Building blocks

From the pen of Angel Gonzalez, one of the powerhouses behind the ATR protest Weingarten did her best to sabotage on the 24th but which took on a life of its own:

"The lack of information, transparency and open debate in our union denies member input into critical issues about pedagogy and historic union rights. An uninformed membership gives even a well-intentioned leadership free rein to function as it pleases. As the economy worsens, we need to take a strong stand in defense of the rights of teachers and communities, rather than to facilitate the erosion of all that has been built over the years."

You can read Gonzalez's whole column over at Ednotes, which Norm posted this afternoon just as I was writing up another example of how Unity keeps gaming the word democracy. It centers around Leo Casey's post over at Edwize on the ATR settlement, and before I get into that, let me just say that anyone can tell from the title where Unity's affections lie: "UFT, DoE Agreement Addresses ATR Educator Issue, Saves Money for Schools." They'll support the DoE's need to save money for schools all right, and throw career security for all union members out the bloody window. That stinks, and Norm is so right when he says "their idea is to give the union leaders a seat at the table while the rank and file gain little."

Weingarten's lost her way. She's been weakening the whole structure of the union for more than a decade, disinforming the membership, letting the abusive, misguided DoE degrade our profession and turn us into facilitators, and collaborating on simply horrible goals for the children entrusted to our care.

I don't like the new ATR agreement, and have already said so in my own column. It lays the groundwork for making tiers for tenured educators, and we don't need no tiers at this point. No one's tenure should be better than or different from anyone else's, but that's what they've agreed to. What we need is solidarity, and that message is not getting out to the rank and file. That's because Weingarten's not sending it.

In fact, none of the oppositional voices in the union like this agreement or the false notion of democracy Unity keeps hiding behind. And these people make up a substantial part of the fully credentialed membership. (We can discount the untenured thousands, since they're mostly too afraid to get involved with union at all at this stage in their careers and are in general too busy with grad school anyway.)

TJC thinks the agreement paves the way for firing ATRs and the membership needs to get educated. ICE member James Eterno put it through a strainer last Sunday on the ICE blog (a must-read), and various bloggers have been posting a fair amount all along on Unity's unrecognizable democracy. Examples can be seen in Ednotes ("That is why unless power within the union is shifted from the top, teachers will be given the illusion they are professionals but treated as drones"), on the ICE blog (pseudo-democracy), in NYC Educator (when only a quarter of the members vote, there's no check on Unity's tactics), and a couple of times already on this blog (here for how distribution and costs makes it difficult to get our message out and here for democracy or demogoguery).

It's funny how it's coming from all sides. In Weingarten's vision of labor unionism, totalitarianism is in and democracy is most definitely out.


Getting back to Leo's blog, here's the comment I tried to post:

Any union leader who backs this agreement should resign.

You people have created 4 kinds of tenure, which paves the way for throwing some of us under the bus in the next contract. That’s cause for concern or condemnation, but not for surprise: it’s the way you always negotiate our givebacks — incrementally, hoping we don’t notice.

This agreement only creates incentives to re-hire SOME of the ATRs back, the centrally funded ones, and Weingarten was very clever in her press release to avoid mentioning there’s more than one kind. She says there more than once that the DoE can hire “from the ATR pool,” avoiding any mention of the fact that there is no incentive whatsoever to hire back ATRs whose positions have been cut and who remain on the school’s budget.

So, here are the 4 kinds of tenure, though I’m sure you’re not losing any sleep over what you’ve done:

1. Tenured educators in real positions, paid out of the school’s budget.

2. Tenured educators in real positions, paid in part by central for eight years; principals get extra money the first year to sweeten the deal.

3. Tenured educators in provisional positions one year at a time, paid in part by central. Principals will get that extra cash only if they keep them on permanently. It’s like an auditioning for your job. Disgraceful that you allowed this.

4. Tenured educators who will remain ATRs, paid for by central or by the school. Obviously, the least privileged category: the teacher’s qualifications and years of service make absolutely no difference to anyone. In fact, the vets are worse off, because two-for-the-price-one hiring still flourishes citywide.

Comment by woodlass — November 29, 2008 @ 12:26 pm

When I checked it today, not being logged on, it seemed to have been removed: there were 6 comments, but not mine. Then I logged in and tried again. Oddly enough, it showed up just the way I wrote it, time-stamped and all. What's going on? Either it wasn't deleted properly by the site administrator, or they've devised a way to make you believe your comment is viewable (i.e., if you're logged in, you'll see it), but it really isn't. That would be a whole other level of deception I don't care to think about. I prefer to think it's just a technical glitch, and they meant to take it out entirely.


I want to take this opportunity to re-visit Edwize's General Rules for commenters. Keep in mind when you read these rules that Unity keeps proclaiming far and wide how democratic our union is. No. 8 below specifically says so, and nos. 4 and 10 imply the same. Then keep in mind how much money is going directly out of our salaries into theirs.

1. You should treat this form of discussion just as you would a face-to-face conversation. There will be no tolerance for foul language, abusive attacks or threatening of members or moderators, or any other form of harassment. If this rule is broken, you will be immediately removed from this blog. Proper etiquette and charity must be observed at ALL times by ALL users. Others here may be as adamant in their opinions and ideas as you are.
[While I did say that anyone who backs this agreement "should resign," it's only an opinion. I didn't use any foul language, and I would certainly be comfortable telling Casey face-to-face that I think he should resign. Even if I had said something a little more threatening, like: "Let's get these bums out of office!" it'd be like throwing a pebble at the Hoover Dam, a threat to nobody, and they'd all probably have a good laugh. That's actually the problem with the totalitarian structure they've built. They've made themselves impervious.]

2. If in the judgment of the moderators we believe that comments are frivolous and non-constructive, we will delete them.
[My comment was hardly frivolous or non-constructive. I think it is totally in the members' interest to know when tenure has been diluted, because the next step is tenure eliminated.]

3. If a moderator has declined your post, please drop that thread. Advice from the moderators that your post is inappropriate should be taken seriously. Your participation is desired, but a person’s right and desire to participate ends where it begins to violate the right and desire of others to participate and harms Edwize’s capacity to maintain a welcoming forum for all. If you disagree with the host or moderator you may appeal in the proper place at http://edwize.org/contact/.
[A forum for "all"? I object to this boldface lie. No need to check the dictionary definition of the word "all," we know exactly who "all" means to the Unity moderators, and it doesn't include the oppositional voices.]

4. All points of view are welcome on EdWize, with the following exceptions: EdWize will limit commenters to one comment a day if, in its sole discretion, the commenter is “trolling“: (We’re not trying to insult anyone it’s an actual term to describe an activity on blogs.)
["All points of view are welcome" — another boldface lie. And I certainly wasn't trolling. The whole agreement is pertinent to my career, having been an unplaced ATR — or a displaced teacher, if you like — for more than a year.]

a. Posts numerous times a day with the intent of dominating, re-directing or hijacking the thread.
[Not guilty.]; or

b. Posts numerous times a day and insults or calls other commenters names or repeatedly makes the same point with the effect of annoying other commenters.
[Not guilty.]

c. Cross Posting articles from other sites, from copyrighted sources or posting the same message to multiple threads is considered spamming.
[Not guilty.]

5. Obscene, slanderous, abusive, attacks, expressions of prejudice and bigotry, or use of profanity by any commenter will not be tolerated and will result in the deletion of the comment and the banning of the commenter.
[Not guilty, but I wonder if they notify you that you've been banned. I didn't get notified yet. It must be something like Guantanamo, where they accuse you and diminish your rights in secret. I'm going to post a favorable comment and see if I've been banned outright.]

6. Comments will remain editable for 20 minutes to allow the commenter to correct grammatical errors.

7. The first comment from new users automatically goes into the moderation queue.

8. The UFT is a democratic organization. However, since the Landrum-Griffin Act prohibits the use of union dues for internal election activity and since the union’s political caucuses run candidates for elective offices within the leadership, comments that argue for or against one political caucus or another will be removed.
[Not guilty on the 2nd sentence. As for being democratic, when does misrepresentation become fraud?]

9. Please use upper and lower case letters, as appropriate, for better legibility.

10. EdWize was built as an advocacy vehicle for labor and education issues, if you are a member of the UFT and need help in any way feel free to contact your borough office, or program directly, or send an email to blog@uft.org.
[Might do.]

Whether this particular comment of mine has been deleted or not, we all know Edwize for what it is: a Unity armband. But, does everyone?

Our first job will always be towards our students, but in this degraded union, we need to be talking to our newest colleagues as well, and to everyone else who's bought the Unity line.

After all, that's what education's all about.

Run over . . .

. . . . to Ednotesonline to read about the age discrimination lawsuit that went to jury trial on Sept. 8th.

Three of the seven Graphic Arts HS teachers won, and one of them wrote this:

"Let me verify that we have paid dearly from our own pockets to get there.... This is about justice and reputation, and our rights to teach as we have always enjoyed. It is also about getting fair pay and professional treatment for teachers who have studied and worked hard to earn senior tenure and status."

Where was Weingarten/Unity?

Where was Klein and all that "love" he showed us in his fake welcome letter earlier this month?

In his deconstruction of union minimalism, Scott quotes from his essay of a year ago on the Age Discrimination Lawsuit to Nowhere:

"The entire purpose was to deflect people from taking action on their own."

He thought then that the UFT's collaboration cum ineptitude cum procrastination could be turned into a song.

As another lawsuit on this same subject grinds its way through the DoE slime and the courts, I think it's rather more of a dirge.


Then continue running over to the post on NYC Educator about all the newbie teachers sitting around waiting to be placed:

According to today's Daily News, budget cuts notwithstanding, the city hired 5400 new teachers this year. They did so even as 1400 veteran teachers sat in the Absent Teacher Reserve. In fact, 229 of the new teachers have not even been placed yet. They were 'such good candidates' that the city could not risk losing them."

I'm thinking of the plural of a 7-letter word beginning with "b", the origins of which someone in cyberspace has laid out. It's not nice to use such words without scholarly back-up:

'one begotten and born out of wedlock; an illegitmate or natural child' comes from the Old French bastard = 'fils de bast,' 'pack-saddle child,' f. 'bast' (see BAST + the pejorative suffix -ARD. C. BANTLING.

BAST is from O Fr. bast, medieval Latin bastum, 'pack-saddle' (used as a bed by muleteers in the inns) in phrase 'fils (homme, etc.) de bast,' literally 'pack-saddle child,' as opposed to a child of the marriage-bed, thus forming a tersely allusive epithet for illegitimate offspring.

-ARD is suffix... O Fr. -ard, -art, German -hart, -hard, 'hardy,' often forming part of personal names as in OHG Regin-hart (Raynard)...Used in Fr. as masculine formative...often pejorative...It appeared in Middle English in words from O Fr., as bastard, coward, mallard, wizard...and became at last a living formative of English derivatives, as in buzzard, drunkard, laggard, sluggard, with the sense of 'one who does to excess, or who does what is discreditable.

BANTLING is possibly from BAND, swathe + -LING, but considered by Mahn, with greater probability, a corruption of Ger 'bankling' bastard from 'bank' bench, i.e. 'a child begotten on the bench, and not in the marriage bed.'...used formerly as a synonym of 'bastard.'

Scratching backs, but not ours

I thought it would be appropriate to give the text of Weingarten’s speech to the Democratic National Convention this past Monday night.

Anyone who reads this blog will know that it won't go without comment.

I've also appended an important tally at the end, which has absolutely nothing to do with the Convention and everything to do with the state of our union.

---

"I am honored to be here representing the American Federation of Teachers' more than 1.4 million members. We work in your schools and colleges, in your hospitals and in your government agencies. And we believe that access to an excellent education is a basic civil right.

"For the children who are denied the education they need to fulfill their God-given [there’s that useful God word again cropping up where you least expect it, grrrrrr....] potential, it is a personal [and how may we ask it your personal tragedy?] and an inexcusable injustice. It's also an affront to American values and a threat to America's role as an incubator [funny, I just used that word, too, in a totally different context, of course] of innovation. This must change.

"And that requires leadership, not demagoguery [I posted something last December on how Democratic or Demogogic this woman is]. That is why we need to elect Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the White House. And why they need all of us working with them. The American Federation of Teachers is ready.

"Our number one priority is, as it has always been, strengthening our public schools to better serve our students [I won’t niggle about the split infinitive, but I will about the veracity. As far as I can see, she focuses on her own career gambits and doesn’t sweat the kids or the teachers either.] Let's do what we do in our best schools in all of our schools. Barack Obama knows that teachers must be partners, not pawns, in federal education policy. [You can read his platform here, but keep in mind how beholden he’s become to corporate money, and a fair number of those people are falling all over themselves putting education into private hands.] And federal education policy must be about a lot more than testing.

"I ask you to join us in this quest because you believe that strong public schools are cornerstones of our democracy, because our aging population depends on future generations growing the economy, because today's students will be the caretakers of tomorrow's environment, the sparks igniting our innovations, the tenders of our global relationships, the guardians of our prosperity and the creators of our arts. And simply because every child has a right to a fair and hopeful start in life.

"When those children walk through the doors of our classrooms, they bring us their dreams, their potential and their trust. And sometimes they bring empty stomachs, untreated ailments, and life experiences that can chill you to your core.

"America's teachers take them all in their fullness, and we do all we can to help them reach great heights. Good things are happening in our public schools: teachers and para-professionals who work tirelessly to inspire their students [until, of course, they get older or if they teach one of those expendable subjects (like art or typing), when the not-so-secret campaign to save money and get them out of the system has brought harassment and marginalization to an all-time high]; students who struggle, yet strive and succeed; communities that value education and ensure students have what they need.

"I can't tell you how proud I am when I visit those schools [I must have missed something: I know of individuals here and there who make a difference and kids who succeed, but I don’t know of any Utopian schools of the kind you describe in any of the five boroughs. Stop obfuscating.] Barack Obama and Joe Biden will champion and challenge the people entrusted with our children's well-being, and we welcome it! We are ready to work together to usher in a new era of excellence in America's public schools [I’ll settle for non-educators to stop meddling and give teachers back the autonomy they need to get things done.] We can do this. We must do this. And it starts with electing Barack Obama as the next President of the United States."

SOURCE 2008 Democratic National Convention Committee





APPENDIX

WEINGARTEN has ALREADY SOLD OUT ON:

The length of the school day and year

Seniority transfers

Excessing rights

Cafeteria duty, hall and potty patrol

An adequate grievance procedure

Principal’s presence at Step II and III

Arbitrations compromised by selectivity and delay

Rubber room abuses (unnecessary teacher removals, appalling conditions, extreme delays, misuse of financial penalties, etc.)

Merit pay

Teachers’ Choice reductions

Car permits

WEINGARTEN HAS TOLERATED AND CONTINUES TO TOLERATE:

The appointment of an uncertified, non-educator chancellor with no teaching experience

One-way accountability (us, not us and them)

Oversized classes at all levels

Salary increases that don’t keep up with inflation

Gross violations on teacher autonomy

New funding formula that encourages 2-for-1 hiring

Patronage hiring

Enforced methodologies that do not work in all classrooms or for all children

Micromanagement

Inordinate amounts of paperwork and testing

One-size-fits-all professional development

School closings and reshuffling, involving mass shake-ups and the dislocation of staff and students

Charter schools

Reductivism — did we ask for this?

Some of the statements coming from Unity after they pushed through the last disastrous contract, and I guess back before that as well, have led me to think there are only two kinds of union leadership: the one that fights for better conditions and the one that settles for the bottom line: "Hey, you have a job, don’t you."



There’s almost no use beating this dead horse to make it serve us better. Weingarten, queen of collaboration and givebacks, hasn't got us better conditions for years, and that includes salary as well, since people who have bothered to calculate the net results of the pay increases came out with unfavorable verdicts once standard-of- living adjustments and increased hours were factored in.

But there’s a lot of talk about job security and no-layoff. You get statements like these:

On the UFT website under Excessing Rules, June 5, 2006: "... the excessing clause is a virtual no-layoff provision"

In a Weingarten email of Sept. 16, 2007, the 2005 contract "created a job security clause the likes of which we have never had.”

Another of her emails a few weeks later: "I have said the following countless times: we have total job security ... By negotiating full job security in the 2005 contract, we stopped [Klein]. That was re-affirmed in the 2006 contract."

As I see it, Weingarten thinks of the word “job” as “the state of being employed.” She has neither the intention or the anger to fight for the kinds of things that word means to the rest of us — that in return for our expertise, stamina, creativity, and willingness to teach huge classes with limited supplies and social supports, we ask for a fair degree of autonomy and other conditions shared by professionals who hold graduate degrees.

Weingarten is reductive: she diminishes and curtails our profession. There are any number of conditions that don't really work for us, like cafeteria duty, staff “development” (professionals don’t need to be “developed”— they need to confer, meet, read, and chew over educational issues and school methodologies), one-size-fits-all staff development, longer days, shorter summers, and meaningless procedures to rebut untruths in the files to exemplify her long record of this kind of diminishment.

In the past two years, the leadership seems to have gone from this statement in Edwize, where a “job” seems to imply a real position:

Seniority in lay-offs is a core union principle. We could not accept a contract which did not secure the rights of senior excessed teachers to a position in another school. (Leo Casey, Oct. 4, 2005)

to this statement on the UFT website a year later talking about the No-Layoff Provision, where the mention of a real “position” is decidedly absent:

The fact-finders ... agreed with us to stop bumping and to maintain educators who are in excess in the D.O.E. employ.

Here's something else. When I wrote Weingarten last summer (after being excessed) that in spite of years of good service and skills it looked as if I was not going to land even a single interview much less a new position because of my age or salary, she wrote back rather glibly:

"It used to be this way all the time except that when music teachers used to be excessed they were laid off."

What this statement showed most was her indisputable lack of concern for quality and length of service. When she got blindsided, seemingly, by Klein's move last spring to have principals pay salaries out of their own budgets, even then she couldn't muster anything more than a "Ho, hum."


It would surprise a lot of us if Weingarten were to hold firm on job security, and it's not at all clear she's even planning to. Unity staff have accused people of fearmongering and keep insisting that giving up tenure will "never happen."

But, the wording in the explanation of tenure given on the UFT's own website is vague enough to spell no good. I've underlined these bits, then elaborated on them below:

Tenure is a status that appointed pedagogues achieve after completing a probationary period with satisfactory service. Once you have tenure, you cannot be dismissed without being formally charged and having a hearing before an independent arbitrator on those charges. This protects you from being fired by your supervisor for personal or political reasons.

Although teachers are not “guaranteed a job for life”, as critics often say, it is true that, after completing a probationary period, teachers in New York State may generally not be fired except for just cause or a layoff situation. Inappropriate conduct that gives rise to dismissal is defined in state law and must be substantiated by the DOE in a due-process hearing before an independent arbitrator. A layoff or “reduction in force” happens when positions have been eliminated, usually due to funding cuts. (NY Teacher, June 7, 2007)

generally — mostly, but not always

just cause — defined as a “standard or test often applied to determine the appropriateness of disciplinary action,” and which we all know is not always kosher, either at the school level or the DOE level

inappropriate conduct ... defined in state law — Education Law 3020-a talks about the sale and possession of drugs and certain felonies, as well as “pedagogical incompetence or issues involving pedagogical judgment,” but other kinds of inappropriate conduct are not mentioned or defined. Article 21.G of the UFT contract also speaks of 3020-a procedures, which includes this time Time and Attendance (G.1). It also seems to recognize a difference between plain old misconduct and “serious misconduct,” which gets its own subsection, G.5; firearms and unspecified felonies are mentioned here. So these kinds of things seem to be covered in a variety of laws and contracts, and those of us who are not lawyers will find this whole search tiresome, vague, and fairly impenetrable.

independent arbitrators — which most of us really doubt, since there is much talk of their having to divide the cases up to find for the board and the members in somewhat equal proportion

usually — in other words, there might be cases when positions are eliminated for reasons other than funding cuts (like when the board eliminated the position of ed evaluator in 2003, probably because these people cost the city a chunk of change)

No matter what the leadership says about holding firm on no-layoff, this kind of ambiguity does not bode well for our future. The board is already finding it easy enough to pressure us to resign through harassment even when a no-layoff rule is still in place.




We need substantive changes in the way the UFT deals with the BloomKlein regime in the next couple of years. We need less kissy-kissy, less gamesmanship, and less collaboration. We don't need the public hugs, or the compliments, or the birthday celebrations. And we certainly don't need a president who serves us less than full time while she goes about seeking national office and working for other labor unions. There's certainly plenty of work to be done right here.

What we do need is to reconstitute this union. We need a rank-and-file that is motivated to stand up to management when it needs to, we need protests and other kinds of demonstrations (like withholding service within contractual stipulations), we need instant responses to the outrageous union-busting maneuvers Klein has been pulling for years, and we need a definitive commitment on the part of leadership to send these anti-teacher corporate thugs back where they came from.

A media of our own

If New York City teachers have something to say, some of them at least will say it. And they’ll get the approval of the silent majority, who either don’t trust themselves in print or fear for their jobs. That’s the climate in the BloomKlein culture, and we shouldn’t forget that it hasn’t always been that way.

It's not that there hasn't always been edopinion and edcommentary in this city, but it’s been limited. Sure, the caucuses have flooded the delegate assemblies with handouts and stuffed position papers into mailboxes at election time, and serious chapter leaders have put out newsletters in their own schools. These publications have run the gamut of content, from info-documents to political statements, sometimes both and sometimes indistinguishable.

It got a lot more interesting about a decade ago, when Norm Scott started publishing Education Notes, a satirical and super-informative publication that morphed its way into our hearts and minds in various forms. It started out as a newsletter for his school, but I’ll bet that even in those early years, it was way more “out there” and sharp-shooting than what most of us have dared to circulate in our schools. He treats Brooklyn readers to doses of the same kind of stinging analyses in his bi-weekly column in the Wave. Too bad that’s not syndicated yet: it needs to be.

But what has always hampered individuals or oppositional groups from producing hard-copy publications in any great numbers has been the cost of these things and the impossibility of distributing them. Unity caucus, omnipotent as it is, only gives lip service to what doesn’t exist in our union at all: democracy. You can't use their copiers to produce your publications, you can't run oppositional meetings in UFT buildings, there’s censorship of critical comments on their website, and chapter leader training sessions don’t exactly advertise that there might be differences of opinion within the union.

Of course, the NY press (Post, Daily News, etc.) has also played a part in this milieu where teacher voices are not much heard. They’ve run rough-shod over the profession for years, and there’s not been much of a chance to fight back except for the occasional letter to the editor that some editorial board has gone out on a limb to actually publish.

In short: the prohibitive cost and enormous distribution problem meant that you could always speak up on ed issues if you wanted to, but getting your message heard was a whole other thing.

Enter Blogging, where at no cost whatsoever you can write under a pen name if you like, revise what you’ve written at any time, link to other people’s blogs, comment under a dozen other names (or anonymously), and even have conversations with yourself. A new era, a new world.

NYC Educator started blogging in May 2005 with a piece on “Bloomberg and Klein on Teacher Quality”. You can see from the first post, prescient and spot on as it was, the kind of quality we were going to get from this blog in the coming years:

But when push came to shove, Bloomy sent Klein to Albany to beg for the right to hire and retain those who failed the test! Underqualified teachers are paid less than NYS certified teachers.

Now many will say that certification alone does not ensure a good teacher, and I couldn't agree more. But failing that LAST test virtually guarantees a bad one. Why, then does Bloomy do this? He does for about 3,000 bucks per teacher.

I don’t know when Reality-Based Educator joined the effort over there, but what great stuff they’ve been putting out.

The Norm Scott phenomenon mentioned above turned itself into a blog in August 2006 with a statement typical of its tireless progenitor: “Coming soon (if I get out of the hammock)..." and a satiric picture-post of 3 engrossed cats called “An attentive class size of three.” (PS: he's just put up another cat on his blog a few minutes ago. That's weird.) We knew very well what we could continue to expect from this guy. Scott’s brain overflowed into other sites of his own imagination, Norm’s Notes and just today: EdnotesHumor. It’s about time someone thought of putting that stuff up.

The caucuses jumped in: ICE put up a blog in August 2005, its second post already stabbing at both the DOE and the UFT (the one for their incompetence, the other for their lack of foresight ... or incompetence):

As a side note the paras were rehired that September in one of the DOE's stunning display of disregard of its employees and managerial incompetence.

It is doubtful that you will hear anything about this case from official UFT sources even though it affected many members.

We must also remember that the “layoff” was only made possible when, in our previous contract, we gave up our no layoff clause. At the time our leadership argued that this was not a “giveback” since the possibility of layoffs was unimaginable.

Unity seems to have started blogging at the same time (you can find a link to their website on your own), TJC started theirs (I think) in Dec 2006. Other blogs followed, and more recently: loads of them. NYC Educator’s bloglist in the right margin is getting longer all the time. I myself began last September, battle-scarred as a chapter leader and having posted a comment or two for a couple of years on other websites. And when you’ve explored all these links, don’t forget the local Yahoo groups and websites, the national groups, and the fabulous Carnival of Education, which posts a new selection of current essays each week by teachers across the country. Neat-o.

I am proud to be part of this community of people who are willing to speak up.

I am proud that these sites are read by the press, government officials and ed administrators.

I am proud that we have created a new media.

Because we owe it to the kids we teach, to their parents, and to our own colleagues to present the insider’s, professional knowledge of what’s going on in our schools.

And because if we don’t do it, no one else is gonna.