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Judge Rules City May Not Close 24 NYC Schools

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2012 //
11

The city and the teachers’ union went to court to battle over the city’s plan to “turnaround” 24 schools by firing thousands of teachers.

The judge listened to the arguments, retired to her chambers, and returned seven minutes later to say that she was sustaining the arbitrator’s decision. The city may not lay off the teachers. It violates their contract.

This battle involves more than 3,000 teachers and 30,000 students. No one is sure how the schools will be staffed when schools opens in a few weeks. No one knows which teachers have found other jobs and which will return.

The schools, having been labeled as “failures,” have suffered enormous blows to their reputation in the community. If past experience is any guide, parents will be reluctant to enroll their children in a school that has been targeted for closure and that is now on life support for another year.

Just keep saying to yourself, that is reform, this is not reform, this is reform, this is not reform.

Or just call it chaos.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, NYC, Unions

What Chris Cerf Needs to Know About Albert Shanker

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2012 //
44

Chris Cerf, the acting commissioner of education in New Jersey, published an article today defending charter schools, which have become very controversial in his state. They have become controversial because the state is trying to push them into suburbs that have great public schools and don’t want them, and they have become controversial because the public is beginning to revolt against for-profit charters, especially for-profit online charters, which Cerf is promoting.

People in New Jersey are beginning to realize that every dollar that goes to a privately managed charter school is a dollar taken away from their own public school. Because the budget is not expanding, it IS a zero sum game. Fixed costs do not decline when children leave the school.

Despite Governor Chris Christie’s frequent belittling of New Jersey teachers and schools, New Jersey is one of the highest performing states in the nation on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. So, citizens of the state have good reason to oppose the Christie administration’s efforts to turn more taxpayer dollars over to private entrepreneurs.

In his article, Chris Cerf writes:

“...it is often forgotten that one of the first advocates for public charter schools was Albert Shanker, the former New York City teachers’ union leader, who supported charter schools as a way to empower public school educators to innovate.”

Chris Cerf needs to know what Albert Shanker really said about charter schools. This is what he would learn if he read pp. 122-124 of my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System:

1. Albert Shanker was president of the American Federation of Teachers, not the New York City union, when he first proposed the charter school idea in 1988.

2. Shanker proposed that any new charter should be jointly approved by the union and the school district. More than 90% of charters today are non-union. Shanker would not have approved any school that did not respect the rights of teachers to bargain collectively.

3. Shanker proposed that new charters should target the hardest-to-educate students: those who had dropped out or were failing. He never imagined that charters would have a selection process or that charters might avoid students with disabilities or English-language learners as is now the case in many charters.

3. Shanker wanted charters to collaborate, not compete, with existing public schools. He proposed them as a way to solve the problems of public schools. Whatever they learned, he said, should be shared with the public schools that sponsored them.

4. MOST IMPORTANT: In 1993, when Shanker saw that the charter idea was going to be used to privatize public education, he turned against charter schools. He opposed the takeover of the charter idea by corporations, entrepreneurs, and for-profit vendors. He became a vocal opponent of charter schools when he realized that his idea was embraced by “the education industry.” In his weekly column in The New York Times, Albert Shanker repeatedly denounced charter schools, vouchers, and for-profit management as “quick fixes that won’t fix anything.”

Here is an idea for Commissioner Cerf. You can fix the charter idea if you align it with Shanker’s original idea.

First, insist that all new charters are endorsed by the local school district and the union representing teachers.

Second, bar all for-profit management.

Third, insist that all charters recruit and enroll only the lowest-performing students, the students who have dropped out, and the students who are doing poorly in their present public school.

Fourth, require that charters collaborate with the public schools and share whatever they learn.

Fifth, to truly revive the spirit of Shanker’s proposal, bar all corporate-owned charter chains. Authorize only stand-alone charters that are created by teachers and parents in the district to serve the children of that district. No chains, just local charters committed to that community.

So, yes, Commissioner Cerf, you are on the right track when you quote Albert Shanker. Now, if you take his advice, you can save the charter school idea from the privatizers and profiteers who are giving it a bad name.

Categories Cerf, Chris, Charter Schools, New Jersey, Unions

CTU Strike Humor: What About Those Greedy Teachers?

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
2

Last Stand for Children First is a very funny Twitter site. The person who created it does a great job of impersonating trust-fund babies who know everything about how to fix public schools without ever setting foot into one.

Follow the outrageous, sophomoric, enjoyable humor of Last Stand for Children First on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/LS4C1

Categories Chicago, Humor, Unions

Is Ohio the Worst State?

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2012 //
3

As we scour the nation to identify the state that has reached the zenith in its efforts to destroy our public education system and to discourage its teachers, our eyes must necessarily turn to Ohio. Here a Tea Party Governor, John Kasich, is working in tandem with a Republican-dominated legislature to do their level best to achieve the dubious distinction of creating the most toxic school reforms in the nation. Readers may recall the battle last year when Kasich’s SB 5–which banned collective bargaining–was rejected by 61% of the voters in a referendum. Some observers thought he made a mistake by including police and firefighters along with teachers. That created a united front against SB 5. Of course, that was a minor detail in the ongoing effort to reduce the status of  teachers and their ability to have a say in what happens in the schools of Ohio. Ohio is incredibly welcoming to for-profit charters and for-profit cybercharters.

Here are some readers’ comments:

Ohio is beginning the same idiotic system this coming school year, only 50 percent of our evaluation will be based on student test scores. I hope none of my students have an ear infection, are hungry,had their grammy put in the hospital or their dog run away because my future would be at risk. Does anyone see how absurd this is?

Here in Ohio we have been under attack on a state and local level. We have a union busting governor who tried to take on the firefighters, police and teachers with his infamous SB5 which was put to a vote in 2011 and defeated by a large majority. Recently, the mayor of Cleveland (also in charge of schools because of legislation from a previous mayor), went on the assault of the bargaining rights of teachers and of course it was essential that his proposed legislation be pushed through in Columbus quickly for the sake of the children.
In my own smaller suburban school district, Brecksville-Broadview Heights, 3 recently voted in school board members won the election based on the premise they were going to give the voters a school district they can afford. We have earned an excellent with distinction report card with the state of Ohio 13 years! However, these school board members have been quoted(not publicly of course) that they were going to “break that union”, “that if you teach in Brecksville you should not be able to afford to live there”,”that the proposed 10 percent pay cut would not affect that many families because most of the teachers are women and it is only a second income”. The school board’s proposed contract also would take away our insurance and replace it with a low level plan, decrease our prep/planning time by 50 percent and even has a clause whereby a teacher drinking an adult beverage at a restaurant, imbibes a little too much could be “reported” to the school board and be reprimanded.
Please check out link on our very public web page Brecksville-Broadview Heights schools an click on the link to “Negotiations” and read the half truths.
Categories Accountability, Education Reform, On-Line Education, Teacher Tenure, Unions

A Parent’s Advice to the CTU

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2012 //
9

During these stressful times, teachers sometimes think they are alone in their struggle to maintain the dignity of their profession. They may get the impression by listening to politicians and the media that no one cares about them or about public education. This is wrong. The American public does not want to turn its schools over to inept amateurs or Wall Street financiers. And the overwhelming majority remembers its teachers warmly and respects their work.

I recently wrote a blog about the Chicago Teachers Union’s overwhelming decision to authorize a strike. This decision received the affirmative vote of 90% of the members (actually it was 98%, because non-votes were counted as negative). Less than 2% opposed the strike resolution. This is quite a stunning rebuke to the bully tactics of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. And it is a stunning rebuke as well to Jonah Edelman, the civil-rights-activist turned corporate-reformer, who predicted (and boasted) that the teachers would never get 75% of its members to agree to strike and spent millions of dollars lobbying to change the law to make sure that CTU had to meet what he thought was an impossible threshold. Edelman, head of Stand for Children, went to the Aspen Ideas Festival to advise the nation’s elites how to cripple their teachers’ unions by adopting his hardball tactics.

In response to my blog, I received the following comment from a parent. I post it here to let teachers know that they are not alone. Count on your parents. Enlist them as allies. I would go even farther and say appeal to your local business and civic leaders. They are not pawns of the financial elites. They are your potential allies. They do not want to see your community torn apart. They will stand with you as you fight to defend your students, your school, your profession, and your community.

This is what the parent wrote:

I’m not a teacher. Neither is anyone in my family. The way in which you beat bullies and well-funded propaganda campaigns is to ENLIST THE PARENTS. Get us on your side. It’s not an “easy” thing to do. But it’s not nearly as difficult as it might first appear.

For every irate, blustering, nasty parent you’ve encountered, I guarantee you there are 2 or 3 or even 9 who feel differently. And a lot of them will have your back, stand with you, speak out for you, support you fully: but you have to approach them, one on one. You have to make the first move, reach out, and ASK their help.

Most parents know it’s all about a partnership with your child’s teacher and school. We WANT to work with you. Please don’t be afraid to, quite literally, ring our doorbell and initiate the conversation.

Stand strong, teachers. And don’t let a handful of elitists—whose own children are always in fancy private schools—intimidate you and destroy our American system of free public education for all.

Diane

Categories Chicago, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Stand for Children, Unions

Did Albert Shanker Say That?

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2012 //
24

When critics of teachers’ unions want to strike a blow against unions, they throw around something that they claim was said by the late Albert Shanker:

‘When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of children.’ ”

Albert Shanker was the brilliant and much-admired and very outspoken president of the American Federation of Teachers; he died in 1997.

Joel Klein, former NYC chancellor who now sells education technology for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, quoted this line in an article in The Atlantic Monthly, and Mitt Romney quoted it when he unveiled his education policy package.

The problem is that no one knows for sure if Albert Shanker actually said these words.

Various efforts to trace the origins of this line have failed to discover whether Shanker ever said it.

It appeared in a small newspaper in Mississippi. Rightwing outlets love to cite it.

But no one can authenticate that Albert Shanker ever said it.

So we can expect that rightwing opponents of teachers’ right to bargain collectively will continue to cite this as fact rather than fancy.

As it happened, I knew Al Shanker very well. The best representation of his beliefs was the sign that New York City teachers carried when they protested or went on strike: “Teachers Want What Children Need.”

Next time someone rails against the unions, remember that teachers’ working conditions are children’s learning conditions.

Diane

Categories Teachers and Teaching, Unions
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