied to test scores accurate? Have school districts been able to accurately measure the progress of students who don't take standardized tests? Do classroom observations provide useful feedback for teachers and districts? Does the system really help districts fire bad teachers? Is anyone reviewing the effectiveness of the overall system?

Fixing the system matters. Its rushed implementation alienated teachers and school districts, which hurt school morale and got the "reform" era off to an awful start.

If Cuomo really wants to repair a flawed evaluation system, he and legislative leaders need to listen to the myriad of complaints from New Rochelle to Rochester, involve educators in a thorough review, and produce an evaluation system that is tough, fair and informative. That's one way to help kids. In the meantime, he should give teachers the safety net he promised.

Cuomo's not interested in a fair evaluation system, he's not interested in listening to teachers or administrators for input, and he's certainly not interested in making the public education system work better.

He's interested in scapegoating teachers and public schools, using the Common Core tests as a bludgeon to prove why teachers and public schools suck, and do the work his hedge fundie donors want - privatize the school system so that they can cash in.

That's what this whole evaluation fight is about.

Kudos to the LoHud editorial board for telling Cuomo (and the public) what Cuomo ought to be doing to fix things.

You Can Say That Again

Tweet of the Day:

I will say it again. Andrew Cuomo is a much greater danger to teachers and public education than Time Magazine
— Mark Naison (@McFiredogg) November 1, 2014

That's why Randi Weingarten takes on TIME over an anti-teacher cover while giving Andrew Cuomo a pass for saying the public school system is a "monopoly" he plans to "break" in his next term.

The TIME cover, while not innocuous, certainly doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot in the grand scheme of things.

It's the not first anti-teacher cover they've run.

It probably won't be the last.

And I'm not sure outside the already anti-teacher Beltway circle how much influence the thing will have anyway.

Cuomo's promise to break public schools is a serious threat and one a labor leader for a teachers union ought to be pushing back against rather than defending.

But that's AFT President Randi Weingarten for you.

There's never a windmill she won't fight and a real battle with a deformer she won't run from (or worse, aid in.)

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?

Cuomo Vows To Break Public School "Monopoly" - I.E., To Privatize The Public School System

I posted this morning how Governor Cuomo has promised the Daily News editorial board that he will push for "more rigorous" teacher evaluations with "sanctions" in his second term - a threat he foreshadowed weeks ago when he said his APPR teacher evaluation system needs to be revised because the ratings aren't mirroring student passing rates on the state tests.

That wasn't the only change he has promised to enact in his second term.

He also plans to rid the state of the "monopoly" that public schools enjoy:

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.”

You can expect Cuomo to push for an increase in the charter school cap - or perhaps an end to the cap completely.

Cuomo loves charter schools (and the money their supporters provide him) - and they love him in return.

For a while now charter school entrepreneurs have been saying they plan an assault on the charter cap next budget session.

Cuomo's saying he is not only on board with that, he wants to go further and end the "monopoly" public schools have.

A commenter at the Daily News story on Cuomo's threats against teachers and schools notes that public schools are not a "monopoly" like Cuomo says they are - they are public institutions run for the public good.

Taking on the "monopoly" of public schools is like taking on the "monopoly" of the MTA or the water company says the commenter:

Cuomo “to break what is in essence one of the only remaining public monopolies — and that’s what this is, it’s a public monopoly.”

So what about the MTA arent they a monopoly or the water company, National Grid etc.

Let's use the Charter school model for the MTA I plan on petitioning the state for the opportunity to run the #4 train but only in Manhattan (most profitable section) I will force the MTA to give me the subway cars and track maintenance for free because I am a public entity with the expenses only. I will then hire people without union benefits to operate my line while getting a stipend from the city and pocket the profits by paying myself a six figure management fee.

Charters pick and choose their students, they get rid of the ones they don't want, they don't replace their numbers after attrition, the city is now on the hook for either finding them space or paying their rent - and now Cuomo wants to give them even more advantages in the next term.

If the charter cap is eliminated, charter school growth will look like cancer rates in Russia after Chernobyl - SUNY has never said no to any charter application.

What Cuomo is essentially saying in this interview with the DN editors is that he plans the end of the public school system as we know it.

I'll strategize out the fighting on this in coming posts, but suffice to say for now, the key strategy is to keep Cuomo's numbers low next Tuesday.

The lower the vote totals Cuomo has on Election Night, the less juice he has to push this stuff through.

He's had a rough couple of months, first over the Moreland mess, with a federal prosecutor publicly admonishing him to stop tampering in his investigation of Cuomo's tampering with the Moreland Commission, now with the mess he has made with the state's Ebola protocols.

He won his primary against Zephyr Teachout, but it was the lowest total ever for a sitting governor in a primary since the current system was instituted in the 70's.

Cuomo is vulnerable to public pressure and politics these days, unlike throughout much of the first term when he called most of the shots.

Parents, teachers, administrators, advocates for public education, and anybody else who cares for public schools are going to have to join together in this next term to beat back Cuomo's privatization plans for public schools and his destruction plan for the teaching profession.

And we can do it - but it starts by holding his totals down on Election Day.

FireDogLake: Time To Fight Corporate Democrats Who Shill For Education Privatization

DS Wright at FireDogLake:

While President Obama’s former spokesman, Robert Gibbs, manages a national public relations campaign against teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) has finally decided it has had enough of Team Obama’s union busting. The NEA has now called on Education Secretary Arne Duncan to resign.

...

Duncan may have made a misstep when he publicly supported a court decision in California that destroyed teacher tenure and job protections, a shill too far?

...


Though it is unlikely Duncan will resign, the call for his resignation from the NEA may be a turning point for the teachers unions who have largely refused to substantively push back against the privatization agenda that Obama has been pushing for five years. Unions typically go light on Democrats which is one of the reasons privatizers do everything they can to use them in their fight to wreck public schools.

The policies of “education reformers” – charter schools, merit pay, vouchers, drill and kill testing to evaluate teachers – that Duncan has promoted have consistently proved not to work. Though the reformers/privatizers constantly point to America’s poor rankings compared to other developed countries, none of those superior countries have adopted the policies the privatizers are promoting, in fact, most have strong unions and lots of public investment and control. So it is a rather strange argument to make, isn’t it?

Nonetheless, it is well past time for teachers to start educating corporate Democrats as to what happens when you try to destroy public education.

It is well past time to take on corporate Dems like Obama, Cuomo, Emanuel, et al. - unless you're Randi Weingarten, of course, in which case you send out a strongly worded letter, then appear at the next Duncan "Teacher Bash" fest to shill for "Excellent Educator Equity".

Yeah, that'll show 'em, Randi.

Time For Dennis Walcott To Just Go The ---- Away

Dennis Walcott shares the results of his latest physical for all New Yorkers to rejoice in:

Smart government policies to improve longevity and health outcomes for the public are critical. But it is ultimately our own individual responsibility to chart a healthier course for ourselves. You don’t need to run marathons. A modest change in diet and exercise habits can go a long way.

My annual physical checkup — I just got the results — yielded the following comparisons to last year’s findings: Weight down from 152 to 148 lbs.; HDL (“good cholesterol”) up from 80 to 103; LDL (“bad cholesterol”) down from 82 to 73; blood pressure from 122/70 to 120/68; resting heart rate from 59 to 46 beats per minute.

I am here today as a result of the change in diet and exercise and a determination to confront the diseases that devastated families like mine. It’s a small price to pay to experience the joy of holding your grandchildren someday.

That's great, Dennis - you're an awesome physical specimen.

But you're also a de-humanized functionary of the oligarchy who has spent years doing the work of privatizing the public school system.

Few people have done more to damage children in the past ten years in this city than you.

Better to be a little less of an awesome physical specimen and a little more of a whole human being.

Go away, Dennis.

No one gives a shit about your latest physical results, your cholesterol levels or your body fat measures.

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.