REVISEDKleinWitz FOILED!and an educational puppet show

Let me get this link up so you can hear how NY Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez foiled 3 years' worth of email correspondence between charter school entrepreneur Eva Moskowitz and Big Daddy Joel Klein.

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". . . what it shows is an enormous amount of direct support by the top person in the public school system to these charter schools, in terms of raising money for them, overruling lower-level officials who were insisting that certain policies don’t allow them to do certain things. A very close relationship between the top chancellor of the New York City school system and this very small charter network leader in Harlem."

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Transcript of the video clip here on Democracy.Now, and 77 pages of emails written between 2006 and 2009 can be found here.

Read Gonzalez's original article here.
Also read NYC Educator, PerdidoStreet (which gives tel. nos. for Liu, DeBlasio and Quinn to place your complaint), and Accountable Talk on the same topic.

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And while we're dealing with great moments in EdDeform history, view this link for what parent activists Jane Hirschmann (Time Out from Testing, left) and Lisa Donlan think about Klein's "Puppet" PEP.

Puppeteer Donlan: "Education puppet, did you actually read the 20 educational impact statements that talk about the schools ... they're supposed to vote on tonight?"

Puppeteer Hirschmann: "Read?!? I'm a PUPPET. I don't read!!!"


Puppeteer Donlan: "Education puppet, did you actually visit any of the schools that you are [slated] to vote on for closing tonight?"

Puppeteer Hirschmann: "Go to public schools? I don't go there. My kids go to private schools."


Puppeteer Donlan: "Did you actually attend any of the local hearings and listen to the hours and hours of heartfelt testimony from teachers, and parents, and students, and administrators ... in the schools they're voting to close today?"

Puppeteer Hirschmann: "Listen to parents? and students? and teachers? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I am much too busy on my Blackberry!"

Michael Best and Joel Klein's reaction to that one —

Succinct, to the point, spot on — and don't trust Mulgrew to save all our jobs

This article was just posted at Ednotes (where you can see Scott's useful introductory remarks).

TAG comments:

Below is a lengthy bit of reading but essential reading. The UFT has abandoned its duty to represent teachers as employees entitlted to due process, but rather it is complicit in turning us into 'employees-at-will'. TAGNYC states it is time to challenge the UFT. If Unity wins the next election, time for talk is gone. We need another union to represent us. The below account of the UFT's failure to uphold its duty to represent is sickening and must be widely publicized.

I actually don't have to add a single word, this thing is entirely — and ominously — self-explanatory.

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RELATED articles I've written on the same subject:

MM Pinocchio - Dec. 3, 2009
Four different kinds of tenure - Nov. 25, 2008

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A RETROSPECTIVE ON "RECKLESS REFORM"

By Rosalind Panepento

Dear Colleagues,

As many of you know, I was the ASHS chapter leader at the time of the 2007 "reckless reorganization" of District 79, and the closing of our schools. I have been reflecting on our unique situation: we were some of the first to suffer the chaos of school closings, resulting in hundreds of students education interrupted, and hundreds of our colleagues ending up as ATRs. Now that the Board of Ed is closing 19 more schools, I think our particular struggle is more relevant than ever. I invite you to read this "retrospective" and welcome your comments.

-- Roz Panependo



On January 26, 2010, a rally was held to protest the closing of nineteen city schools by the Department of Education. Over the last few years, the Department of Education has taken it upon itself to close major schools. This time they have gone too far. Schools like Jamaica High School, Norman Thomas High School, Alfred E. Smith Vocational and Maxwell Vocational are among the schools slated to be closed. Despite protests from community leaders, politicians, educators, students, the DOE is doggedly proceeding, claiming they know what is best. The rally was held at Brooklyn Tech, the site of the January PEP meeting (The Panel on Educational Policy was formed by Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg – the majority of members are Bloomberg appointees). Hundreds of people came to speak in front of an overflow and angry crowd of parents, students and teachers. But the P.E.P. was impervious, riding over these voices and ramming through their agenda of school closures.

I have an urgent need to share information and hope to be able to speak at this meeting. I have a unique perspective. I was a teacher and a UFT chapter leader of a GED program that was closed in May 2007. At that time, there was not the outrage that there is today. We were a program – with no parent base – we were a stepchild of the Board of Ed. What happened to us - to the staff, the students, the program – set the stage in miniature – with the missteps and complicity of the DOE and UFT – for the drama that is unfolding. Like any drama there are themes – but in all drama – there are subtexts. Given my perspective and experience, I may be able to give some information and shed some light on a situation that I believe should never have been allowed to get to this disturbing point. In New York City school system which is still experiencing the aftershocks of 9/11, it is egregious that the Mayor and his cohorts should pursue reform – reckless reform – by jeopardizing the security of staff, students and entire communities. Let me begin at the beginning:

April 2007 – I, along with two former UFT chapter leaders of Auxiliary Services for High School Students* met with members of the DOE to find out the fate of our program for September. Over the past few years, staff had been excessed. (Excessed – displaced – sent to other programs), including many math teachers. There was not much that we could do. But at this April meeting, we were told that our program would be fine. We went away and I told the staff of the good news. *ASHS was to remain intact.

May 2007 – The Friday before Memorial Day Weekend – I was invited to a press conference that Chancellor Joel Klein and DOE District 79 Superintendent Cami Anderson had convened at the last minute.

The press conference was at our site on the Lower East Side. It was announced at this meeting that our GED program, as well as three others, and the high school for pregnant and parenting teens would be closed.

At the press conference, many questions were asked of Klein and Anderson. Answers were not readily available. There was a great deal of stonewalling. Art McFarland, the education reporter for Channel 7, kept asking Chancellor Klein why he was closing the high schools; why not keep the schools open and work with the staff and students? Klein kept repeating that this was what the “girls” at the school for pregnant teens wanted. In fact, New York Times reported a few days later that the staff at Pregnant Teens had no idea about the closings and were very upset.

The UFT special rep for District 79 sat next to me. At the end of the meeting, he got up and left. Usually, he and I would talk and mull over the situations presented. I was surprised by his hasty exit. (I was to learn later from Mike Meehan, then the education reporter for Channel 1 News that the UFT had already signed off on this closing back in April!

The five GED programs would be consolidated into one – to be called GED-Plus. A major question was how many staff would get positions in this reorganization. We were never, ever able to get an answer to this question. Carrie Melago, the education reporter for the Daily News, told me the following September that there were going to be about 276 staff members brought on board.

Originally, we were told that the staffing would be done according to Article 32-B in the UFT contract. Under these UFT/DOE guidelines, only ONLY 50 percent of the original staff can be rehired in the new school. What happens to the rest of the staff? What and who determine who gets to be part of the staff that goes to the new program? However, in the face of our strong vocal protests and angry meetings with reps at the UFT headquarters, the union declared a crisis situation under “Impact Bargaining.” They won an agreement from the DOE that all jobs would be filled from staff at the closed schools. However, the number of jobs in the new schools would be drastically reduced--by the hundreds.

We were told that there would be interviews. We were not given dates or criteria for these interviews. Those who didn’t get assignments would be placed in the now –infamous *ATRs or Absentee Teacher Reserves. These are teachers – usually older- who through the closing of schools and programs – not through their own actions – no longer had regular classrooms.

The UFT and DOE kept reassuring everyone – ATRs would be getting their pay. That’s good, but our dedicated teachers want to be in the classroom doing what they do best – teaching. This was in the beginning period of the ATR phenomenon. The situation grew out of the disastrous 2005 UFT contract which gave away seniority transfer. Before this, if a school or program closed, the teacher could put his or her name on the transfer list and be assigned to another school. But now the Board of Ed has given over all hiring rights to the principal – to hire whomever he wanted. Under a new funding formula, the teacher’s entire salary would come out of the individual school budget. What principal could “afford’ to hire a senior teacher, when he could take two beginning teachers for the same price?

This was the beginning of the vicious press campaign against experienced teachers. Over the next few months, years the press has vilified these teachers who are ”costing the city millions”; who, it was said, were poor teachers, or rated “unsatisfactory.” This was a deliberate untruth. As of the closing of my program, I can assure you that the teachers in my school were not unsatisfactory teachers and did not ask to be placed in this situation. I had to go back to the ASHS staff and give them news contrary to the news I had delivered in April. I had to wait to speak to them in person after the Memorial Day weekend. I had no real specifics about interviews to give them. What we felt about the success of our program did not matter. This was a fait accompli.


JUNE 2007 – Teachers had made summer plans and wanted to know more about the dates of the interviews – not unreasonable, but the DOE never got back to us. We were not told what to tell our students about what was going to happen in September. There was so much uncertainty. We turned to the UFT for assistance. Finally, after repeatedly insisting, we got the UFT to agree to hold a meeting for us one day after the last day of school. The UFT was not too pleased to be dealing with almost two hundred teachers who were very upset and unsettled about the closing of the program that they loved.

Forget the fact that we were unsettled; the UFT leadership complained that we were rude and tried to end the meeting after two hours. Here we were on our time and they had their custodians pulling up the carpets. We had to beg and plead for more time. UFT-then president, Randi Weingarten tried to ramrod us into accepting the DOE’s plan to take the deal under which the schools would be closed, with the union’s acceptance and hundreds of jobs would be lost.. We could go after the DOE for what they were doing, said only one dissenter. Weingarten humiliated him publicly and said that this was what we should do.

This shoddy acceptance of re-hiring WITHOUT set dates and parameters and equal criteria for interviews would come back to haunt – to this day the UFT and DOE have created the monster that is rearing its head by closing more and more schools until even sleeping dogs have been awakened and alerted to the rally on January 26.

We left the UFT meeting that day frustrated and with no more information about the interviews than we had when we walked in. The DOE had betrayed us; the UFT was rude and probably signed off on the terms of the re-hiring practices which were shoddy and set the stage for major trouble in the future.

JULY 2007 - we clear out our classrooms – no news of the interview dates. Teachers had made summer plans but we were uneasy – our program was ripped away from us; we had no information about interview dates. In the meantime, the UFT became more sensitive to our situation and had their offices open to us so that we could get our resumes together. Still no definite dates for interviews.

MIDDLE TO THE END OF AUGUST 2007 – Teachers who made travel plans waited for news of the dates of interviews. One of them – a teacher who was in France – did not make the interviews and to this day is still an ATR. Another teacher was in China taking a course -- they planned to interview her over the phone from China!

I was on the way to Buffalo and finally I heard that my interview was to be the next day. I had been around all summer. I finally got another interview date which was to be during the last week of August.

I went to the interview and was informed in a few days that I passed. However, some of the teachers who were not in the City were interviewed on the phone – one of my colleagues was interviewed on the phone while he was working his summer job, helping the food service in a DOE school cafeteria. He is today still an ATR. Some of the ATRs who were out of town could not get dates rescheduled. All of this was chaos- before the beginning of a new school year with a new program that had not even been planned out. Be aware that the hiring practices were not thought out nor was the creation of this new program.

BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER 2007 – I called a meeting of our staff to discuss how we should support each other during this very stressful time. The UFT was not terribly helpful, so we felt we had to be proactive. One of our members, Marjorie Stamberg, started to blog to inform our co-workers, parents, and staff across the city of our plight. The issues were not only where the teachers would go, but what would happen to hundreds of GED students when they arrived at school, only to find their schools were gone, their programs destroyed.

Teachers were told who had passed the interviews; The teachers who did not do well on the interviews were told to report to “hiring halls” on the first day of school. Again chaos reigned. It was unclear what these teachers would do. The teachers who did not pass the interview process were never told why they did not get hired. We subsequently filed grievances for these teachers to find out why they did not get hired. It took months of prodding UFT to get the status of these grievances. Most of the grievances were simply dropped or died because there were no slots on the limited number of UFT grievances that can go to arbitration.

To this day, I am haunted by a colleague of mine whom I represented, who did not get re-hired. She told me that she realized that she would probably not get her job back but she just wanted to know THE REASON. It is this teacher and the other teachers like her, veteran teachers who loved what they were doing, who prompt me to go to rallies and meetings and wonder why this ATR situation really was created.–In September,

The hiring halls were chaotic and teachers were not given clear directions as to what to do. Interestingly, a UFT rep told me that the teachers, themselves were to blame for not being successful in the hiring halls and the days after. Forget the fact that the situation was the whole creation of the DOE, to throw hundreds of S-rated teachers out of their classrooms.


THE REAL UNDOCUMENTED TRAGEDY OF THIS WHOLE CLOSING AND REORGANIZATION IS THAT ABOUT SIX OR SEVEN HUNDRED OR MORE GED STUDENTS GOT LOST AND DIDN’T KNOW WHERE TO GO. EDUCATIONS WERE ABORTED BECAUSE OF POOR PLANNING. THE TRAGEDY IS THAT THIS SITUATION HAPPENED AND IT COULD NOT BE STOPPED. IT WILL BE INTERESTING TO SEE IF THE JANUARY 26TH RALLY CAN STOP KLEIN AND BLOOMBERG ASSAULTS ON SCHOOLS.

What happened to the teachers who landed in the ATR pool? Some were brought back into our reconstituted program on a one-year trial basis, which could or could not be made a permanent assignment at the end of the year. A number of these teachers eventually got hired in the program, but many did not. Across the city, our ATRs were left to try to get by in the schools they landed in--some situations were better than others. Many of the ATRs who were created in 2007 – remained in this situation until 2009!

As Daily News reporter Carrie Melago told us, about 270 of the original staff of over 700 were hired. The others were left to be ATRS. School started and the fate of students and staff of GED Plus was hit and miss.

NOVEMBER 2007-NOVEMBER 2008 –

The crisis of the ATRs was growing;--there were frequent articles in the New York Post and Daily News and New York Times drawing attention to the ATR situation. The numbers rose to as high as 1,400 and 1,600, as more schools were closed. We were, as I said earlier, the beginning. The articles begin to hammer the ATRs as costly and unsatisfactory. They, as the press reported during this period, were costing the city around 78 million dollars. (A computer that the DOE purchased to track student attendance cost over 80 million dollars but no-one is critical of this) Again, the message seeps out that the Chancellor would like to “terminate” the ATRs who have not work for themselves within a year.

We begin to watch and read carefully the actions of the DOE. We do some serious networking and appearing at Executive Board meetings to highlight the plight of the ATRs takes place. If the ATRs are terminated it would be the end of tenure. This I have suspected all along is the elephant in the room.

At this point, we formed the Committee to Support ATRS, and began to circulate petitions in the schools calling for a citywide rally to draw attention to the ATRs and demand union action to get positions for all who want to be placed. We call for a moratorium on all hiring until all ATRs want positions are placed. This touched a chord with teachers across the schools. “If you’re not ATR now, you could be next!” Petitions flooded in; these were raised at the Delegate Assembly in October, and a rally was planned for November 24. 2008.

Pressure is mounting, now, by many teachers to force the union to do something to quell the numbers of ATRs. Other teachers are beginning to experience what we went through in 2007 and they are frightened that what happened to us will happen to them.

We kept the pressure on. We go to speak at PEP meetings and criticize the closings of schools and the creation of even more ATRs. Chancellor Klein and company exhibit the same manner of stonewalling that they exhibited at the original press conference. We speak to other ATRS. Some have become very discouraged. In the meantime, Teachers for “Teach for America” are still getting jobs. How is this happening and they’re ATRs with no regular classrooms still?

Due to this pressure, shortly before the rally, the UFT leadership announced a deal – a ”Side Agreement” with the DOE to offer principals special incentives to hire the ATRs. They tried to get us to call off the rally, and when that didn’t work, they organized a “wine and cheese” meeting at the UFT union hall to draw teachers away from the rally in front of Tweed! It didn’t work. Hundreds turned out to the rally that day. There was, however, little press there that day -- the UFT leadership tried their best to downplay the action at Tweed.

[Ednotes's Note: See my 2 part video of that day where UFT/Unity crew sip wine and eat cheese while ATRs and supporters rally at Tweed: The Video the UFT Doesn't Want You To See: The ATR Rally]

THE “SIDE AGREEMENT”

Randi Weingarten e-mailed all of the members of the Executive Board at around 3 PM on Monday, November 18 to vote on the “Side Agreement” that she had negotiated with the DOE concerning the ATR situation. The pressure of the rally and many teacher/ATRs had forced her to take some actions. Suffice it to say because of the last minute notice, hardly any executive board members were able to make the meeting. They had to give their votes over the phone. I was technically not supposed to be allowed in this meeting. I was not an executive board member, but because of my involvement in this situation, I went and spoke to the issue at hand.

According to the Side Agreement, all ATRs would be “safe” – collecting full salaries, doing nothing much, unless principals wanted them to. Some ATRs went to work on a regular basis in regular schools but never were taken off ATR status. Principals didn’t want to pay their salaries and instead hired new teachers (who have not advanced along the salary "steps.". Among the proposals which supposedly would encourage principals to hire ATRs were:

1. Principals would be subsidized by the Central Board if they hired ATRs. Out of their budgets the principals would only have to pay beginners salary.

2. Chancellor Klein strongly suggested to principals that they hire these ATRs, but he never said that it was mandatory before any new hiring.

Since this was a side agreement to the contract, which was to expire in late 2009, It was not clear what would happen in 2010.

The Executive Board members – what few there were – agreed, for the most part with Weingarten. I did not. There were too many vagueries. I had seen this before. I wanted to know, if this was a Side Agreement to the present contract, what would happen after 2010 when the contract expired? I strongly felt that the chancellor should have mandated that principals hire the ATRs before any new hires. For these reasons, I voiced my objections. Weingarten listened but the Side Agreement was hastily passed;


FEBRUARY 2009-SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2009

By now, the economy is in serious trouble. Schools open in September. Prospective kindergarten students need to be wait-listed! Classes are overcrowded. More schools are slated to be closed. The public at-large is beginning to get savvy to the notion that all is not well with the DOE. Parents start stronger protests; Critics of this administration become more vocal. In the meantime, to the dismay and despair of all, Bloomberg has announced that he will run for a third term…something that he vowed he would never do.

My fear was that, with a third term, he would finish off what he had started, with the ATRs termination. Classes are very overcrowded but the ATRs are not being used to deal with the overcrowding and the press takes note of this. Finally, Klein does something out of character; because of financial necessity, he is now urging the principals to hire the very same ATRs he villified only a few months before.

The Side Agreement has been ineffective in placing the ATRs. After a steady diet of vilification of these teachers in the press, what principal is willing to hire these teachers.

So in May of 2009, the UFT and DOE negotiates a “hiring freeze”. This is a moratorium on any new hiring until ATR teachers are placed. There are a few exceptions in fields like Special Ed, and math. There is still little relief. Principals just don’t fill positions, juggling with subs and programming, sand-bagging until the hiring freeze is lifted. That October the DOE announces that principals will lose any funding for vacancies “left open” Finally, there is a bit of relief for the ATRs


NOVEMBER 2009

Bloomberg literally buys a third term and the Wednesday before Thanksgiving goes to Washington, where in the presence of Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, he unveils his plan for educational reform which contains some of these items…that he will hire city lawyers to go to Albany to help change the laws of New York State to obtain. They are:

1. He wants the cap on the limit on charter schools changed from 200 – 400
2. He wants ATRs who have not found a job after a year to be terminated. There it is in black and white.
3. He wants to expedite the process to remove teachers who are in “rubber” rooms.

Note: I was in Washington in October 2009 – it was curious that Michele Rhee, that city's Superintendent of Education, has closed schools, and over 400 staff were out of jobs. Seniority does not exist there. One teacher who had 32 years of experience was out of a job. There was a tremendous amount of public support but I don’t think they got jobs back.

4. More schools to be closed

There it is – eliminate these teachers. Right now the UFT is sticking by its stance of refusing to let the ATRs be abandoned. The union is insisting these dedicated teachers lost their positions only through the closing of schools or programs, and not through any failing on their part. This is a major obstacle to the mayor's plans. He would like to get a concession on this and impose a cap. By doing so he would effectively get rid of tenure. If a teacher can be removed from the classroom and then fired, there is no tenure. Say what we want, tenure is a necessary tool in a field that is as subjective as teaching. This would be a feather in the mayor's cap – he has hired Joel Klein who was one of the legal eagles who broke up Microsoft to break up the Board of Ed in New York City. Since mayoral control, it has been unrecognizable as any Department of Education. Fiscally, the DOE in its current form is as irresponsible, if not more than his predecessors.


JANUARY 2010

The start of the New Year, and the closings of twenty schools have been announced. Next week we will see what will happen. What will it take to keep these schools from closing? How many new ATRs will be created by these closings? How many more students will be lost?

Thousands turned out on JANUARY 26TH at Brooklyn Tech. We have to continue to make our voices heard.

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Kruger to Klein: "You've disconnected us from the process!"

I've taken the trouble to transcribe part of a video clip of one of our state senators aiming some strong remarks at our chancellor of NYC schools, Joel Klein.

Senator Carl Kruger — thank you, but really:

What took you so long?

A half a generation of school children have been handicapped for life, and teaching, once a dignified, intensely rewarding profession, has been downgraded to a grad school job you can pick up on the way to doing something "more important" with your life.

The whole clip of Kruger's remarks at the Feb. 2nd session of the Joint Budget Hearing on Elementary and Secondary Education up in Albany can be found here.

Scroll down to see my favorite paragraph, in larger print. He's picked up some steam by then, but the question remains:

What took them so long?

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Kruger's record discussed here and here.

Wikipedia: "On December 2, 2009, Kruger voted against marriage equality legislation,
which failed to pass the Senate."

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There has been a lot of acrimony concerning school closings in the city.

We seem to find a disconnect whenever we talk about the Dept of Education between the communities and Tweed, and it doesn't get any better, it just keeps on getting worse and worse.

[He mentions the renewal of school governance, putting the control of the schools once again into the mayor's hands . . .]

But we built in certain safeguards into that new legislation. The question of bringing closures into the communities that are affected, impact reports, the opportunity to hold individualized public hearings at those schools that are slated for closure, bringing the entire package along with a LEGITIMATE impact report to the puppet Council for Education Equality, which in its last vote the 5 borough presidents voted against and the other members weigh in as we knew they would be, and ultimately it passes.

I guess my question to you is: What is going to be the wake-up call, when we as the partner are making the parents part of the process in developing the educational policies for our schools?

When are we going to be able to say that we have accomplished our goal and that the parents are not sort of put on the back burner and treated as, as an annoyance rather than a partner?

When are we going to be able to say that the Legislature and the elected officials are partners in the effort?

You know, you come to us for money, but you don't come to us for direction.

You come to us for money, but you don't come to us for involvement.

You come to us for money, but at the same time, you know, we're sort of like the orphaned children that are never really around the table at the day of the family dinner.

So, I'm not asking a question, I'm making a statement. I brought a lawsuit . . .

Today we find ourselves once again being asked — by you — being asked to undo the executive budget, to be able to funnel more money into the NYC school system.

At the same time, you haven't come to us today, or ever, and said how can we become a partner with you in how we're going to use that money and how we're going to educate our children — except in some kind of a mock, distorted fashion that the Dept. of Education knows best and we know least. . .

Before we go ahead and we cut health care or we cut something else out of the budget in order to try to bring the gap between what the Executive proposed and what we're prepared to offer up, then you should be able to offer up to us some kind of a public statement and some kind of real meaningful input in the way NYC school systems are run.

Not that you're annoyed because the NAACP has to join a lawsuit with the UFT on the issue of closure, because I think at the end of the day, they may very well win that suit.

I know at 5 o'clock tonight I have a meeting in my office with members of the Senate, that we are going to have our first meeting under the new School Governance Law, that allows us oversight to weigh in on a lot of these issues, and we're going to do it. We'll do it either nicely or we'll do it by subpoena.

But at the end of the day, we want to find out, we want to find out where after NINE YEARS of TORTURE, nine years of ACRIMONY, nine years of nail-biting and hand-twisting, to this day, whether it's trailers in the school yard, or whether it's parents standing in the door, or whether it's teachers that are trying to do battle, or whether it's just plain folks who live in the community wanting to know where their tax dollars are, and WE CAN'T ANSWER THEM!!

We can't answer them because you've disconnected us from the process.

Computer dysfunction

It is certainly no secret that this week is one of the busiest in the school year, with HS and MS administrators trying to set up new classes and make register adjustments.

During this crucial period, every programmer, teacher, guidance counselor, AP and principal relies on STARS and the school's computers to do what they're supposed to be doing: manage schedules, registers, and student data.

Yet, they're not. Again.

Or still — because I wrote about the problems schools were having with their data management systems way back in October.

A letter sent to the school techies yesterday, the first day of the spring term and several days after all that programming and planning had to have taken place, reads like this:

We are experiencing unusual slowness on the web pages of the STARS application today (as well as yesterday). We have been working with the web administrators to monitor the servers and network to determine if there are any issues.

To date, the high number of people using the system appears to be the primary reason for the slowness. The web administrators are preparing to add additional servers tonight to help handle the load. These will be added at the end of the day as the process will require that the system be brought down for a short time (you will receive more information later today as to time). They are also monitoring all of the servers being used and will correct any server that does not appear to be running as efficiently as expected. Until that time, the following steps can be taken to help us get through this busy time . . .

[blah, blah, blah......]

We do anticipate that this week will see higher than normal usage of the system. If we can limit the number of people using the system and keep updates and reporting to essential functions, we should all be able to get the work required completed.

It's not that I can't wrap my head around an occasional computer snafu, but something is seriously wrong when the DoE can't plan for high usage at this time of year.

A citywide failure of this kind is incomprehensible to me — especially when a billionaire mayor twists laws and lawmakers around his pinkies claiming that accountability, data collection and computer systems are a panacea for all the woes of mankind.

Incompetence does come to mind, but wasted tax dollars even more.

Jabberwock redux

NEW LINK:
It seems I'm not the only one who's referred to Duncan's "twisted vision" of education. See this essay by Danny Lucia for more thoughts along these lines and what this super-challenged individual is doing for the country's children.

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Just as I finished putting up the last post about the chancellor's twisted vision of the public he's supposed to be serving, I came across an Arne Duncan quote from a couple of days ago that I had missed:

"I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.

"That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that
'we have to do better.' And the progress that they've made in four years since the hurricane is unbelievable. They have a chance to create a phenomenal school district. Long way to go, but that — that city was not serious about its education."

I think these people are really so removed from reality, from humanity actually, that it's time for them to step down.

Is there not a single Congressional leader who will call for Duncan's immediate resignation?

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

Thanks to Ednotes — maybe thanks is not quite the word I'm looking for — we have the opportunity to view the chancellor, our manxome foe, come whiffling through the tulgey wood, burbling as it came.

For in uffish thought he stood, then quoth:

"And once again, I ask this panel to listen carefully tonight to deliberate effectively. And I ask you also to think, each one of you: Is this a school that you would send your own child to?

"Because in the end, we don't have schools for other peoples' children, we have to have schools for all our children.

"It saddens me, Mr. Chairman, that there are people here who are unprepared to listen. And people who cannot listen are typically people who are unconcerned about the dialogue, but only only about shouting others down."

Pardon me, while I choketh on his words.

"We don't have schools for other people's children, we have to have schools for all our children . . ."

I'd surely like to know who he means by "all our children," because he can't be talking about his own. Or Bloomberg's, or probably any of Bloomberg's appointees' on the panel. That's because all of those guys really DO have schools for "other" people's children, and they'd never dream of running their schools into the ground the way they're doing ours.

And who's he talking about when he says there are people who "are unprepared to listen" and are "unconcerned about the dialogue." He doesn't mean us, does he?

Any Jabberwock worth his salt knows there's all kinds of ways to shout people down, and this tribe does it very well — with money, legal sleight of hand, no-bid business deals, marginalization, and the power of the mic. Who needs to shout when you you're using that armory of dirty tricks.

One, two! One two! and through and through the vorpal blade goes snicker-snack! (I'm starting to feel better already.)

If only we could leave it dead.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! I'd chortel in my joy.


Click on his burbling tongue to view the whole speech at the Jan. 26th rally.

When the fix is in . . .

. . . it comes from every direction.

GEM, CAPE and ICE members felt it this week when the courts, after the City appealed, revoked the right it had previously given to demonstrators to march on the north side of street in front of Bloomberg's residence and restricted them to the south side instead.

There's much video footage of that rally, including this by ArtsAndCulture, and some more of parts of a press conference that civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel (right) called after the Village Voice put up a video of police surveillance cameras on the rooftops overlooking the demonstration. Pretend you're taking a course on Civil Liberties 101 and make time to view the three parts of that conference here, here and here. Siegel and some of the other speakers explain the tactics this mayor is using to make exercising your First Amendment rights uncomfortable.

There have been many stories this past year on how the city is not acting in accordance with law and violating the parents and communities the right to participate in public education.

Teachers have been feeling what it's like to face administrators who have been lawyered up by BloomKlein. "Do what you want," we've heard Klein's told them, and we assume the ramifications of their misdemeanors and violations will be left to the attorneys to sort out. Not least of our worries is the gutted grievance system built into the last contract, which means that lies, omissions and misrepresentations rot in teacher files with no legal vehicle to get them out. (The UFT, by the way, is in permanent denial of their complicity in this. It amounts to the gross "mismanagement" of our ability to protect our careers.)

This morning we heard from David Pakter that Pablo Guzman's story on the Teacher Reassignment Centers, which aired last night, was severely chopped by CBS News.

(Guzman stands in the center of a group of teachers on the left.)

I have posted articles with descriptions of the rubber rooms before (on Dec. 13th and Nov. 2nd, for example). Here's the way the broadcast went out, and below is more of the back story, in excerpts from what Pakter has just circulated.

ENTIRE PAKTER INTERVIEW CUT FROM THE 11 PM NEWS BROADCAST

I was alerted by a source a few hours before the story aired at 11 PM that the in depth story that Legendary and well known and widely respected CBS Reporter, Pablo Guzman had spent weeks researching and filming had gotten the thumbs down by the Editors at WCBS Television News.

Another source disclosed to me earlier in the day, before the CBS Rubber Room story aired, that apparently news of the story had been leaked to those who run the City, especially individuals whose names end with the letters "Esq" and work in the Chambers Street area of Manhattan.

It seems that massive pressure was apparently exerted on person or persons unknown at WCBS News to have the story killed or so edited (read Butchered), that it was the predominantly innocent, Railroaded Teachers, incarcerated in the so-called "Rubber Rooms", themselves, who were made to look like "the problem" and not the victims of multiple miscarriages of Justice that have continued for years.

I can not describe what a personal Tragedy this is for me personally but also for the whole cause of Teachers nationwide.

It really meant the whole world to me that after 7 years of non stop blistering Whistle-blower Retaliation that the general public would finally hear from my own lips why the NYC Dept of Education had targetted me with such a pathological venom that continues to the present.

The broadcast was edited in such a fashion as to ensure the viewing audience never got to hear a single word I spoke during a more than two hour interview at the office of my Attorney, Dr. Joy Hochstadt Esq.

By muzzling and eliminating literally every word I had said during the lengthy interview, the Editors at WCBS News have guaranteed that the one Teacher, who had become the Poster Child "Teacher of the Year" victim of the NYC Dept of Education's crusade to crush any dissent among New York City's one hundred thousand Educators, was not heard during the Newscast.

Due to the fact that I have been one of the most outspoken Rubber Room Teachers, a constant advocate of Teacher's Constitutional Rights, who has always spoken out and written articles under my real name, it was deemed critical by the Editors at WCBS Television News, that the public not be given the opportunity to learn the facts of my story from the First Person source.

Clearly my more than four decade history of achievements in Education have made and continue to make the faux Chancellor and his willing stooges and lapdogs look like the pitiful excuses for human beings they are.

Most observers would tend to agree that once the Bloom/Klein people were pre-warned about the WCBS "Rubber Room" expose, immense pressure was brought to bare on the Television Network and a Quid Pro Quo was worked out that the show could air as long as there was no inclusion or reference to the topics I had discussed in detail during the taping at the office of Dr. Joy Hochstadt, Esq. [Pakter's lawyer].

With all mention of the topics I discussed during the interview effectively eliminated from what went out over the airwaves, it means this entire broadcast will now ultimately be perceived by those who saw this "News" Broadcast in exactly the light the CBS Editors intended.

That is to say that the Teachers who have been removed from the schools system and banished, exiled, disappeared into the "Rubber Rooms" are a threat and "clear and present danger" to the City's children, as well as being lazy, incompetent, burnt out parasites who just sit back collecting Taxpayer dollars as they allegedly relax all day in the City's numerous gulags.

That stale old, tired strategy that goes back five thousand years.

When all else fails find a convenient scapegoat and then blame the victims.

I am far too old to cry but it hurts too bloody much to laugh.

Pablo Guzman at WCBS cannot and must not be blamed that the whole story has now been edited to death, truncated and cut to ribbons — and will likely not go up on the WCBS website as a permanent reference source on New York's rubber rooms.

The NYC power mongers totally sabotaged all of us, and the chief reporter on the story likely ended up in the position of having to try to save what little could be salvaged of a story that could have done so much for so many. . .

This story could have had real legs — but then I do not have to educate anyone on that score.

Pakter was talking to the people he sent his memo to, and he's right: he doesn't have to educate us on that score.

But, the unfortunate fact is that with reporters under the thumb of a dictatorial government and compliant corporate bosses, we DO have to educate people, even if we have to do it in blogs and out in the streets.

Which side are they on?

People keep talking about the big protest the UFT is mounting this Tuesday at Klein's PEP meeting at Brooklyn Tech, and no doubt lots of people are making it their business to be there.

But I've been trying to figure out what's up with the demonstration the UFT has been planning for the day before — up in the Bronx at the Courthouse. You know which one I mean?

I'm not surprised if you don't.

The Bronx reps have been trying to get all the members to come out for it, and I did what I could to drum up support. I put their flyer up in the right sidebar last week and told everyone to show up: Your school could be next, senior teachers will kiss their careers goodbye, local communities are getting hammered, parent and teacher voices silenced — all that stuff.

I'm thinking it's time to remind everyone to be there at the Courthouse in droves on Monday afternoon, but what more can I tell people about it?

The short answer is not much, and that's because UFT management doesn't seem to be all that committed to this thing. I checked.

I looked on the UFT website. Nothing on the front page, nothing when I searched a whole slew of key words.

I looked on the District 11 website under "District News." The most recent event there was something back in May 08.

I wrote one of the DRs asking for more details. Their very brief response was a rationale for the choice of location (it's central and Diaz's office is there), it's on school closings, it's a community effort, but no details. No mention of which politicians will be solicited or involved, no mention of the speakers.

Even the alert we got this morning from Mulgrew is silent on the Monday rally, you can see for yourself:


Are these people kidding?

Proof of Life's comment on a GEM post is actually perfect:

There will be buses at the Bronx Boro office to take people to the PEP Rally. However, if you're not Unity you may have to hide your signs!

Because I'm just about ready to recycle some of my biggest and best anti-Unity signs. There's no excuse for their inability to send me info on what I need to be telling people.

The times they are a-changing, and UFT managers will eventually have to decide "Which Side Are They On."
(Click on the picture at the top and hear a great version of that song.)

Mr. Seeger, this time it's a whole different set of bosses we have to worry about.

---

If you haven't already, check out these links to see how grassroots ed activists in five boroughs are putting on protests without a dime in the piggybank. Then tell me if we're getting our money's worth paying the UFT to fight for our profession and for public education.

Ednotes: video clip on the protest at Bloomberg's residence

In the video at 2:42: Civil rights lawyer Norm Siegel went to court to get this rally a permit to march in front of the mayor's house. Beaten down on appeal, the rally took place on the south side, but Siegel's not going to drop the pressure. Bloomberg's residence is a private house, and citizens have First Amendment rights that this billionaire mayor seems to think don't apply.

At 6:30: Seung Ok (delegate at Maxwell, one of the schools they're closing, and running with ICE in the March election):
"We are here to prove to the mayor that he is not the civil rights leader in education that he claims to be. We are proving to him that we are the people. Parents, teachers, students and neighborhoods, and we have to decide how our children get their education. We need a mayor, not a billionaire!"

At 8:00: James Eterno (chapter leader of Jamaica HS, also being closed, and ICE candidate for president):
"It is an outrage that our schools are being threatened. We're here to say Public Education: YES, Privatization: NO, and Charterization: NO. We're taking it to Brooklyn, and then beyond that!"

At 9:20: Angel Gonzalez (one of the founders of GEM):
"Klein's PEP is a puppet organization for Bloomberg."

More pictures on the GEM blog of all the protests that group has mounted or participated in since last spring. The video of the 79th St. protest here.


Gonzalez's analysis on the UFT's "empty rhetoric" — a must-read at this link. He says:

But there is no evidence of one single UFT educational and analytical flier at any of the recent local school "closings" protests or hearings!

and concludes that:

[The] UFT continues to utilize strategies that historically have failed education and instead have benefited the corporate powers' neoliberal agendas and the officialdom's pockets. Strategies that have focused primarily on either:

— legal-judicial wrangling
— endorsing & financing politicians
— legislative reforms
— being at the table or in bed with management or corporate heads

have brought us to the sorry state we are in. Millions of member dollars wasted to bring us to this sorry state we are in. It took about a decade to get a CFE ruling that produced more dollars for the DOE privatization drive. The recently announced "Small Class Size Lawsuit" will again fail and drag on for years without a member-based strategy.

It's not a small thing that this same rally was covered by two national sites, the Huffington Post (with a nice picture of the GEM banner) and ArtAnd Struggle.com (with a great video).

Make no bones about it: The grassroots activists are leading this fight.
The UFT managers might be just going along with us for a very short ride.

Unity/UFT has style

While I'm finishing up a longer commentary on the union's grandstanding on school closings, I'll take a second here to put up my comment to the Ednotes post two days ago, in which he expanded on my Finally post from the day before.

Needless to say I agree with Norm when he says:

"I still maintain it is just style over substance and with an election coming up Mulgrew must sound militant."

Here's some of what I wrote in the comments:

I did not want to give the impression that I think Mulgrew will act in accordance with his words. I've watched Unity too long for that, where they say one thing and do another, as in Weingarten's sabotaging of the 2008 ATR rally at Tweed.

And you don't even have to go back that far. Today's chapter leader weekly doesn't even mention yesterday's protest at Bloomberg's residence, even though it's plastered over the media from the Times to the Huffington Post.

So here's Mulgrew on Dec. 20th complimenting PS 15 activists at the DA, yet choosing not to even acknowledge their nationally reported rally two days later in an in-house newsletter. Such is Unity.

They're publicly taking on some ICE positions (what did take them so long) — but . . . what's going on underneath, out of the light of day is anyone's guess . . .

So I'll bet to Scott — and certainly the way I see it — it's more sinister than style over substance. It's style designed to camouflage selling the membership out behind closed doors.

That's because the UFT has a horrible record of debasing our profession through systematic, ideological collaboration.

Finally.

Delegate Assemblies ain't what they used to be, that's for sure.

Today Mulgrew gave a President's Report that sounded like a playbook from ICE and GEM.

My only question is: What took him and his Unity caucus so long.

For Mulgrew to talk about how bad it is in some communities reeling from the "separate and unequal" charter schools shoving their way into our public schools, he had to have boned up pretty well on the Sept. 13 '09 post in the GEM blog:

The protest denounced the chaos precipitated by the HSA charter takeover of PS 123 classrooms, the disarray to their supplies and furnishings, the DOE’s dictatorial imposition of charter schools, privatization and the resulting “separate and unequal” conditions.

Or this one from even earlier, on June 15th:

“We need to support quality and democratic processes for all public schools. Charter schools, such as Equality Charter, split communities and sow inequality instead. They ‘cream the best students’ and evidence shows that charters service fewer percentages of the neediest of students such English Language Learners, Special Education and the poorest of the poor. We need to organize a citywide fight-back against the mayor’s undemocratic imposition of these charters that take away resources from public schools. Charters union-bust and undermine the necessary unity parents and teachers against government’s failure to properly provide for all public schools.”

That comment was made by GEM co-founder and long-time activist Angel Gonzalez. GEM put up its first post last April, and it's been pretty much one report after another over on that blog about all the demonstrations, rallies, protests and activism against the charter school movement.

Mulgrew's just discovering this now? What took him and his Unity caucus so long.


Back at today's meeting, he congratulated the teacher activists at PS 15 defending their school against a charter (PAVE) trying to extend its stay in the building. There's no question that these members and the parents should be commended for their fight, but it wasn't Mulgrew or his caucus spearheading that effort either. Ednotes put up a post and video on the PAVE encroachment last September. GEM (in this post) and a newly formed group in the area, Concerned Activists for Public Education (CAPE), took up the fight in the fall and haven't let up since.

In fact, Ednotes has been publishing a virtual almanac of the whole charter school invasion citywide, and it looks as if Mulgrew's been prepping for this moment on all that reportage. As he said at today's meeting: "That's the type of fight we want to be on top of all the time." And so they are — jumping right on board after all the groundwork has been laid by everybody else.


I worked a lot this past summer on the charter school takeovers in Harlem with members of ICE, GEM, CPE (Coalition for Public Education), CIF (the Center for Immigrant Families) and the office of Senator Bill Perkins. We've been to community board meetings, confronted DoE and charter school administrators, talked with politicians and the press, blogged a lot, and made some spectacular videos of most of the events.

Not many Unity/UFT members ever showed up at these events. If they did, they mostly hung around at the edges — interested enough to see what was going on, but not enough to actually roll up their sleeves.

And I've written before about how UFT managers have co-opted some of the fundamental principles on which groups like ICE and GEM are founded. What was Weingarten's ACES program last May but a reworking of ICE's 2004 platform.

It seems they're doing it again, jumping onto a movement that activist groups have been building for a year. They published a picture of GEM's 10-ft banner in the NY Teacher, and they spout our words. "Fix our schools, don't shut them down" appeared in the Jan. 11, 2010 of their rag, but see the April 6th '09 post GEM put up on its blog nine months earlier focusing on the message to "keep schools open, fix our schools, don't close them."


Facing the assembly this afternoon, Mulgrew spread his arms wide and thanked the delegates for all their work "reframing the argument." The DoE, he said, can no longer close schools without rhyme, reason or accountability. We [presumably the union and the communities] demand clear criteria, and these arguments are now resonating with elected officials all over town.

The majority of delegates at that assembly did nothing to earn his praise. It was the work of our grassroots oppositional union groups that plowed this field so that Mulgrew and his Unity hacks could muck their way through it to our side.

I keep coming back to the same question. What took them so long.

GW Bush — you besmirch everything you touch

Just heard your speech at the launch of the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund.

You hideous liar! How dare you say with a straight face that great tragedies bring out the best in us. Remember this picture? We do, if you don't.

When Obama introduced you he purposely sidestepped your abominal response to

K A T R I N A

where you abandoned American citizens to the elements. I hated you then, I hate you now.

And . . . we will NEVER forget how you destroyed this country.


There. I feel better now.

Blogger educators, unite!

But not just bloggers. Everyone. It's time to get out from behind the computers and hit the pavement in three boroughs.

Three BIG protests scheduled in the next couple of weeks (posters below: click on them for links to downloadable copies).

And here's a little bit of interesting news. It seems as if someone might have already hacked into one blog publicizing the 79th St. protest at the mayor's house. (Thanks for the alert, Ednotes).

Which makes me keen to try a little experiment myself:

HEY, EVERYONE!

COME TO THE PROTEST AT BLOOMBERG's HOUSE
on January 21st.

Let's see what happens . . .


Kidding aside, here's where bodies are needed:

First: Parents, teachers and community activists are bringing it to the mayor's doorstep on Thursday, Jan. 21st:

Then the Bronx UFT is mounting a protest at the Court House on the 25th:

See JD2718 for a link to a video on that event.


And finally there's the protest Mulgrew and the UFT are pushing at Klein's PEP meeting at Brooklyn Tech on Jan. 26th.

Frankly, it's nice to see some fists in the air. I thought they forgot how to do that over at central.

Be there.

Revisiting an earlier post

This is only the second time I've re-posted an earlier essay, but the list of school closings and school "utilization" changes makes we want to repeat what I said before:

The campaign against Reason is spearheaded here in New York City by the mayor and his five-star general Joel Klein.

No need to duplicate the names of those schools they're trying to destroy because it's all being covered by other NYC blogs — Norm's Notes, the parent's blog and GEM, to name just a few.


So, once again: "The Age of Enlightenment is on its way out."

---

There’s not a lot of agreement on what it means to be “enlightened,” but for starters we could look at back to the middle of the 18th century.

That would be a couple of decades before a handful of truly enlightened souls cobbled together a declaration of independence, and about 150 years before these united states committed to an education system funded by the public purse (1870).

Voltaire, according to some, thought the appeal of the new way of thinking boiled down to seven social and intellectual phenomena:

— the autonomy of reason
— perfectibility and progress
— confidence in the ability to discover causality
— principles governing nature, man and society
— assault on authority
— cosmopolitan solidarity of enlightened intellectuals, and
— a disgust with nationalism.

(Gerhard Rempel, Western New England College)

I could argue that the corporatist siege squeezing the moral life out of this country, perpetrated by heavily lobbied facilitators at every level of government, has maneuvered us in totally the opposite direction. We’ve abandoned all of Voltaire’s phenomena.

The Age of Enlightenment is well on its way out, and the ignorance, social chaos and repression of the Middle Ages are making a big comeback.

The campaign against Reason is spearheaded here in New York City by the mayor and his five-star general Joel Klein. They command a whole army of hastily trained-up staff sergeants from the Leadership Academy and a slew of corporate players bidding for pieces of the education pie.

BloomKlein campaigns best when the rest of us are overworked, apathetic or comatose. Shuffling things around under the guise of reform, they’ve come up with ill-conceived reorganizations, a perverted school grading system, falsified testing analyses, and some very strange notions of quality education.

These are the fabrications of an unenlightened oligarchy.

They don’t seek to understand or fix the underlying problems of the system — like overstuffed classrooms, too few experienced certified teachers, not enough school buildings, arts and phys ed programs, or services for special needs. They don’t listen to educators or parents, they intentionally place blame where it doesn’t belong, and they show little respect laws that get in their way.

Thumped for half a generation at least, we’ve learned how to keep taking it on the chin. We're becoming un-enlightened.

Across the country, being educated, articulate, and rational in thought has somehow become a bad thing. We’re still reeling from a federal administration that put nationalism at an all-time high and the ability to reason at an all-time low.


Nevertheless, the reasoning people among us are forever confident in the ability to discover causality, so we should be able to think this one through:

Oligarchs grab power when society allows them to. Enlightened people need to get out in the streets and stop them.

That’s what they did two hundred years ago, and that’s what they need to do now.



Just like what they've already been doing:

at P.S. 57 in Manhattan . . .
at P.S. 160 in the Bronx . . .
at IS 218 in East New York . . .
at IS 278 in Brooklyn . . .
At Bethel Church in Harlem . . .