Will Hollywood make this movie?
It is not “based on a true story.”
It is a story of parents and teachers in Red Hook, Brooklyn, who joined together to fight off the invasion of a billionaire-owned charter school.
It is an inspiring story.
The powerless against the powerful.
The people who love the school standing up to those who see it as real estate.
Read and see what happened.
Louisiana under Bobby Jindal is diminishing the value of certification. State Commissioner of Education John White (ex-TFA) thinks that nothing more is needed than a college diploma to be a teacher. Extra degrees, like a masters or a doctorate, will not be recognized or rewarded in this state. In other words, they want students to get more education but not their teachers.
This teacher wonders if she can get her money back:
I earned a Ph.D. In Curriculum and Instruction from Louisiana’s flagship university to strengthen my pedagogy and to live in the joy of learning. With each passing day my degree is becoming irrelevant. Do I have grounds to demand the return of tuition and punitive damages for establishing what are now false certification and academic advancement requirements that are no longer needed to be a teacher in Louisiana?
When the issue of the “parent trigger” first arose, my first question was why the parents of a school should be given the power to “seize control” and give the school to a private corporation? Should the tenants of a public housing project have the same power to privatize their building? How about the patrons of a public library? The riders on a public bus?
I wrote nearly a year ago:
“To me, a public school is a public trust. It doesn’t belong to the students who are currently enrolled in it or their parents or to the teachers who currently teach in it. All of them are part of the school community, and that community needs to collaborate to make the school better for everyone. Together, they should be able to redesign or create or discontinue programs and services. But collaboration is not the same as ownership. The school belongs to the public, to the commonwealth. It belongs to everyone who ever attended it (and their parents) and to future generations. It is part of the public patrimony, not an asset that can be closed or privatized by its current constituents.”
Who “owns” a public facility?
My assumption is that the public owns it, not the consumers or patrons or the users at a given time. The public paid for it, built it, and owns it.
But how can anyone change it for the better?
This article suggests a far better use of a parent trigger: “…how about passing a law that a group of parents can sign a petition that forces the state to allocate the appropriate level of funding to fix a building, supply nurses and librarians, books, provide special education and ELL services, give teachers classroom assistants and teacher leaders to do high quality professional development and to provide schools with teacher leaders to do high quality professional development and planning with teachers to implement best practices.”
This reader spells out the price of electing Romney and Ryan:
I completely agree with you and the author of the original post. It’s all well and good to promote ideological purity when it’s only your own neck on the line. When I was in law school, my torts professor challenged us to always consider this when making a policy decision: Who pays the price? Who bears the burden?
Who would pay the price for a Romney Ryan presidency? Even if we assume Obama is “the same” as Romney-Ryan on education (which is not really the case) what about everything else? I think these people would pay the price:
* Seniors and impoverished people without ID’s who will be denied the right to vote;
* Children and adults with disabilities or preexisting conditions who will be denied health insurance coverage;
* Middle-income taxpayers who will bear an undue burden because their income is earned from labor rather than capital gains;
* Women who will be unable to secure needed health care when Planned Parenthood is shut down;
* Women who will be denied the right to terminate a pregnancy without government interference in her private deliberations with her doctor;
* People who will lose their life savings in an unregulated Wall Street (2008 was no so long ago);
* All citizens who will breathe polluted air and drink polluted water because of lax environmental standards;
And then, as Tim points out, there is the Supreme Court. The current conservative majority, through the Citizens United case, has allowed staggering amounts of private anonymous funds to be pumped into efforts to influence elections. They have also dramatically weakened affirmative action. Brave Americans fought for years to win precious victories such as Brown v. Board of Education. Are we willing to let Romney pick any more justices?
Sorry to rant and rave. I am nearly 62 years old. When I was born, Brown v. Board had not yet been decided, women who needed an abortion needed to arrange an illegal procedure, and male teachers were routinely paid more than female teachers. Discrimination against those who were gay or lesbian was unquestioned. During my first year in college I watched the televised draft lottery that would send young men off to die in Vietnam.
There is no question that I will vote for Obama and do my best to see that he is elected. My life experiences tell me that Romney would be so much worse on so many issues. I am also not willing to have the most vulnerable of my fellow citizens pay the price for a right-wing Tea Party controlled administration.
A press release describes a shocking new initiative: the New York City Department of Education will pilot Pearson’s new in-the-womb test for fetuses.
The esteemed research entity and public relations firm Students Last was first to break the news.
Lighten up.
A reader comments:
As the first woman in my family to graduate from college, I am still the working poor, with no health insurance (and several physical ailments) and no pension. It is extremely stressful and disconcerting to have multiple college degrees and still be in poverty. I’m in my 60s and I will never be able to afford to retire, so I have no choice but to work until I die.
Diana Senechal, the author of “Republic of Noise,” describes the resources and methods she used to teach philosophy to students in a New York City high school.
Students read “The Book of Job,” Plato, Orwell, and other classics and discussed their meaning. It is very satisfying to think that teaching of this quality still survives in the age of teach-to-the-test. Job is never on the test. Just part of life.
I wrote a post about the NYC Department of Education’s determination to destroy once-esteemed John Dewey High School in Brooklyn. The post was called “The Ugly Face of Reform in New York City.”
First, they turned it into a dump for the low-performing kids rejected by their small schools and charters. Then they began systematically starving it of needed resources. As this comment shows, even the students know the score:
I am currently a student at the school. Many people don’t realize how hurt we really are, we lack so many things. Our budget is dry, insufficient equipment, low enrollment, slashed programs and classes, new inexperienced teachers replacing traditionally great ones that have been their for DECADES before I was even born! We’re turning into a typical high school. A conventional one at that, and that’s not a good thing. There’s no such thing as bands or cycles anymore. Where is the liberty we used to have of changing our schedules to fit our own needs academically? Where is the freedom of being metal detector free (even though many high schools throughout NYC are implementing metal detectors anyway) and where are all the students on the campus?
It’s exasperating. We did not deserve this. I personally try my best to make a number higher in that school, my 92 average is for the school, and for my family. Not necessarily for me. I want to turn that 62% graduation rate into a 63, and I want my classmates to want the same thing. I don’t want Dewey to be another school on the list that reads “Closed Schools Due to Poor Performance” and I certainly do not want Dewey to be restructured into small schools with a sugar coated name. I also do not want another Insideschools page that reads “This school was closed in due to poor performance.” in the header. And no, I hope the administration doesn’t win this time. They’ve closed enough schools, far too many, and this is the breaking point!
Can’t anyone volunteer to be a principal? One who actually cares about the school? Not Elvin and her inexperienced crew. Shockingly, some of the new appointed AP’s have never taught/are not teaching any classes. The DOE knows the demise of Dewey, but they’re purposefully ignoring it. And they can get away with it, like the corporate rats because the people are sheep. A herd of sheep. They would rather kiss *** than to speak up for themselves. It’s sad. This is not like me, I don’t even know how I managed to type this much. Just know this proves my anger, as a Dewey student. This will not be the end for us. Trust me, we’re in this too deep and we’ve fought too much to go down now. The DOE picked the wrong school to mess with. The worst part is that this corruption is not only happening in NYC, but also in Chicago, and other cities.
Yesterday, I posted an article about growing income inequality in New York City. This morning, I posted an editorial from Bloomberg News claiming that the Census Bureau was overstating the extent of poverty by not counting transfers like food stamps.
A reader sent this story, which should remind us that it is no picnic to be poor in America.
Let me add a personal note. I am not poor. I have never been poor. But I hope I never reach a point when I stop caring about others less fortunate than I. I hope I never become so hard-hearted that I say, like some others do now, that the poor don’t know how lucky they are, or that poverty is just an excuse for bad teachers, or that fixing schools (by privatizing them or firing their teachers) will fix poverty. Or that we don’t know how to end poverty so we shouldn’t do anything about it.
I think it is shameful that so many people live in desperate poverty in the richest nation in the world. I think it is shameful that so many children come to school hungry and so many families are homeless. I think it is shameful that we have so many billionaires. I don’t know how to reorganize the tax code. It doesn’t seem fair if it produces the society we have now, where some people struggle to survive while others count their yachts and helicopters. Something’s wrong with that.
If you happen to be in New Orleans this Saturday September 22, you won’t want to miss this fascinating panel discussion about “The Education Experiment: Petri Dish Reform in New Orleans and Louisiana.”
And even if you can’t get there for the panel discussion, open the link and see what they are talking about.
New Orleans is the first American city to wipe out public education and replace it with a charter system (80% of the students are in charters). Louisiana has passed legislation that will transfer $2 billion in public fund away from public schools to voucher schools.
Pay attention.
Diane Ravitch's blog 