Bill Phillis forwarded the email below to me. It comes from a teacher in the Lorain City public schools, which were the target of a state takeover under HB 70, a law that was hurriedly passed without debate. The schools were placed under the autocratic control of one man with unlimited powers. Bill Phillis knows the teacher’s name, as do I. She remains anonymous, for obvious reasons.
She writes.
Lorain City Schools are living a state takeover nightmare under HB70. Never in my career have I witnessed or experienced such dysfunction.
For the past two years the CEO has been chipping away at the dedicated, experienced staff. First he got rid of administrators. Then he went after the Title I and Special Education teachers. Now it’s the Union Building Reps.
Building Reps have been the voice for our students and teachers affected by the harm caused by this takeover. Botched initiatives such as dress code policy, completely overhauling the grading system after the school year began, and ever-changing discipline procedures have wreaked havoc across the district. Programs and Services have been cut. Curriculum narrowed. Short-cuts taken. Promises broken. All of this has a major impact in the classroom and teachers are advocating for what’s in the best interests of our students. Everyone deserves to teach and learn in a safe and healthy environment and I believe our union representatives are under attack for holding admin accountable to ensure such conditions.
What may be more frightening is that he’s now taking aim at students with his recent claim that those speaking out are being used for “political gain.” It seems anyone who speaks truth to power has become a target to silence.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Our union leaders haven’t been ousted yet (they are very good handmaidens to the top-level admins), but our Title 1 school is experiencing many of the same nightmares: rapid admin turnover, botched uniform initiative (imposing a charterlike veneer on high school students does NOT work), foisting competency-based curriculum (and watching a large proportion of freshmen fail to pass algebra), principals promising “accountability” via weekly data meetings, and non-exist discipline procedures that allow student athletes to be exempt from any consequences for poor grades and behavior that lands other students in in-school suspensions and alternative placements.
And coming for us in the fall is TNTP’s custom recommendation for how teachers need to teach. Sad.
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He’s got to be a liberal
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I loved teaching. I didn’t get to be in a classroom as a teacher long enough and would go back in a minute (well, if I didn’t have to pay back my pension!) if we could just expunge about the last 30 years of no nothing “expertise.”
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TNTP like so much of what we know about “reform” is based on false assumptions. It assumes business has all the answers for education. The board is dominated by business professionals, not educators. It was founded by Michelle Rhee, no need to say more. TNTP’s goal is to create turmoil and disruption, neither of which is good for students. Senior teachers are viewed as “dinos.” Students are only viewed as “data points.” Any professional teacher knows this is nonsense. Last year Ultican examined the work of TNTP and concluded the following:
“Instead of relying on our amazing stable of genuine scholars doing the hard work of researching, studying, practicing and writing, we are being bamboozled into adopting the theories of neophytes that would never bite the hand of their paymasters. If TNTP has a contract with a school district, it is certain that district is a target for privatization.
TNTP is important for the DPE movement. It produces papers that undermine teacher professionalism and it works to circumvent proven teacher training led by universities. It also works to gain control of pedagogy in a way that narrows curriculum. Why? It is all about cutting costs and business transactions. It does not improve the quality of education in America; it harms it.”https://tultican.com/2018/01/13/tntp-making-big-bucks-from-the-destroy-public-education-dpe-movement/
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And this is a surprise? To whom? They emptied NYC of the teachers voices, so they could do as they please. Y’all know my story by now, but I summarize it because it is the example that shows how the corrupt Ohio administration can to in in 2019
In 1998, when I was the NY State Educator of Excellence, the NYC school system was the largest in the nation, followed by LA. The war on teachers began here. How easy it would be to take out the professional teacher-practitioner anywhere (like in Ohio) if the could do it in NYC– “if you could do it THERE, you could do it ANYWHERE,” like the song goes.
Surely you have read this, written one a decade ago http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
They couldn’t say I was incompetent, I was filmed by Harvard and Pew as the NYC cohort — so — In a totally lawless act — Elaine Fink (the Superintendent of District 2 ( the tony NYC district which has the Met, The Mayor’s Mansion and the East Side, , the Theater District etc) wrote a letter. It did not ALLEGE that I had committed corporal punishment. It STATED that I had been Found Guilty (by her alone) AND IT WAS PUBLISHED TO THE ENTIRE DISTRICT. NOTHING COULD STOP ATTACKS ON TEACHERS in the nineties, and that is why we are where we are today.
Such outrageous behavior is nothing new, Ohio. Just like segregation and anti-Semitism and viral nationalism is not new).
The UFT looked the other way, as did unions across the nation, and tens of thousands of the top teacher-practitioners were thrown to the dogs!In LAUSD, Perdaily chronicled it!
http://www.perdaily.com/2015/01/were-you-terminated-or-forced-to-retire-from-lausd-based-on-fabricated-charges.html
Those poor Ohio teachers haven’t got a leg to stand on, if they could do this, in the nineties to ME! I was, for 6 month in a rubber room, as the new principal trashed my room, and ended the curricula that I wrote and instituted in that East Side school when it opened– a curricula that saw my students rise to the top of all the city tests. They were third in NYS when the new WRITING tests were instituted. I had to be thrown out. Such competence made me powerful.
TELL ME AGAIN ABOUT what’s afoot in OHIO????
I never WAS PRESENTED WITH the ‘allegation’ or a compliant.
The union ignored my pleas as I asked “WHY have I been taken from my practice.
There was no hearing. The Manhattan Bureau rep, Ivan Tiger hung up on me!
(Yeah, Diane. We need the unions, We need competent union leaders to fight for us! and Remember… Randi and the UFT have seen ALL my documents and tapes! …Ivan was thrown out… well… not exactly… he was allowed to move his ass to Albany. Only teachers lose everything.)
Can you spell Lawless?
Unions are the LAW for teachers. Unions have been eliminated across America, but the ILLUSION that teacher unions protect worthless teachers was sold in the media owned by the Educational Industrial Complex https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf
Here is LA again, where Lenny Isenberg pointed out the collusion of the union UTLA http://www.perdaily.com/2011/03/lausd-and-utla–connecting-the-dots-of-blattant-corruption.html which supported the dismissal process (so much for all the ranters who claim unions protect those ‘bad teachers)!
And just one more of the posts that told the SAD STORY OF THE ERADICATION of teachers in LAUSD: as former CTC ATTORNEY, Kathleen Carroll, laid out the UNHOLY ALLIANCE BETWEEN UNION & the PUBLIC EDUCATION PRIVATIZERS http://www.perdaily.com/2014/07/former-ctc-attorney-kathleen-carroll-lays-out-unholy-alliance-between-union-and-public-education-pri.html
Just to finish THE story of my fight to continue my celebrated practice in NYC: I hired an attorney for $26,000 and was returned to the school in which I had taught the entire seventh grade for eight years . Now I was ‘housed’ to a storeroom — where six kids were pulled out each period.*
*Keep in mind, that it was ONLY A YEAR EARLIERr when I was awarded the NYSEC award of excellence. Also, the assault on me occurred even as my work toured the nation with the LRDC (Univ.. of Pittsburgh) who published the Performance Standards at the end of the Pew Research. I was one of six teachers (OUT OF 20,000 studied for the research) who met the standards in a unique way.)
And FYI… I was returned to the rubber room, a few months later, when a letter was written by a teacher in another school, saying that I ‘wanted to kill the principal.’
LOL! Me? A killer?? BUT>>> “if you could do it in NYC to professional, experienced practitioners like Susan Lee Schwartz, you could do it ANYWHERE,” like in any of the 15,880 school systems run by sycophants and corrupt politicians, as in OHIO!.
So, when it is said that “It seems anyone who speaks truth to power has become a target to silence”… I say…not anyone… but definitely ALL teachers
… and of course IF the VOICE of the teaching professional in the practice , can be eliminated, why not go and take out the kids, too! Their voices need to be ended. Have we heard from the kids at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School – school lately?
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