Senate Dem: Cuomo Is Like Scott Walker, Out To Destroy Public Schools And Teachers

From State of Politics:

Queens Democratic Sen. Michael Gianaris in an interview on Monday compared Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s education reform policies to anti-labor measures being enacted under Republican Scott Walker in Wisconsin.

“Resources are being diverted out of the public school system to private schools, an attack on the teachers who sacrifice so much to work in our schools,” Gianaris said on NY1’s Inside City Hall. “If I wanted Scott Walker to be the governor, I’d move to Wisconsin. But we’re here in New York. I think we should be a progressive champion that stands up for working people who stand up for public schools first and foremost and then we should help the entire school system.”

The comment underscores the deepening level of antipathy from Senate Democrats in the mainline conference toward Cuomo.

Many of us in the education blogosphere and twitterverse have compared Cuomo to Walker before.

Now a member of the mainstream Democratic conference in the State Senate is doing it.

If I were NYSUT, I would take the clip of Gianaris comparing Cuomo to Walker, bundle it into an ad and run it all across the state.

Cuomo's at his lowest approval rating ever in the last Siena poll, but that number will be bounce back up after his minimum wage political ploy (and make no mistake, that's what it is - albeit, some good will come from it) and news his consort Sandra Lee has cancer.

But overall we want the trend to be downward.

It's imortant to keep Cuomo's numbers down - the unions should be running ads to do just that.

This Gianaris clip seems tailor made for that task.

Gothamist Readers Sound Off On Cuomo

There are 33 comments on this Gothamist story about De Blasio joining the mayor of Syracuse in fighting Cuomo for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity money the state owes.

Mmany of the commenters at Gothamist don't like Cuomo any more than the commenters at this blog.

Here are some sample comments:

Fuck Cuomo.

...

Look, Andy, you will never be president. Stop with this bullshit thinking you're going to get the fiscal conservative GOP vote.

...

It is really, truly gross...he could accomplish something but instead he'll play to the dumb, old middle and fuck everyone while he's at it.
 

...

Is this DeBlasio's way of saying " fuck you" to Cuomo?  Fuck Cuomo...

...

does that asshole actually think he can be president? i give him a pataki's chance.

...

I wish de Blasio would deal with Cuomo more diplomatically. A pissed off governor is not what the city needs right now.

...

I wish Cuomo would deal with de Blasio more honestly. Cuomo is clearly at fault here and on many other points.

...

He's abandoned us on any number of issues (schools, MTA, etc.) Mayor Bill helped deliver the city vote in a more competitive election than expected, and Cuomo turned his back on us. Remember when he wouldn't debate Teachout and when she confronted him at some p.r. event he scrambled around deliriously shouting "Where's Bill" until deBlasio rescued Cuomo from that awfulness.

...

Chiming in with another Fuck Cuomo.

...

Cuck Fuomo.
 

...

 

Cuomo screws over the city and state in many ways besides owing money to schools.
Glad De Blasio is calling him out.
#FuckCuomo

And I thought Perdido Street School blog commenters were a tough bunch...

NY Post Calls For Cuomo To Override Union Contracts In School Districts

Adam Brodksy at the NY Post has some advice for Governor Cuomo - become more like Scott Walker:

This year, Cuomo’s even pushing reforms the union hates: a tougher teacher-evaluation regime, raising the charter-school cap, taking over failing schools. If his agenda passes, opportunities for kids will likely improve.

Yet even this won’t transform education in New York — or give Cuomo a real legacy.

Remember, in districts like the city’s, it isn’t just a few schools failing. It’s most of them.
Cuomo needs a bolder approach. He’ll need to find a way to bypass the union — or limit its power, perhaps in much the way governors like Bruce Rauner of Illinois and Scott Walker of Wisconsin are dealing with unions in their states.

Yes, Cuomo’s a Democrat, and those two are Republicans. No one expects him to “break” a union, end collective bargaining or shutter schools en masse.

But to see big gains, Cuomo will have to move in that direction. Along with bumping the charter cap, how about creating an environment that lures charter operators?

Overriding contracts with legislation? OKing alternatives — vouchers, private-school tax credits, traditional schools with all-new work rules and management — that foster competition among schools?

Cuomo may think this is too much for bluer-than-blue New York. But if he hopes to make himself viable nationally, he has to prove he can lead his base — not just appease it.

Actually Cuomo is pushing for "failing" schools and even "failing" school districts to be taken over by the state and put into receivership where the teachers contracts can be broken and whole swaths of teachers fired.

Cuomo's also pushing for vouchers for private schools via an education tax credit, an increase to the charter cap, and more accountability measures for pubic schools (but not for charter schools.)

Alas, those privatization Cuomo policies aren't enough Scott Walker for the NY Post - they want even more.

Well, they just need to wait a year or two - I'm sure Cuomo will give it them.

Every year he grows more anti-union and anti-pubic school.

Give him a couple more years and he'll complete his transformation into Scott Walker.

In fact, he's more than half way there now.

Cuomo Wants State Review Of Long Island Teacher Evaluations Because He Says They're Rigged In Favor Of Teachers

Governor Cuomo's war against teachers continues:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo Sunday called for a state review of all Long Island school districts because many use a union-provided evaluation he said is skewed to favor teachers.

A Newsday analysis of teacher evaluation systems in Long Island public schools found that in many the portion that local districts control is weighted toward ensuring teachers score an overall "effective" rating.

Principals' judgment of teacher performance in classroom observations and other subjective criteria accounted for 60 percent of a teacher's overall 100-point evaluation, according to the Newsday analysis. The other 40 points are determined by student test performance.

"Recent news reports found that most Long Island school districts have used their local discretion in teacher evaluation systems to skew the overall scoring to ensure that their teachers are rated only 'effective' and 'highly effective,' " said Jim Malatras, the state director of operations, in a statement on behalf of Cuomo. "Most districts adopted the scoring procedures specifically drafted by the teachers unions."

In short, the governor doesn't like the locally negotiated components and is going to try and circumvent them with a statewide system.

Never mind that many of these districts - and the parents whose children attend the schools in these districts - are fine with the way the evaluations are and aren't looking for a system that rates thousands of teachers "ineffective" every year.

Cuomo has decided he is Governor Education Reform and he is going to give his constituency - the education reform movement and their Wall Street and hedge fund supporters who donate so much money to him - everything they want this legislative session.

Gary Stern at LoHun reported that Mamaronek in Westchester has an evaluation system that it is very happy with, one that works for the district, but under Cuomo's plan, it will go out the window and be replaced by a state-imposed plan.

The state's evaluation system is a lot to grasp for outsiders, and I apologize for trying to explain it. A teacher's rating is based 60 percent on those classroom observations, 20 percent on how his or her students "progress," and 20 percent on a locally chosen measure (usually a test).

Cuomo wants to cut out the locally chosen 20 percent and pump up the student-progress component to 50 percent. Why? Because for about 1 in 5 teachers, student progress is determined by standardized test scores. Increasing reliance on test scores, you see, would show that the governor is a tough guy.

And indeed, a lot of this is about Cuomo getting to show how tough he is.

It's also about Cuomo - a "Democrat" - using teachers and teachers unions for a Sista Souljah moment to show how he's a "different" kind of Dem, although since so many Dems these days use teachers and public education as foils (Obama, Emanuel, Malloy, et al.), I'm not sure why he thinks this makes him stand out.

In any case, he's fighting this battle like it's 2010 and there's a huge momentum to re-do evaluations and fire thousands of teachers.

There isn't - especially not after the piss-poor Common Core rollout that the state educrats are responsible for.

Other than his education reform buddies and their well-heeled donors, I'm not sure who Cuomo thinks he's appealing to here with his agenda.

You can see the opposition to it from all over the state and now that he's screwing with wealthy districts from Long Island to Westchester, don't be surprised if he doesn't get burned.

When he was just screwing with the cities - NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse - he can get away with imposing all kinds of nonsense onto the education system.

But let's see what the folks in Garden City and Great Neck think about his agenda.

Weingarten Says "Maybe I Will, Maybe I Won't"

From the Politico Morning Education Email:

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten raised some eyebrows Monday when she publicly listed [http://bit.ly/1phg7cx] the candidates she plans to vote for - and did not include Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Instead, she called out the incumbent, writing: "I am deeply disappointed and appalled by Gov. Cuomo's recent statement that public education is a 'monopoly' that needs to be busted up." Education historian Diane Ravitch jumped on the statement with a blog post titled "Randi is NOT Voting for Cuomo." That turned out not to be accurate. Or, then again, maybe it was. 'I didn't say I would, didn't say I wouldn't," Weingarten told Morning Education. "I said it's painful and heartbreaking.' In other words, she's keeping her vote for governor secret. At least for now.

Few people in public life can spew as much verbiage while saying so little of consequence as Randi Weingarten.

As I posted last night, her statement on the AFT website criticizing Andrew Cuomo for his anti-public school statements is essentially meaningless.

There's been a furor over Weingarten's defending Cuomo's statements as "campaign rhetoric," so she felt the need to push back publicly.

But nothing about Weingarten's and the AFT's refusal to stand up to Andrew Cuomo has changed.

That's been obvious if you watch what she and the AFT do and listen less to what she and they say.

That strategy hasn't changed any this past week - not with her earlier defense of Cuomo nor her equivocating critique of him now that she feels pressure to say something critical about him.

Randi Weingarten Writes Another Letter

Randi Weingarten writes more letters than the characters in a Samuel Richardson novel.

First she wrote a letter to TIME Magazine telling them how bad their "Rotten Apples" cover was.

Then she wrote a "private" letter to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo after he promised the Daily News he was going to "break" the public school system "monopoly" in his next term.

Now she's written a letter to the AFT membership that Diane Ravitch posted a bit ago with a headline along the lines of "Randi Is Not Voting For Cuomo."

That caused some uproar on Twitter, as people started to read the letter and say "Hey, where does it say she's not voting for Cuomo?"

The headline's now changed on Ravitch's post, probably because nowhere in the letter does it say explicitly that Randi's not voting for Cuomo.

Here's the letter in full:

The difficult choices New Yorkers face at the polls

As I head back home to vote on Nov. 4, I’ll be casting my vote for the candidates endorsed by NYSUT, my statewide union, starting with Eric Schneiderman for attorney general, Thomas DiNapoli for comptroller, Tim Bishop for the U.S. House of Representatives, and a strong pro-public education, pro-worker majority in the state Senate and Assembly. And I’ll be voting on the Working Families Party line. If I lived in another state, I’d be starting with the governor—but not in New York.

It’s heartbreaking to see what’s happening in New York, especially after campaigning across the country for gubernatorial candidates who unequivocally support public education, respect teachers and will fight for the investment our schools need.

But in New York, the decision is painful. I am deeply disappointed and appalled by Gov. Cuomo’s recent statement that public education is a “monopoly” that needs to be busted up. (Frankly, it’s only hedge fund millionaires, right-wing privatizers and tea partiers who would use that terminology.) Public education is a public good and an anchor of democracy that is enshrined in our state constitution. Public education needs to be nurtured and reclaimed.

At the same time, the other major candidate, Rob Astorino, would be no day at the beach for New York’s students, educators and working families. His letter was a needed salve to teachers, but his embrace of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s politics of destruction, public education funding cuts and attacks on workers’ voices is not a model for New York.

Whichever candidate is elected governor on Nov. 4 needs to know that I (and so many others) will hold his feet to the fire to strengthen public education. Our public schools and our students are a sacred responsibility, and our educators are national treasures. It’s well past time to fund our schools, care for our children, support our teachers, and stand up for workers and working families everywhere in our state.

Randi Weingarten

It's Talmudic in its text, that's for sure.

She's criticizing Cuomo for making the monopoly comment, but she already did that in an interview with Jessica Bakeman at Capital NY.

She's using a bit Cuomo's line of attack against Astorino, characterizing him as an extremist who shouldn't be in power in a state like New York.

She did that with Bakeman too.

She writes that she's voting the Working Families Party line, starting with the AG and going down the line.

I guess we're supposed to take that as a gesture that she's not voting for Cuomo.

But she never actually writes those words.

Intead she writes:

And I’ll be voting on the Working Families Party line. If I lived in another state, I’d be starting with the governor—but not in New York.

What does that mean?

She's not voting for governor at all?

She is voting for governor, just not for Cuomo?

She's voting WFP because she lives in NY, but if she lived in another state she'd be voting Dem?

Who knows what it means because it's classic Weingarten - it's inscrutable and could mean just about anything, depending upon the weather, the phases of the moon and how the Dow Jones ended up the day.

In the end, I don't particularly care whether Weingarten's voting for Cuomo or not and I frankly am not assuaged by the letter in anyway.

When Weingarten spends a tenth of the time, resources and energy she put into the TIME Magazine boondoggle or the Pearson protests to fighting Andy Cuomo when he tries to raise the charter cap or revise APPR to make it more punitive (as he has promised to do) or "break" the public school "monopoly" by underfunding public schools and giving that money to charters, that's when I'll start caring about something Weingarten does or says.

Until then, this is just more Randi jive.

Her track record of giving in to deformers - from Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein to Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation to Andrew Cuomo and John King speaks louder than any words she posted at the AFT website.

How Cuomo Governs In Crystallized Form

In the middle of the NY Times piece today that reports how New Yorkers don't really like Andrew Cuomo much is this story:

“Initially, I had a good impression of him — he’s a Democrat, I’m a Democrat,” said Jamie Pagirsky, 22, a recent graduate of the State University of New York at New Paltz who lives in Rockville Centre. “But over time, that changed.”

Mr. Pagirsky said that his view of the governor had been sharply affected when Mr. Cuomo spoke on campus last fall, and a friend, Jaklin Levine-Pritzker, wore a T-shirt saying “NY Says No to Fracking.” A gruff and beefy Cuomo aide tried to eject her from the lecture, then demanded that she turn her T-shirt inside out, because of fears that she would be too disruptive, according to Mr. Pagirsky and Ms. Levine-Pritzker, who confirmed his account. She ultimately was allowed to stay, but the incident irked her classmates. And when she told Mr. Pagirsky about it, the image stuck with him.

“We were all in disbelief — Is this real? Is this happening to my close friend? Is this how his administration operates?" he said. “This is supposed to be a healthy democracy, and this was completely obstructing that process. After that incident, I was just completely turned off by him.”

Andrew Cuomo's New York is not a "healthy democracy" in any way.

It is an autocracy where the autocrat - Andrew Cuomo - pushes for his own way on everything and either gets it or sends his "gruff and beefy aide" to discuss matters with Cuomo's irritants.

Sometimes Cuomo or his people don't get what he wants - as happened with Ms. Levine-Pritzker and the “NY Says No to Fracking" to T-shirt.

But most of the time Cuomo does get what he wants and often his irritants are destroyed in the process.

If you are a student, a parent of a student, a teacher or an administrator of a public school, know that he's coming for you in the next budget in order to "break" the school system.

Something to think about before going in to vote.

Daily News: Cuomo Declares War On Teachers, Public Schools

I thought this would happen.

Last week after reading through Andrew Cuomo's 245 page policy pronouncements for his second term, I got the feeling that we were going to see a re-do of Cuomo's vaunted APPR teacher evaluation system.

Cuomo had complained in the past that not enough teachers were being rated "developing" or "ineffective" in their evaluations.

In his policy pronouncement book, Cuomo bragged about APPR, claiming it was one of the best evaluation systems in the nation, but did say that New York has "the opportunity to strengthen teacher and principal evaluations" in his next term anyway.

That sounded like a threat to me.

I wrote that

Cuomo is saying publicly that APPR is a great success, but to make it more successful, it will need to be "strengthened " (i.e., made to more closely mirror student test score results.)

Meanwhile superintendents in the Lower Hudson Valley are saying the test components of the system are so broken that administrators have to rate teachers as high as they can on subjective measures to ensure they don't get low ratings they don't deserve because SED's algorithms suck.

We've got a fight coming in the next term over this awful evaluation system.

As bad as it is now, Cuomo wants to make it worse.

Today the Daily News confirms that threat:

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 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 in 2012 won enactment of a new system tying teacher performance to the Common Core curriculum testing results.

The implementation of some of those standards was delayed for two years earlier this year in recognition of the sloppy roll-out of the Common Core program.

Cuomo accused teachers of having tried to torpedo the Common Core curriculum in fighting the evaluation standards — and expects they will again.

“They will be using it the way they used it, I believe — to get the parents upset last year about this entire Common Core agenda,” he said.

There you have it - "a more rigorous evaluation system" with "sanctions."

More charter schools.

That's his plans for the second term.

And the tone - the disdain he has for teachers and public schools.

It speaks volumes, doesn't it?

Tell me again why the AFT, UFT and NYSUT helped him out by fighting Zephyr Teachout at the Working Families Party convention?

Tell me again why AFT President Weingarten helped him out by robocalling for his running mate?

The one saving grace we have this time around is that he is under investigation by a US attorney for witness tampering and obstruction of justice.

He has been weakened by Moreland, further weakened by the stupidity he has pulled the last few days over the Ebola protocols.

Also, he is struggling to put together a convincing win on Election day - his support numbers are soft and while I expect him to win, it won't be by the same margin as the first time around.

So he won't have the same juice in the second term that he had in the first and he CAN be beaten on these issues.

Nonetheless a fight is coming - Cuomo has declared war here and he plans on destroying the public school system and the teaching profession.

Time to go to the barricades - with or without the union leadership.