The council member from southern Brooklyn suggested that marathon runners should deliver water, food, medicine and other supplies to elderly people trapped in high-rise buildings in the Coney Island area, who have no power. No elevator, no refrigerator, no heat.
Mayor Bloomberg says the Marathon will go on, no matter what.
When I printed the post by Kris L. Neilsen explaining why he quit his teaching job in North Carolina, I had no idea what the reaction would be.
It went viral.
Kris’s post has been read–to this point–by more than 130,000 people. It has been retweeted more than 800 times.
Previously, the post that had the largest readership was “I am a teacher. Let me teach,” read by 4,000 people.
For Kris’s post, more than 130,000 page views.
Wow.
I have only been blogging for six months, so maybe others have experienced posts that took off like a rocket.
This one was a meteor.
Every time I check, the numbers have soared yet again.
Kris captured the rage and frustration that many teachers feel.
He is sick of the disrespect.
He is tired of being micromanaged by people who know nothing about education.
He is fed up with the directives and mandates.
He wants to be treated as a professional.
He wants to exercise autonomy and judgment, as professionals should.
He wants to do what is best for his students, not comply with federal or state or local mandates.
Many others have written to say that Kris expressed their own feelings.
His story illustrates the sickness of what is now absurdly called “reform.”
It is nothing of the sort.
It is micromanagement by bureaucrats and politicians.
It will not improve education.
It sets up schools for failure and it demoralizes dedicated teachers.
The sooner the public understands what these people in Washington and in the state capitols are doing to the public schools, the sooner it will end.
Our job: Inform the public. Get the word out. Be strong.
But don’t quit. Be there when the madness collapses.
It will.
Mayor Bloomberg told President Obama not to visit NYC because he would be a distraction.
But he has given approval to the annual NYC marathon, which attracts thousands of runners from around the world and requires hundreds of police to supervise.
The borough president of Manhattan Scott Stringer has called for the cancellation of the marathon.
Justin Wedes of Occupy Wall Street has an even better idea. How about directing the energy of he runners to bring relief supplies to the communities that are suffering?
This is the message Justin sent on the NYC Parent website to Scott Stringer:
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer calls on Mayor Bloomberg to cancel the #NYCMarathon http://ow.ly/eY98f
Patrick — our hurricane relief coalition is interested in working with orgs/the city to develop an alternative Sandy Marathon of relief support that will visit most affected neighborhoods and get support/aid to them. Could you put me in touch with any interested parties?
-justin
—
Justin Wedes
Educator & Activist
Co-principal, Paul Robeson Freedom School
Twitter: @FreedomSchoolBK
Facebook: facebook.com/Education4Liberation
Web: http://paulrobesonfreedomschool.org/
This article explains succinctly why certain members of the billionaire boys club have decided that Washington State absolutely positively must have charter schools. Their recipe for school reform: the free market. And why not? The free market works for them. Will they put their own children (or in the case of the Bezos family, grandchildren) in charter schools? Don’t be silly.
A group called Education Voters of Idaho refused to disclose its donors until required to do so by a court order.
The biggest donor is a businessman who is an investor in K12, the online charter corporation ($250,000); the second biggest donor is Mayor Michael Bloomberg ($200,000).
EVI promotes the anti-union, anti-teacher, privatizing policies of state superintendent Tom Luna. Supporters of public education are seeking to repeal the Luna laws, which are deceptively called “Students Come First.” The phrase echoes Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst and Joel Klein’s Children’s First.
Luna has received heavy funding from technology corporations, and his laws mandate the purchase of a laptop computer for every student, and every student must take two online courses for graduation. They eliminate tenure and seniority. They require that student test scores count for 50% of every educator’s evaluation, including district superintendents, principals and teachers. All educators will have a one or two year contract. They initiate bonus pay based on test scores for all educators. Teachers will not get a written explanation if the principal decides to fire them.
A sample of one of the laws:
School districts no longer have to prove a financial emergency before reducing teacher numbers. School boards can reduce teacher numbers at their discretion but cannot consider seniority when deciding who to eliminate.
Yesterday the New Orleans Times-Picayune revealed that I had “cut a check” for school board candidate Karran Royal Harper. It’s true. I flooded her campaign with a contribution of $100.
That was intended to offset the $110,000 that other out-of-state donors like Joel Klein of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp and Reed Hastings of Netflix and Boykin Curry of Wall Street had given to Sarah Usdin of TFA-New Schools for New Orleans and the New Teacher Project.
With the infusion of big checks like mine, Karran might have raised as much as $6,000 or so by now. Those are the kinds of numbers that scare the corporate reformers.
I also disclosed a huge gift of $100 to the No on 1240 campaign in Washington State, which should effectively counter the millions put up on the other side by Bill Gates, Alice Walton, the Bezos family of amazon.com, and other donors.
In the interest of full disclosure, I here admit a third massive contribution. I gave $100 to Marie Corfield’s campaign for the New Jersey legislature.
There. I have revealed all my political contributions in 2012.
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone else did the same? I’d like to know who is putting up the money to subsidize attacks on public education. I’d like to know who is promoting the privatization of this most basic of democratic institutions.
Andrea Gabor asks whether Brockton High will do a better job in the selection of a successor than Mayor Bloomberg.
Brockton High is a large high school in Massachusetts that successfully turned around its performance through teamwork and coloration, not punishment, closing and privatization.
Now that the principal is retiring, Gabor hopes the successor will be a knowledgeable insider, not a “star” intent on rocking the boat.
Gabor contrasts the steady progress at Brockton High with the upheavals in New York City, where the mayor replaced Joel Klein with a novice who failed.
I question her claim that Klein and Bloomberg “decentralized” decision-making. For the past decade, every important decision in New York City regarding education policy has been made in City Hall, not the schools.
Two California teachers have created a rap video to exhort peope to vote “yes” on Proposition 30, which raises taxes on incomes over $250,000 to fund education, and to vote “no” on Proposition 32, which is intended to take away automatic contributions by members to their unions, a longtime goal of anti-union activists.
The video describes the “pre-school to prison pipeline.”
Pay now or pay later.
Long ago there was an organization called Stand for Children that advocated for children and their public schools. Unfortunately, the organization jumped on the money train and joined the corporate reform movement. Now it is flush with cash. It still pretends to care about children but it uses its clout to strip teachers of any rights and to advocate for privatization. It is anti-teacher, anti-union, and anti-public education. Some of its former supporters now refer to the organization as Stand on Children.
In Colorado, where there is a heated contest for control of the Legislature, Stand on Children removed the mask. It has endorsed five Republicans who support privatization. Corporate money is bolstering the GOP campaigns, along with Stand on Children and Wall Street hedge fund groups devoted to privatization of Colorado’s public schools.
If you live in Colorado, please support these five Democrats:
Evie Hudak (SD 19)
Andy Kerr (SD 22)
Daniel Kagan (HD 3)
Brittany Petterson (HD 28)
Max Tyler (HD 23)
Public education advocates also urge a NO vote on Bond 3B, which allocates disproportionate funding to charter schools while neglecting the needs of students who are poor, black, and Hispanic and attending overcrowded schools.
Opponents of the bond say:
• A zip code shouldn’t determine the quality of a child’s education. This bond reinforces that race and class still largely determine which children are prioritized depending on where they live.
• Though SW Denver’s low-income children have suffered years of chronic overcrowding, there is little money allocated through the bond to address the needs of the 12 SW Denver schools which are over 100% capacity.
• Lincoln High School will remain overcrowded. Lincoln is the only high school designated by the district for English Language Learners. Many students must travel from throughout the district to attend this program.
• Charter schools will get millions of taxpayer dollars at the expense of neighborhood schools. Nearly 40% of non- technology monies will go to select charter schools. Of the $119M for new facility capacity, $80.6M will go to charter schools directly or through co-locations.
• Nearly $40 million or 32% of the new facility bond funds will go to Stapleton even though there is space in nearby schools. Manual High (4.4 miles from central Stapleton) and George Washington High (4.9 miles) have a combined 1500 open seats, and Smiley Middle School (2 miles) has 381 open seats. The planned location of the proposed Stapleton high school, at 56th and Spruce St, is 3.8 miles from central Stapleton.
• The amount to build a Stapleton high school is more than all bond monies allocated for the high schools of East, George Washington, North, South, Kennedy, Lincoln and TJ combined.
Into my mailbox came this link, which suggests there are some mighty big winners in the new education world of New Orleans.
Read it and gasp.
Advocates say that New Orleans is a national model. The documents here raise questions about who benefits from the avalanche of money poured into the city’s new way of doing business.
Diane Ravitch's blog 