Mark Naison salutes a principal in the Bronx, Luis Torres, who has overshadowed the Success Academy co-located in his Building because his school is more innovative, more dynamic than the test-taking machine at SA.
Mark calls him “a genius.”
“One of the most brilliant and important achievements of PS 55’s visionary Principal, Luis E Torres, is that through innovative programming and a relentless public relations campaign, he has totally overshadowed the Success Academy Charter School co-located in his building! Normally, Success Academy tries to humiliate and stigmatize the public schools it is co-located by pointing out how much better it’s performance is! Not at PS 55! Here, the action, innovation and excitement is all with the public school, whether it is the scientific and pedagogical innovations of the Green Bronx Machine, the school based agriculture program housed at the School; the full service Medical clinic Principal Torres has created; or the school’s championship step team and basketball team! People from all over the city and the nation come to see what Principal Torres has done; while Success Academy stays in the background.”
Was it competition that spurred Torres’ creativity? Or was he an exemplary principal who wanted the best for his students regardless of the competition?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In my opinion we need many more exactly like him!
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Oh, it was surely the competition, Diane. Without Success Academy, Mr. Torres surely would have coasted along as we know he was before the co-location.
Well done, Luis Torres and PS 55!
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“…by pointing out how much better it’s performance is!”
By what metric? I hope we’re not talking about standardized tests here.
And for that matter, how is any of this “innovative”? Innovative means new and original. There’s nothing new or original about medical clinics, basketball teams or even agricultural programs.
Don’t get me wrong, this is exactly the kind of thing I like to hear about. And, yes, every school should be doing these kinds of things, as appropriate to their unique environment and population. But please let’s not fall into the trap of using the rephormers’ language. We don’t need “innovation” or “performance”. We need good, enriched education. That’s what Principal Torres and PS 55 are providing and that’s what they should be proud of.
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I dunno, sure don’t see medical clinics or agricultural programs in pubschs around these parts– sounds innovative to me. If I had such things onboard– or anything else rising above the humdrum drill&kill CCSS-based academics, I’d publicize them!
I have to agree, I would not focus on faux-measured ‘performance’ [e.g. test scores] to one-up the co-located charter– but I would trumpet such things as grad rate, college- & job-placements, & interesting post-secondary pursuits of my grads.
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Such essential logic: “let’s not fall into the trap of using the rephormers’ language.”
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The only thing I don’t understand is the claim that Success Academy stays in the background. On the contrary, according to this recent article in “The Nation” (which I believe refers to a statement in Eva Moskowitz’ new self-aggrandizing book), this is what Moskowitz says:
“Moskowitz urges those who would “try to explain away our results” to consider Bronx 2, a school in the network whose demographics are similar to nearby PS 55. ”
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-miseducation-of-eva-moskowitz/
That doesn’t seem to be staying in the background. That is Moskowitz’ all out challenge in which she claims her school is far superior to PS 55 due ONLY to her own remarkable abilities to turn all students regardless of their special needs or at-risk status into top performing scholars.
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As an educator and a Bronx resident, I salute you, Principal Torres.
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Points well taken, dienne77!
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Seems as though he delivered on what the clients wanted and needed, just what the free market people talk about. And he isn’t a private
money-making business. Maybe people first isn’t so inefficient in education.
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This means the autocratic, corporate reformers that want to close the public schools and privatize them to grow their wealth and power off the public’s money will have to “trump” up lies to get that principal fired.
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It’s always gratifying to see a principal making the most of the abundant resources provided by the taxpayers of NYC and NYS–$26,191 per student as of the 2015-2016 school year, the most recent year for which official audited data is available.
http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/09/X055/AboutUs/Statistics/expenditures.htm
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Once again Tim offers misleading statistics. Is it a character flaw? I notice that he plays the right wing Republican game of accusing his critics of his own misdeeds in order to distract from them.
To wit:
That 26,191 per pupil includes over $62,000 per pupil for the all the special education students that certain co-located charters refuse to teach.
It is especially ironic that Tim “accidentally” made that mistake after his insistence that no Success Academy school should have any obligation to teach its share of special needs kids and there is nothing wrong with sending them to PS 55 so their budget can pay for those students.
And Tim also offers a “per pupil” cost for public school students that includes the SUBSIDY those public school students provide to the rich charter chain that just got $20 million donation but wants the poorest students in co-located public schools like PS 55 to support the rich charters’ students from their own budget.
The children at PS 55 are charged for building maintainance, transportation, school security, custodial services, energy, and the debt service that PAYS for the building that the charter piggy backs on.
If Tim had an ounce of integrity, he would THANK those 92% poor students for using their per pupil allocation to subsidize the much richer Success Academy students in their building. Not trying to cut their budget by using misleading statistics that conveniently leave out that a good portion of their per pupil allocation subsidizes Success Academy and other charters so they can save their money to pay their CEO an outrageously high salary. And of course, pay PR firms to hire minions like Tim to post misleading statistics designed to deceive.
Tim, remember when Eva Moskowitz challenged anyone to prove that Success Academy Bronx 2 didn’t teach the exact same demographic as PS 55?
Are you willing to acknowledge she was wrong? Or is that not allowed?
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Tim also didn’t mention the cost of living in NYC. In fact, I’ve never read anyone make that comparison.
The cost of living factors into what teachers are paid unless we want our teachers to earn poverty wages equal to what WalMart pays its employees so they have to work two or three jobs to survive.
NYC is listed by Expatistan as having the highest cost of living in North America vs Tucson, Arizona that’s ranked 101 on their list. Monthly rent in Tucson for a 900 square fot place is listed at $1,072 vs $3,632 in NYC.
https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/index/north-america
Glass Door reports that the average pay for a teacher in Tucson Unified School District is $38,463 annually vs. “The typical New York City Department of Education Teacher salary is $64,969. Teacher salaries at New York City Department of Education can range from $45,000-$110,451.”
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/New-York-City-Department-of-Education-Teacher-Salaries-E105247_D_KO38,45.htm
Conclusion, the average pay for a NYC teacher is a bit more than twice what a Tucson teacher earns, but the rent is more than three times higher in NYC along with other higher costs of living expenses.
Let’s not forget that most if not all of the corrupt and disgusting oligarch billionaires behind the destruction of labor unions and the public sector are also against minimum wage laws, livable wages, benefits, and so much more. It is obvious that they don’t care if everyone else has to struggle to survive as the few continue to add to their great wealth and power at the expense of hundreds of millions or billions of people.
How much does someone like the two Koch brothers, David and Charles, need to live like a billionaire — more than $40 billion each or just $1 or $2 billion each?
There should be a limit on how much a person can be worth and every cent beyond that limit must go to support the social safety net for the rest of us and also pay down the national federal debt?
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Lloyd, your numbers are off. I’ll provide links to the sources for these numbers in a separate post.
The median teacher salary in Bronx CSD 12, where PS 55 is located, is $71,306.
The median home value in zip code 10456, where PS 55 is located, is an extremely affordable (for NYC) $348,300. The housing stock ranges from freestanding homes with yards and garages to full-service mid-rise coops and condos. The neighborhood is very safe. The property taxes are one-fourth or less of what you’d pay on a comparable assessment in the suburbs, and the public schools like PS 55 are obviously great–it’s simply puzzling why so many Bronx teachers live an hour or more away (grueling 60-90+ minute drives to Suffolk, Rockland, etc) and pay way MORE for housing. I wonder why they do this?
The median household–household, not individual–income in Bronx County is $34,299. The median teacher all by herself is making twice that. Even a brand-new DOE D12 teacher (~$54,000) makes 157% of her district’s median household salary.
New York does have a high cost of living, especially for the working poor, but it is less daunting when you factor out the luxury markets in sections of the city, and the racially restricted, exclusionarily zoned suburbs. If the traditional public schools in the Bronx, upper Manhattan, and central Brooklyn are good enough that we can insist that the children living there must attend them, then they are certainly good enough for teachers, and they are absolutely affordable on a teacher’s salary.
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I refuse to accept your alternative facts, your fake news.
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That’s a reasonable response. You definitely should be skeptical of salary data that journalists have FOILed from the state education department, and as for the Census, please, don’t even get me started!
Heckuva living room you’ve got here, Diane.
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When there are so many sources of data to pick from, it is very easy for extremists to only believe the crap they are fed to mislead them. You scoff at the census. You doubt the census. That is hilarious. Where do you think all of the other sources get their data?
Every data gathering agency is going to have problems. Nothing is perfect. But those data gathering agencies like the Census hire people to work for them from both political parties and independent voters. They don’t just hire liberals or conservatives.
If we turn our backs on data gathered by the Census, the IRS, Social Security, and other public sector fact gathering agencies, who do we trust, the data gathered by the Alt-Right conspiracy theory generating media or from corporations or from think tanks funded by extremist billionaires like the Koch brothers or Walton family who deliberately cherry pick the data they want the fools that support them to get.
For instance, do to all the manipulation of the data that comes from the hate-filled, lying Alt-Right (the real fake media), we now have several private sector media fact checkers like Politifact. And we also have to be careful of the fact checkers because the Alt-Right has launched their own fact check sites to support their lies and conspiracy theories.
North Carolina teacher pay: $50,000 or not?
http://www.politifact.com/north-carolina/article/2017/feb/03/north-carolina-teacher-pay-50000-or-not-politician/
How about fact-checking New York City – of course you can’t trust the Department of Education that actually has access to the real facts.
“For 2017-18, starting salaries for teachers will range from $54,000 (bachelor’s degree, no prior teaching experience) to $81,694 (master’s degree, eight years teaching experience, plus additional coursework). New teachers with a master’s degree but no prior teaching experience earned $60,704. Teachers’ salaries increase each year for more experience as well as education. In addition, from 2015 to 2018, all salary steps will increase about 13 percent, with the most experienced teachers earning $119,000 annually.”
http://teachnyc.net/your-career/salary-and-benefits
The next link comes with a chart that shows how many teachers earn how much money. The number that earned the top salary is very small. There is a lot more data below that chart at the top.
http://teachnyc.net/your-career/salary-and-benefits
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Sorry, Lloyd, the gaslighting stuff doesn’t work on me. You, of course, are the one scoffing at the Census. The salary data I provided is taken straight from official payroll data that the NYC DOE is required to file with the state ed department. Read the source documents!
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You are a trickster.
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Avg D9 salary: http://www.syracuse.com/schools/index.ssf/2016/02/teacher_salaries_in_ny_look_up_compare_any_school_district.html?appSession=37AY8ARIKHGFGPEEM6Z03P4274YKH1QV7V3874QET3H9659PPW9B5W9YYT0A9RKZR0O94R2YEBM072Y6F34452N5Q00640950G427FUK273NWI00M0F689A12NX25LXC&RecordID=6062&PageID=8&PrevPageID=2&cpipage=1&CPIsortType=&CPIorderBy=&cbCurrentRecordPosition=32&Mod0LinkToDetails=True
Avg real estate costs: https://www.zillow.com/new-york-ny-10456/home-values/
Census data: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/bronxcountybronxboroughnewyork/AGE765210
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A typo in my first reply to Lloyd–PS 55 is in District 9, not 12.
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Lloyd,
Teachers’ salaries aren’t even that high in NYC. Notice that Tim did not do a direct comparison of salaries. He did a direct comparison of “per pupil costs”.
In fact, it costs far more to teach a child with serious special needs which is why Tim supports Eva Moskowitz’ refusal to teach them if she doesn’t want to. What’s dishonest, however, is for Tim to then include those children’s costs when he claims that a co-located public school that teaches the kids that SA refuses to teach spends too much “per pupil”.
Furthermore, the students at PS 55 are SUBSIDIZING the students at Success Academy. The per pupil costs charged to PS 55 include many of the costs that are involved in providing the the “free rent” to charters.
Finally, one of the most dishonest things about the pro-charter shills like Tim is they believe that only public school students should be charged for past debt for retired teachers.
For decades, the politicians have underfunded retirement liabilities in order to keep taxes on the very rich low. They said “oh don’t worry, we have plenty of money, let’s give rich people a big tax break”.
Now, when money is owed to retirees, they say “let’s just charge CURRENT public school students for that cost as part of their per pupil money.”
Every child that chooses a charter means more of those historical costs paid for by the remaining public school students.
In the pro-charter folks’ ideal world, the 50% of the kids left in public schools would be burdened with all the costs of underfunded pension liabilities for the last 20 years while the 50% in charter schools are absolved from paying for it.
It’s dishonest through and through. Shills like Tim don’t want to have a discussion about costs. They want to burden public school students with subsidizing costs of charter school kids so they can do what Tim just did and claim that they are awash in money receiving over $25,000 per student.
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What you said and more: Most if not all charter schools like Success Academy don’t even offer a pension with a retirement. In fact, charter schools pay teachers less, a lot less, while demanding more from them, with little or no benefits at all and no job security while forcing those teachers to abuse students or else.
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Tim, I ‘d like to comment on the stats you quoted (8:14am 11/22) to support that PS 55 teachers make more than enough to buy home/ raise family in the safe, family-oriented, affordable neighborhoods nearby.
You don’t sound like someone who’s lived in NYC. I did for 18 yrs (MH upper E side 4 yrs, upper W side 2 yrs, Park Slope Bklyn 12 yrs incl raising kids to ages 1.5, 3.5, & 5.5 yrs old). That incl home ownership exp: 3 yrs 2br co-op & 10 yrs 2-fam brownstone.
It’s possible to get input for your proposition, but not from averaged stats. You’d need to pick an address & research reddit, niche, city-data et al for on-the-ground up-to-date reports from residents. The area is a patchwork of good/ bad/ ok but sketchy sections to live in. Like much of NYC but more so here, as old established nbhds were wiped out/ rebuilt/ splintered/ regrouped time & again by public projects. You’ll have an area with good policing/ parks/pools marred by mini- around large section 8 bldgs. Bad encircling areas means petty criminals crossing thru your ok area at any time of day or night. There are wonderful pockets where movement is restricted to just a couple of blocks in one or two directions.
About the only generalizations that hold: the South Bronx is still slowly rising from its ’70’s nadir; there is still a lot of poverty, but increasingly there are areas where middle-class folks who like vibrant diverse urban living w/a reasonable degree of safety will enjoy living. Affordable rent for singles/ young childless couples and only 20mins subway ride from Manhattan night life. That by no means makes it a no-brainer for buying a home & raising a family. Neighborhoods like these are small and change quickly. Longer-term investment/ commitment to the community is still a roll of the dice, requiring a bit of the pioneer mentality.
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Tim,
Are you still kowtowing to right wing Republican billionaire Dan Loeb, the CEO of Success Academy? Did you see his latest racist e-mail attacks on a NYC education official?
You’ve already made it clear that Eva Moskowitz’ embrace and adoration of Betsy DeVos isn’t worth of criticism.
Now will you try to defend Dan Loeb for his nasty attacks on deputy Mayor Richard Buery?
Here is what the guy who oversees Success Academy AND who supports all the Republicans’ plans to cut money from programs that help the poor says:
“There is right and wrong and you put your bureaucracy, the union puppets you serve, over the interest of little vulnerable black children and their families,”
“little vulnerable black children and their families”???? Are those the same children that Eva Moskowitz and Dan Loeb insist are acting out so violently in their charters’ Kindergarten classes and keep suspending?
Yes, Tim, no one cares more about the “little vulnerable black children and their families” than the Success Academy board chairman who has already been caught making racist remarks and who gives millions to elect the right wing Republicans in Congress.
Keep fighting your good fight to tell us how much the woman who endorsed Betsy DeVos cares. And how much Dan Loeb cares. But I suspect you don’t believe it yourself.
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LOVE!!!!!
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School ag programs and medical care at schools is neither new nor innovative. They are part of a system of service delivery that I studied in my MS in Education program more than 20 years ago. What is unusual, though, is that Principal Torres actually did it, followed through, and kept it going. Bravo!
As for Mr. Tim: if the students and families are using the school-based clinic, they probably need one. What’s more important than having healthy kids? If they’re not healthy, and if their parents and other family members aren’t healthy, the students won’t learn as well as they could. Then you’d be wasting your tax dollars. Wouldn’t you rather make sure that your tax dollars were successful in helping to educate children?
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I’m a big supporter of school health programs. In New York City they aren’t run by the Department of Education; they are usually provided by privately managed (gasp) hospital networks and funded by a combination of donations, grants, and Medicaid reimbursement.
Fortunately, this school building’s health care partner, which has operated for years in quite a few Bronx schools, also provides full coverage to the many socioeconomically disadvantaged children who attend the charter school.
http://www.montefiore.org/school-health-program-ps55-success-bronx-academy-2
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Tim,
You must have been thrulled asone city hospital after another was taken over by a for profit chain, including the one that saved my life when I had a pulmonary embolism. The forprofit chain ran it a few years, then backed out when they didn’t profit. The hospital closed. Nice work.
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I’m happy that this particular hospital was there when you needed it, but it was first closed by SUNY trustees who (correctly) noted that not enough cash-paying, privately insured, or voucher-holding patients were choosing it for healthcare, even though all its doctors, nurses, and staff were certified and put through the same training and credentialing as the personnel at Columbia-Presbyterian or Mount Sinai. I don’t recall anyone proposing to draw a box on the map around LICH and insisting the people living within it go nowhere else for their healthcare.
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The hospital is now gone. If it had not existed, I would have died. That’s how close I was to death, with both lungs full of blood.
Thanks for caring, Tim.
As the public sector disappears, gobbled up by greed, we will remember you, anonymously of course.
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Tim,
According to the link you provided, Montefiore Hospital is providing services to a charter school co-located in the building.
There is a cost to housing it in the building as well as other costs that are not ALL covered by charity. But don’t worry, the much more disadvantaged students at PS 55 are once again using their per pupil allocation to cover the free riders at Success Academy Bronx 2. PS 55 students will be charged more so that Success Academy Bronx 2 and Tim can point to their high per pupil allocation as a way to attack them. Talk about Tim being ungrateful for all that those PS 55 students provide to his beloved Success Academy. Instead of thanking those children for subsidizing his beloved charter so that Eva Moskowitz has money to pay overpriced PR firms, Tim implies PS 55 spends too much per student.
Must be nice to get a $20 million dollar donation one week and demand that the poorest kids subsidize your students’ health care AND your school rent.
It’s interesting that Eva Moskowitz and the Republican Party agree on a few things. The first — that Betsy DeVos was a terrific choice for Sec. of Education. The second — that there’s nothing wrong with the richest charter chains paying less while the poorest public school students are charged more. Just like the new Republican tax plan!
Third- that Dan Loeb is a terrific guy even if he does so often get caught attacking and demeaning respected African-Americans who won’t do his bidding. Once again, the leader of the Board that oversees the entire Success Academy network gets caught demonstrating exactly what he thinks about African-Americans. As long as they do exactly what Dan Loeb tells them to do, it’s all good. No wonder Eva Mvksowitz is so enamored of Dan Loeb. That’s how she treats the students in her school. As long as they do exactly what they are told by their Kindergarten teachers and perform exactly as they are expected to perform on state tests, they are good. If not, well, we all know what happens then.
Do what the Success Academy board chair Dan Loeb does and demean and humiliate them!
It’s interesting that the two right wing Republicans that Eva Moskowitz has the most respect for — Betsy DeVos and Dan Loeb — are both very very rich. I’m sure that their money has nothing to do with why Eva Moskowitz is so fond of Betsy DeVos and Dan Loeb. It’s simply that she shares their values. And wants all the students in Success Academy to share them, too.
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Karen Bayne, just because it can’t hurt to be crystal clear: the healthcare services at PS 55 do not cost the students or the NYC DOE anything–not a cent of that $26,000+ went to pay for it. The hospital provides all of the doctors, nurses, dentists, social workers, and supplies. The services are provided in the 400-sq ft nurse’s office. Montefiore started this program in 1983 and has expanded to additional school buildings like PS 55/Bronx Success #2 as funding allows.
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With all that billionaire money, Success charters should be providing something extra, right?
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You follow Success much more closely than I do, but I believe they use their philanthropic money almost exclusively to cover the costs of quickly opening so many new schools, and after that they expect not only schools but also the entire management organization to run solely–salaries, benefits, supplies, outreach, etc–on the per-pupil funding they receive from the city and state, which for the 2017-2018 school year comes to a very lean $14,527 per gen ed student).
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“the healthcare services at PS 55 do not cost the students or the NYC DOE anything–not a cent of that $26,000+ went to pay for it. ”
That is not true.
The ENTIRE BUILDING is paid for by the public school students and charged as part of that per pupil allocation.
Everything in it — including that fairly large nurse’s office — is paid for by the pupils of PS 55. They pay their own share and then they are also charged for the space that Success Academy uses.
Tim, one of the reasons we all suspect you are VERY close to Eva Moskowitz is your occasional slip-ups like you just did.
How would you know how big the nurses’ office at PS 55 is unless you know it from your inside knowledge of Success Academy and the Bronx 2 school that is located there? 400 square feet?
And please don’t pretend you are just a disinterested observer who somehow knew how to look up the size of a NYC school building’s nurse’s office.
Are you Eva Moskowitz herself? Or just a very good friend? You know far too much to be who you pretend to be.
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Eva wouldn’t have enough time for this. She is too busy being a tyrant and all around ass wipe. Tim is allegedly her minion, programmed to think the way he does or paid to do what he’s told. The extremist funded Alt-Right machine is all about lies, manipulation and pushing conspiracy theories without a shred of proof. The foundation of that is PSYOPs.
“Psychological operations (PSYOP) are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”
“Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media”
But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage
Follow the “GOLD” Alt-Right brick road from the Koch brothers, ALEC, the Walton family, Robert Mercer and his daughter, et al. and it all leads to PSYOPs. Bannon is a willing minion of the billionaire oligarchs.
Conclusion: Tim, and others like him or her, is on this site leaving comments to challenge and cast doubt on reason, truth, and real facts. It’s all part of the PSYOPs campaign from the far Alt-Right that wants to make America WHITE Again. They equate GREAT with WHITE. But not only WHITE. It is sun-shine clear that the few want a feudal system where the billionaires are the nobility and the majority of people their serfs and slaves with only one freedom and that is to die once they are no longer useful to the oligarchs.
Have you seen this yet: “Big Money Rules” by Diane Ravitch dated December 7, 2017, in the New York Review of Books. It’s available online now.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/07/big-money-rules/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Louise%20Bourgeois%20billionaires%20Anni%20Albers&utm_content=NYR%20Louise%20Bourgeois%20billionaires%20Anni%20Albers+CID_e1dc911ab5788f8fed9b7ba60b49c1a8&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Big%20Money%20Rules
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Oh, my, Lloyd, you’ve wandered way off course again.
As any New York City public school parent could tell you, the NYC DOE maintains an online portal for all 1800+ of its schools that offers quick access to a ton of reports and summaries, including detailed descriptions of the condition of school facilities and a room-by-room rundown of how space is utilized. It took me two minutes to look this stuff up.
http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/09/X055/AboutUs/Statistics/default.htm
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Ignore Tim’s diversion. Another revisionist tactic. Bait and switch.
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Here is the space survey, Lloyd, since you seem to be having trouble finding it.
Click to access X055.pdf
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I’m not interested in the space survey you found. I respect every individual’s right to their own opinion, but that doesn’t mean I respect every individual’s opinion. For instance, I don’t respect your opinion or the facts you dig up to support your thinking. But I accept the facts of others on this site that left comments and have countered your claims with their own evidence.
How many times have voters supported so-called school choice?
How many times have voters supported so-called vouchers?
In addition, Eva Moskowitz and her Success Academies are not schools. They are child abusing centers of mental and physical torture where parents have no voice. If a parent speaks out and complains or protests, Eva gets rid of their children from her profit generating school because freedom of expression does not exist where Eva rules.
I reject the United States of Koch, the United States of Walton, The United States of ALEC, the United States of Gates, the United States of Broad, The United States of Hedge Funds, et al.
Every worker should belong to a democratic labor union and pay union dues so the people have a voice to counter the agenda of the autocratic, tyrannical billionaire oligarchs.
The public sector should not be privatized.
Public schools should be community-based, democratic, transparent, non-profit, and decisions should be made from the bottom by teachers just like they are in Finland.
I stand against the existence of ALL publicly funded private sector schools.
You are wasting your time attempting to convince me that you are right with your cherry-picked facts. I know your thinking is wrong because I was a public school teacher for thirty years struggling to teach in a wrong-headed, top down, micromanaged, decision-making environment.
Teachers and children cannot be judged from test scores. Schools are not failing because test scores say they are. I grew up hating tests. I hated tests as a teacher. I still hate tests. There is only one function for tests in a classroom and that is when teachers create a test and use the results to help them improve their own teaching.
Children are not numbers used to make profits.
Teachers are not numbers used to label them as failures.
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^^^”You follow Success much more closely than I do…”
lol! You just happened to know the size of the nurse’s office at SA Bronx 2. But maybe when you say you don’t “follow” SA closely what you mean is your close your eyes to any criticism.
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Tim says:
“As any New York City public school parent could tell you…..”
As a NYT public school parent, I can tell you that Tim’s lie that more than a tiny % of the parents at a typical NYC public school could tell you how large their own child’s nurses office is, let alone would know how to find out the size of a random public school’s nurses office is about as absurd as they come. Nor would they be able to “tell you” how to look it up on the portal.
Why are Eva Moskwoitz’ minions so desperate to lie these days? Are things really so bad that SA supporters can’t figure out how to address questions without outright lying?
“Here is the space survey, Lloyd, since you seem to be having trouble finding it…” says “random public school parent Tim”.
Tim, you are digging yourself into a HUGE hole because even Success Academy parents who are happy that their kids are there know that the chances that ANY parent in a public school knows how to find the size of a random public school’s nurse’s office from some link on the DOE website is about zero percent.
But maybe you can find a few SA parents who have the same moral compass as Eva Moskowitz who will post here agreeing with you about what “any NYC public school parent” could tell you about the size of a random public school’s nurse’s office.
I suspect if they are reading this they recognize dishonesty if they see it and probably a few who are already disgusted with Eva Moskowitz embrace and adoration of Betsy DeVos might think twice about enrolling their kid next year.
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