The War On Teachers

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby elfismiles » Tue Mar 13, 2012 7:22 pm


Louisiana Teachers Cancel Class to Protest Education Reform Bill
4:08 PM, Mar 13, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER


Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is moving ahead with education reform--but it isn't without controversy.

Later this week, on Wednesday and Thursday, education committees in both houses of the state legislature will be considering the governor's proposed package. The reforms include moving toward a voucher program, eliminating teacher tenure programs, and changes in teachers' pay.

And so, in response to these reforms even being considered, "at least three school districts are canceling classes and telling children to stay home to allow school employees the chance to lobby the legislature," according to Aaron Baer, the governor's deputy communications director.

Canceling class "will allow teachers to travel to Baton Rouge for hearings on Gov. Bobby Jindal’s plan to make sweeping changes in public schools," the Baton Rouge Advocate reports.

But the teachers are going to protest, not merely to hear the legislature debate the reforms. And they are going to the state capital with union support:

Leaders of the state’s two largest teacher unions, who oppose most of the governor’s plan, say they expect significant turnouts this week, primarily to protest the possibility of fast action on bills that they say are seriously flawed.

The teachers are canceling class under the pretense of "professional development" days, though "Those who opt not to travel will be expected to work at school on improving their professional skills that day."
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"The reality is that action is [education reform is] needed now," Baer says in an email. "44 percent of Louisiana’s public schools received a grade or D or F last year. Louisiana’s 4th and 8th graders ranked among the bottom in English and Math when compared to other states. In 2010 there were 230,000 students in Louisiana below grade level – one third of all students in public school."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/lou ... 33847.html

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby wordspeak2 » Tue Mar 13, 2012 8:39 pm

And in Georgia- "The Georgia Legislature is hotly debating a bill that would allow the state to cover the costs of charter schools even if local school boards reject them"


Georgia charter school decision could set national precedent
By Elizabeth Prann

The Georgia Legislature is hotly debating a bill that would allow the state to cover the costs of charter schools even if local school boards reject them, setting up a case that could set national precedent on educational reform.

The legislation to amend the state constitution would allow the Peach State to create its own parallel K-12 system to local boards, drawing on the same limited pool of Georgia's taxpayer funds -- a decision that the Georgia Supreme Court said was illegal just one year ago.


"In the education reform battle often times things boil down to a turf battle, and that's what we have here. We have some local school systems that are worried that by virtue of having state charter schools that some of their turf is getting interfered. But it's about the children and the choice," said state Rep. Ed Lindsey, R-Atlanta. "It's a control issue, and it always has been."

The amendment would codify the authority of the Georgia Charter Schools Commission, an organization created by the state in 2008 after complaints that school boards were turning down charter school applicants, preventing competition. But the commission began approving and funding charter schools even at the objection of the local boards, illegal under current law. That's when the Georgia Supreme Court stepped in.

"The Georgia Constitution says local boards control where local dollars go, so if a charter school only gets state approval and not local approval, no way can they receive local funds. They can only receive state funds," said Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators or PAGE, which opposes the funding. "The people who are putting this constitutional amendment on the ballot are trying to do that in our Senate right now -- are really trying to do a run-around the Supreme Court ruling."

Critics say the move to create a state board will damage the public education system because the amendment would allow the state to siphon money from cash-strapped districts at a time when they're facing almost $1 billion in cuts.

"Our state is very strapped in terms of funding," Callahan said. "We have cut by over $2 billion the education budget over the past eight years or so, and we have a funding formula that dates back to 1985 (and) has not been updated for inflation."

Education spending accounts for almost half of the state's yearly budget but GOP leaders promise no money will be taken from school districts.

"This bill in no way touches any kind of local funding," Lindsey said. "In fact we put in to the Constitution a specific provision that guarantees there will be no local money used for these state charter schools. But keep in mind also that these schools that are in the more rural areas. It's a lot of these kids that need charter schools the most and it's the children in those areas we're most concerned about."

Lindsey said charter schools are a beneficial addition to the education world -- they build, not break down, community education.

"Charter schools are part of an overall tool in the tool box for education reform," Lindsey said. "It, along with the myriad of other programs, is extremely important in terms of giving parents and students a greater choice in what is the best education for a particular child and it encourages education achievement and success along the way. It creates innovation."

But Callahan said Georgia charter schools don't outperform public schools.

"Parents are hungry for the latest thing -- whatever may be the best for their children," he said. "And that's understandable, but we all need to step back a little bit and take a deep breath. The best research we've had on charter schools and its pretty comprehensive says that only 17 percent of charter schools actually do better than the public schools they replace."

The amendment is supported by Republican Gov. Nathan Deal, who has gotten involved in the push to get the legislation passed. Lindsey said he is confident the bill will pass the Senate with strong bipartisan support as it did in the Georgia House.

"This is somewhere we can all find common ground," Lindsey said.

If it passes the Senate, the constitutional amendment would go on the ballot in November for voters to decide.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03 ... precedent/
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Re: The War On (David) Teacher's document release

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Tue Mar 13, 2012 11:17 pm

Decoy time.

The recent release of "ratings" on 18,000 teachers in New York was a decoy event.
Meant to hide the publication of a revised document by....David TEACHER...at Cryptome.org.

http://cryptome.org/2012/01/cercle-pinay-6i.pdf
Rogue Agents of Cercle Pinay and the 6I February 29, 2012 (1.4MB)

Document is all about the Peney Circle, Operation Gladio, and right-wing intelligence terrorism and psyops such as put
MARGARET THATCHER in office and trained her to be a fascist mouthpiece...same reason the 'Iron Lady' movie was put out
showing Thatcher getting Alzheimer's....a meme-reversal of 'intelligence.'

So the real War on Teachers was used as a diversion from this history document by David Teacher.
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby MinM » Wed Mar 14, 2012 9:06 am

March 14, 2012 at 1:00 am
State to take over 15 Detroit Public schools

Detroit — Year-around public schools are coming to Detroit.

Officials with Michigan's new recovery school district announced Tuesday that 15 Detroit Public Schools will be taken over by the state and become laboratories this fall for a new system for low-performing schools.

Six DPS high schools and nine elementary-middle schools will come under the Education Achievement Authority, which Gov. Rick Snyder created to revive the state's failing schools.

An extended-year calendar was approved for the EAA schools, increasing the number of days students are in school from 170 days or 1,098 instructional hours in the current schedule, to 210 days starting this fall. Student will have a quarterly calendar that starts Sept. 4, ends Aug. 6, has 52 to 54 days each quarter and shorter breaks around major holidays.

"I don't know if people understand the magnitude of what just happened," EAA Chancellor John Covington said after a EAA board meeting Tuesday. "This 210 days for students, it puts us at the highest in the nation, only second to Massachusetts."

Affected district high schools are Central Collegiate Academy and Denby, Ford, Mumford, Pershing and Southeastern. Primary schools moving into the recovery district are Law Academy and Brenda Scott, Burns, Bethune, Murphy, Nolan, Phoenix, Stewart and Trix.

About 12,000 students attend these schools, which were selected because they had the largest percentage of at-risk children, officials said.

Several members of the audience groaned as the list was read. Community activist Helen Moore shouted, "They are jerking these kids around."

Roy Roberts, who serves as chairman of the authority and emergency manager for DPS, replied: "The state superintendent could close any of these schools. … What we are proposing is how do you get your arms around this and do something special?"

Parents can keep their kids in the affected schools, Covington said, or send their child to another DPS school. Students from other district schools can enroll in the authority schools, too.

Covington will oversee operation of the schools, where principals and staff will make decisions on hiring and academics. A new education model will be implemented that organizes students by instructional level rather than the number of years they have been in school. In the EAA, each child will be assessed and given an Individualized Education Plan, which will be updated as they learn.

"They will progress based on their individual mastery of subjects rather than the number of days spent in the classroom," Covington said in a statement.

Parents waiting for dismissal Tuesday at Brenda Scott Elementary/Middle School, one of the affected buildings, expressed skepticism about the planned move. But most said they would keep their children at the school in northeast Detroit.

"I'm against this new program, and I think they should leave it the way it is now," parent Tamika Davis said. "I don't think making all those changes will make the school any better. My daughter is very intelligent and has a 3.8 grade-point average. I want her to want to come to school, but the kids are kind of bad here, and that discourages her. If anything, I think they need to change the behavior of the children."

Parent Aja Mitchell, 45, said her 11-year-old daughter is thriving at Scott. "She has a 4.0 grade-point average and I don't have a problem with the school," she said. "I will leave her right here."

During Tuesday's announcement, Covington said he will need to hire 15 principals for the schools and those principals will be directly involved in hiring about 600 teachers. A contract to hire 200 Teach For America teachers at the authority was approved at Tuesday's meeting

No decision has been made on whether the collective bargaining agreement with the Detroit Federation of Teachers — the union at DPS — will transfer to the EAA schools, Covington said.

Teaching jobs at the EAA will be posted soon, Covington said, and teachers will be offered a 401(k) program for retirement.

Covington said parents will have several options in the new system, with a mix of schools run directly by the authority, charter-operated schools and contract schools. At least five schools will be directly run by the EAA, Covington said.

Information meetings for parents at each school will begin next week. Open enrollment is from Thursday through April 16.

Covington said if some of the 15 buildings don't attract enough students, EAA officials will make adjustments, including possibly closing schools.

Covington said he and his staff selected the 15 schools from 38 persistently low-performing schools at DPS. All of the schools were evaluated based on the age and condition of the building, the student population and achievement level. Each school was given a score and EAA officials picked the 15 schools that were in the "greatest" need of help.

In classrooms, parents will find students aren't grouped in classes of first-, second- or third-graders. Instead, teachers in some classes will break children into groups where eight may work on computers, eight may work in a skills areas and another eight will be with the teacher getting instruction, a model similar to Montessori schools.

"Here is a new set of schools for a new set of outcomes, far different than what you've been given," Covington said. "We are designing a new approach to education from the ground up."

The buildings going into the EAA range from newly built schools to aging structures in fair condition. Most buildings have low proficiency rates in math as reported by the Michigan Educational Assessment Program test.

One building — Brenda Scott Elementary/Middle School — is eight years old and has 851 students. Based on new state cut scores on the MEAP, 1 percent of students tested proficient in math last fall.

At Denby High, the 82-year-old building has 1,192 students. Last year, zero students tested in math were proficient. The school's graduation rate was 63 percent last year; its dropout rate was almost 12 percent in 2009-10.

Detroit parent Farrah Harris was visibly upset to learn her former high school and the school her son currently attends — Denby — is on the list of schools to be moved into the authority.

"I am the parent of three DPS children and I am a DPS grad. I am upset that parents weren't informed or given the chance to improve schools," Harris said during the EAA meeting at Wayne State University.

Authority officials said they had spent the last several months touring the state and holding public meetings to discuss the new system of schools being launched in Detroit.

More than 1,000 parents attended those meetings, DPS officials said.

Covington is meeting privately with representatives from parent organizations from all 15 school on Wednesday night.

jchambers@detnews.com
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/2012 ... dyssey=tab

Gov Snyder signs bill prohibiting UofM grad assistants from joining Unions

Why Teach for America isn’t ‘the answer’
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby elfismiles » Tue Jun 12, 2012 12:25 am


Rahm Emanuel
Nearly 90 Percent of Teachers Authorize Strike
By Mary Ann Ahern
| Monday, Jun 11, 2012 | Updated 7:24 PM CDT

Nearly 90 percent of union-represented Chicago Public Schools teachers voted to authorize a strike, the Chicago Teachers Union said Monday.

The vote not only exceeded the 75 percent required by state law, but some school networks voted 100 percent to authorize a strike, the union said.

The strike authorization vote began Wednesday, and according to the CTU, 91.55 percent of CTU members cast a ballot. The tallied votes give the union legal authority to call a strike in the fall.

"The results are not a win," said CTU President Karen Lewis. "They are an indictment on the state of the relationship between the management of CPS and its largest labor force."

CTU said union delegates will set the date should contract negotiations fall through.

"While the Union has made no determination on whether a strike will be needed, leaders say the authorization vote has now given them added leverage at the bargaining table," spokeswoman Stephanie Gadlin said in a statement.

CPS and CTU are currently in contract negotiations but union leaders say talks are far apart when it comes to teacher pay and how teachers will be compensated for longer school days.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel last year rescinded a four percent pay increase and pushed for a longer school day. CPS has since proposed a five-year contract which guarantees teachers a two percent raise in their first year and lengthens the school day by 20 percent.

"They asked for a 20 percent increase in our school day and year, so we asked for a 20 percent concomitant raise to that. They stole four percent of our raises from the last contract, so we asked for that. Then we asked for a five percent raise," said Lewis.

Chicago Public Schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard said he was disappointed in the timing of the vote.

“The Chicago Teachers Union leadership pushed their members to authorize a strike before giving them the opportunity to consider the independent fact finder’s compromise report due in July," Brizard said in a statement. "That's a shame. The CTU leadership left the teachers with a choice between a strike and nothing -- that's a false choice. As a former teacher, I am disappointed that union leadership would rush their members to vote for a strike before having the complete information on the table."

The city also weighed in, saying that a strike would derail momentum schools currently have.

"Our teachers deserve a raise, but our kids don't deserve a strike and taxpayers cannot afford to pay for 30 percent raises," said Sarah Hamilton, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's director of communications.


Source: http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-ro ... z1xY9JzzwK



http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-ro ... 22545.html

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby StarmanSkye » Thu Jun 28, 2012 1:01 pm

Bump for this vital topic which typically flies beneath the radar of public attention. As much as it is a war on teachers in a larger sense its nothing less than an all-out coordinated, insidious, diabolical stealth-attack on democratic society directed by the 1% corporate/criminal-class technocrats & unelected elite rulers to conquer and enslave the hearts and minds of the greater 99% public.

The implications here are deeply troubling re: the accelerated mass mind-control indoctrination and deliberate lowest-common-denominator dumbing-down of the public majority so they are more compliant, obedient, servile, unquestioning and uncomplaining in assuming their ordained roles as worker-serfs serving the needs and agenda of the top-tier owners and managers of a feudal system that appropriates more and more of the worker classes' labors to feed capitalism's requirements for surplus that is redirected under centralized control towards propping-up the state.

Following below, Kathleen Carroll, a lawyer and whistleblower who was terminated for exposing corruption and nepotism at the California Commission On Teacher Credentials CTC -- spoke on July 5, 2011 in San Francisco about the commission, the cover-up and the threat to public education that is taking place in California and nationally. She exposed a reign of terror against the state workers at the agency as well as the bullying of teachers throughout California. Governor Brown and California Attorney General Kamal Harris refuse to prosecute the corruption and criminal activities of these privatizers despite the pleas of Attorney Carroll.

For her testimony to the California Joint Legislative Commission go to:
Ex-CA State Attorney At CTC Carroll Kathy Exposes Corruption, Nepotism &
Bullying At State Agency
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ux7F71oUo0
"Teacher Bashing Has To Stop"
CTC Fired Lawyer Carroll on Conflicts Of Interests & Lobbyists
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOCjDI2W ... e=youtu.be
Production Of Labor Video Project http://www.laborvideo.org laborvideo.blip.tv



****
GREAT concise talk below on the use of language and marketting by the corporate/rightwing education privatization interests to soft-sell frame the public 'debate' according to the most effective NLP and psycho-coercive advertising gimmicks like buzz-word phrases, reimagineering & 'owning' or recolonizing definitions to suit their stealth agenda of winning the public's support for a program that is contrary to their best interests. Even beyond the hundreds of billions of dollars at stake for the privateer opportunists is the inside-out sabotage of the very essence of democracy.

*
Corporate Shills, Propaganda And The Media Agenda For Education Privatization with Adam Bessie
-- professor at Diablo Valley College and media expert on education and privatization looks at how the billionaires and their corporate media agenda shape the debate around education and privatization.

This was presented at a conference titled The Attack On Public Education and Privatization which was sponsored by United Public Workers For Action
http://www.upwa.info



*
Capitalism And The Attack On Public Education In California With Professor George Wright
-- Professor from Skyline Community College who is also a
member of AFT 1493 puts historical context into the present privatization
and destruction of public education. He also looks at how capitalism in
the post war period has driven the present crisis. George Wright is also
on the Steering Committed of United Public Workers For Action which
hosted the conference. It was held on January 22, 2012 at Laney College
in Oakland.
A more complete document is at
http://www.upwa.info/documents/GREENHUT-Wright.pdf
United Public Workers For Action http://www.upwa.info

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby jfshade » Thu Jun 28, 2012 2:12 pm

Chicago public school teachers are incredibly united on this. The Mayor and his rubber stamp Council and appointed School Board have the union's back against the wall. The forces arrayed against the teachers are formidable, and potential allies SEIU and Unite Here Local 1 have already made their own deals with the city and won't honor CTU picket lines.

link

How can the Chicago Teachers Union win?

Lee Sustar looks at the prospects for a possible Chicago Teachers Union strike.

June 26, 2012

ImageChicago teachers rally and march through the loop in May (Bartosz Brzezinski)

BIG STRIKE authorization votes by unions in tough contract battles aren't unusual. But the recent 90 percent vote by members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) to back a possible walkout was different--and it sets the stage for a contract showdown that will shape the battle to defend public education across the U.S.

Nearly 90 percent of the members voted to empower union leaders to call a strike--of teachers who cast a ballot, an incredible 98 percent marked "yes." Just 482 teachers--1.82 percent of the membership--voted against a strike authorization, but because of an anti-union law, union members who failed to cast ballots were counted as voting against a strike. Of 26,502 members eligible to vote, 23,780 voted "yes."

Facing a 20 percent increase in their workday and a proposed 2 percent pay raise, teachers, office staff and other CTU members sent the clearest possible message of resolve in their fight for what they deserve. The overwhelming vote gives CTU negotiators leverage at the bargaining table by allowing union officials to call a strike if necessary.

The early June vote followed an electric mass rally on May 23 rally where more than 4,000 teachers jammed a downtown auditorium and 2,000 more union members and supporters rallied in a nearby park.

CTU members--who include not just teachers, but office staff and aides--are acutely aware that they're taking a stand in President Barack Obama's hometown on the eve of a close election. But rather than being intimidated, they're determined--and the rally gave expression to the same feelings of anger and defiance seen in last year's labor uprising in Wisconsin and the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

"It was excellent, very inspiring," Mayra Almarez, a history teacher at Taft High School on the city's North Side, said of the rally. "Sometimes its really hard to continue when, in the media, you hear that we're aggressive, we're this, we're that, we're not in it for the right reasons--when in reality, we are. It was great to see we are supported by other people, by parents."

Asked if teachers at Taft are prepared to walk a picket line if necessary, she replied, "Absolutely. We're ready."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE RALLY and strike authorization vote were the capstone of two years of effort by the CTU leadership to revitalize what had been a dysfunctional and declining union.

The new leadership's first act upon taking office in 2010 was to cut the union officers' pay and devote the money to internal organizing--getting organizers into the schools and strengthening organization at the school site. By late 2010, when Rahm Emanuel, until recently Obama's chief of staff, launched his mayoral election campaign in Chicago by bashing teachers, the union was already in motion.

The Chicago teachers' fight for justice also has national significance because the city has been a testing ground for "school reform" since 1995, when the state legislature handed then-Mayor Richard M. Daley direct control of the schools and stripped the CTU of its right to strike for 18 months.

Daley's second schools CEO, Arne Duncan, oversaw the closure of low-performing schools and the proliferation of charters, which propelled him to the post of Obama's Education Secretary. In that role, he worked closely with Emanuel to take the Chicago agenda across the U.S. Their tool was the Race to the Top initiative, a $4.3 billion pool of federal grants doled out to states if they passed laws that open the door to charter schools and undermine teachers' job security by limiting tenure and imposing merit pay.

That was CTU President Karen Lewis' first point in her speech at the raucous May 23 union rally:

Some people don't believe me, but this is a national fight. All across this country, teachers, clinicians and paraprofessionals are fighting failed status quo reforms. School districts have become emboldened--and what have they done? They've become emboldened, because rich people are now writing the laws. Rich people, who never send their children to public schools, are making the policy. And nationwide, everyone-- everyone--is facing the loss of their collective bargaining rights. Look at Wisconsin. Look at Indiana. We are surrounded by that, brothers and sisters. So why are we here?

A man in the audience answered with a shout: "Str-i-i-i-ke!" Teachers took up the chant, "Strike! Strike! Strike!" as someone sounded a vuvuzela, the noisemaker made famous during the World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa in 2010.

If Rahm Emanuel wants to pick a fight, the CTU is ready. In an interview following the rally, Lewis said that teachers and other CTU members aren't intimidated by Emanuel, and alluded to the national effort to raise awareness of threatening behavior in the schools: "See a bully, stop a bully. It's a campaign, right?"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

CLEARLY, EMANUEL sees his confrontation with the CTU as critical to his political ambitions. He made schools a signature part of his mayoral campaign, and it's been central to his national political profile before that.

Thus, Emanuel's allies have responded to the teacher's strike authorization with radio ads that try to depict the vote as an example of greedy teachers versus needy kids. In reality, the opposite is the case. The CTU has linked its demands for fair compensation for teachers to the fight for fully funded and enriched public education--by fighting school closures and budget cuts in close collaboration with neighborhood organizations and parents' groups. This has put the union at the center of an emerging social movement to save Chicago schools and stop the proliferation of nonunion charter schools.

Along with the CTU, that movement for public education must now contend with the anti-teacher backlash orchestrated by Emanuel, the Democratic Party machine, the city's business establishment and the anti-union "school reform" groups.

Emanuel and Co. are well aware of the potential power of an alliance between the CTU and the community, and fear that it could rally wider working-class support against the mayor's agenda of slashing social services, privatizing city functions and handing out tax breaks for big business. That's why, even before taking office, Emanuel sat down with a key Illinois legislator to insist on passage of a law, known as SB 7, that severely restricted the CTU's right to strike.

Under SB 7--which applies only to Chicago--at least 75 percent of all CTU members must cast a "yes" vote to legally authorize a strike. As the corporate-driven school "reform" hit man, Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children, boasted on video, the law was designed to effectively bar a Chicago teachers' strike. "In effect, they wouldn't have the ability to strike, even though the right was maintained," Edelman declared. "The unions cannot strike in Chicago. They will never be able to muster the 75 percent."

For their part, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) officials were apparently so confident a teachers' strike was impossible that they agreed to the CTU's negotiations timeline that makes a strike possible in September, rather than using other provisions in SB7 that could have postponed a legal walkout. They were smug because they believed the new CTU leadership--classroom teachers propelled into office in the May 2010 election on the militant Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) slate--wouldn't be able to unite the union behind it.

As Chicago television anchor Walter Jacobson wrote on the eve of the CTU elections, "The bosses downtown are rooting for the rookies to get them to a bargaining table and eat them alive."

It sure didn't turn out that way. Emanuel and his hand-picked school board, which includes business executives and political hacks, among them billionaire Penny Pritzker, antagonized teachers by rescinding a previously negotiated 4 percent raise. As a follow-up, Emanuel and Chicago Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard violated the union contract by bribing teachers at a handful of schools to adopt a longer school day in exchange for bonuses and extra cash for school programs. Next, Brizard announced a hit list of 17 schools to be closed or "turned around"--and despite protests, school occupations and heartfelt appeals from parents, students and teachers, the school board rubber-stamped Brizard's decision.

Even so, the effort to keep the schools open linked the CTU more closely with activist networks like Teachers for Social Justice and community groups like the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization and Occupy Chicago. Together, KOCO and Occupy activists organized a "mic check" that succeeded in shutting down a Board of Education meeting. The school closures, which had been a routine story given perfunctory media attention, became a major issue.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

MEANWHILE, BY pushing to lengthen Chicago's 5-hour, 45-minute school day to seven and a half hours, Emanuel alienated middle-class parent groups like Raise Your Hand that he'd tried to play off against the CTU. The mayor's partial retreat--the elementary school day increase to seven hours--didn't go over well, either, since it's accompanied by budget cuts aimed at closing what CPS claims is a $700 million deficit.

The combination of a longer school day and a smaller budget led to the creation of a new alliance of parent and community groups, Chicago Parents for Quality Education. Despite having various positions on the longer school day, the organizations are united behind a demand for increased funding for schools.

One group in the alliance, Parents 4 Teachers (P4T), was formed with the explicit aim of supporting the CTU. As P4T states on its website, blaming teachers "diverts attention from the real problems in education, like under-resourced schools, large class size and high-stakes testing."

However, under the 1995 state law governing Chicago schools, the CTU can't negotiate about anything other than pay and benefits. That means the union can't bargain over critical issues like class size and the need for improved social services for kids unless CPS agrees to make those issues part of negotiations.

That's why CTU has focused on demands for a pay increase--the replacement of last year's 4 percent raise canceled by CPS and an additional increase to compensate teachers for the longer school day. CPS and Emanuel responded by attacking the CTU for asking for more money at a time when many workers are enduring pay cuts. Yet it is only by asking for just compensation that the CTU can defend union members and force CPS and Emanuel to widen the scope of bargaining.

Though the CTU is barred from bringing up key classroom and social issues in negotiations, the union has championed increased school funding and progressive policies in its document, "The Schools Our Students Deserve."

Where the union old guard was mostly silent on such topics, the CTU's publication substantiated the new leadership's calls for smaller class sizes; an enriched curriculum with art and music at all schools, rather than just magnet and selective enrollment schools; and improved social services. The publication bluntly describes segregation in Chicago schools as "educational apartheid"--a term taken up by Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Thus, the CTU is showing its commitment to organizing over such issues as part of a wider working-class movement. For example, the CTU is backing a revived effort to fight for an elected school board.

In making this defense of public education, the CTU got little support from even the traditional liberals on the Chicago City Council.

When Emanuel proposed his slash-and-burn budget, all 50 aldermen voted "yes" in a show of legislative fear and favor-seeking that would have made Hosni Mubarak blush. Since then, a handful of aldermen and state legislators have backed CTU on some issues, but if it comes to a strike, even the most liberal figures among Chicago's Democratic Party are likely to demand that the union back down. In fact, it was an alderman the CTU had endorsed who put forward a City Council resolution calling for early adoption of the longer school day.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WITH POLITICIANS lining up behind Emanuel, the CTU will have to expand its growing ties with parents and community groups to build wider solidarity efforts. However, building labor solidarity during a potential strike may prove more complicated, both at the local and national levels. If there's going to be a push to support the CTU, much of the initiative will have to come from rank-and-file union members.

That's because two other unions with contracts with CPS--UNITE HERE Local 1 and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73--have already settled contracts rather than bargain in parallel with the CTU. As a result, members of those unions, including food service workers, custodians and school aides, are contractually obligated to cross CTU picket lines in the event of a strike.

Those separate deals were surprising to many Chicago labor activists, since both unions have progressive reputations and had collaborated with the CTU. CTU members had turned out to support UNITE HERE workers at brief strikes at the city's Hyatt Hotels as part of a contract campaign last year.

But when CPS pulled back on plans to replace cooked meals with pre-plated frozen ones, the president of UNITE HERE Local 1, Henry Tamarin, jumped at the five-year deal offered by the city, rather than wait to negotiate alongside the CTU.

The decision by SEIU Local 73 leaders to settle early with CPS was more contentious. Local 73 President Christine Boardman sought to ensure that ratification would go through at a membership meeting by withholding details of the tentative agreement until the vote June 9.

Rank-and-file activists were angry both about the information blackout and the fact that by settling separately from the CTU, they were undercutting the teachers. Union leaders countered that job security clauses in the contract warranted the early agreement. The final vote: 163 to 108 for a contract that covers more than 5,000 workers.

Besides peeling off these two locals from the CTU, Emanuel has also sought to consolidate ties with the unions that are the mainstays of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL).

In campaigning for mayor, Emanuel got the Teamsters' backing by promising to make sure that privatized sanitation jobs would go to Teamster-organized companies. More recently, he got the unions' backing for the Chicago Infrastructure Trust, a proposed $7 billion fund that will pay for public works projects while putting city taxpayers on the hook to banks at unspecified rates of interest.

City Hall will use jobs on upcoming infrastructure projects to try to buy the loyalty of union leaders and keep them out of the CTU's camp. Notably, Emanuel announced a series of projects to be funded by the trust at a Laborers' apprentice school.

Ullico, the union-run insurance and finance company, was an early backer of the infrastructure plan. And when Emanuel named a union official to the Infrastructure Trust's board, CFL President Jorge Ramirez declared, "It's smart, and it's a call to collaboration that we've been looking for."

Collaboration with City Hall hasn't been on offer for the public-sector unions that Emanuel has targeted for concessions, however.

Some have tried to avoid confrontation and simply taken the hit. Others, like the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, have waged a series of different protests around particular budget cuts--in the libraries, for example.

Two unions stand out for their level of activism. One is Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 241, which represents city bus drivers. Last fall, Local 241 allied with Occupy Chicago to fight attacks on their union.

The other is National Nurses United/National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNU), which represents nurses at Stroger Hospital, the main public health care facility in Cook County, which has also allied with Occupy. When NNU members volunteered to provide medical assistance to Occupy Chicago, Emanuel made an example of them by having them arrested and jailed longer than other activists. Significantly, activists from the ATU, NNU and CTU unions held a solidarity dinner to forge closer ties for the battles ahead.

Another key public-sector union notable for its activism is the Chicago branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers, which has developed ties with Occupy and labor activists in the fight against mass postal facility closures and job losses. A key labor-community coalition, Stand Up Chicago, initiated by the SEIU, has worked closely with the CTU and Occupy, too--as has Chicago Jobs with Justice, the longstanding coalition that's played a pivotal role in local labor solidarity efforts. ARISE Chicago, a religious coalition committed to workers' rights, will be key in reaching out to churches.

All this sets the stage for labor solidarity efforts with the CTU. The potential for such an effort was on display in January, when the Occupy Chicago Labor Working Group hosted a "Workers' Power" labor solidarity conference that drew 250 leaders and rank-and-file activists from a range of unions. It was already clear then that the CTU was heading toward a collision with Emanuel, and support for the teachers' union was a major theme of the event.

So it's clear that if Chicago's major union leaders are hesitant to take on the mayor on behalf of the CTU, activists are prepared to take the initiative themselves.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SOLIDARITY WILL also be needed from the CTU's parent union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Union President Randi Weingarten was on hand to address the CTU's May 23 solidarity rally, and she backed the CTU's key messages. "If the 1 percent can get the help, if all those with silver spoons in their mouths can get help, what about the children of this city and the people that teach them?" Weingarten said to wild cheers.

Yet the AFT leader also made it clear that she preferred partnership to confrontation, noting that she'd come to the rally from Cincinnati where she was attending the U.S. Department of Education Labor-Management Collaboration conference. At that meeting, Weingarten said, "there are over 100 districts talking about working together, and here in the second [sic] city in the United States of America, we have to rally just to be heard."

In fact, the face-off in Chicago is an example of the failure of Weingarten's strategy of collaboration. At the 2010 AFT convention in Seattle, Weingarten brought out Microsoft Chair Bill Gates, who bankrolls a wide range of reform efforts, as a guest speaker. The AFT, she said, must "lead and propose" on school reform issues.

The prime example of school reform according to the AFT is the contract settled in New Haven, Conn. in 2010, which Weingarten called a "model or a template" for future AFT collective bargaining agreements. That deal sharply limits teachers' traditional job protections and gives administrators more leeway to close schools.

For its part, the larger National Education Association (NEA), while formally more critical of the school reform agenda, differs little in practice from the AFT.

However, school reform groups have only taken the unions' willingness to collaborate as a sign of weakness, as the notorious Edelman video about the CTU shows.

For example, in Detroit--where the AFT's next convention will be held in July--unelected school authorities are carrying out huge budget cuts, sweeping school closures and a privatization agenda. The Detroit Federation of Teachers has seen its membership plummet, and the schools' emergency financial manager imposed a 10 percent pay cut last year.

In Philadelphia, authorities are going even further, breaking up the public school system into "networks" to be run by nonprofit groups, charter management organizations and universities, effectively destroying the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers bargaining unit.

Weingarten's home local, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City, is also on the defensive. The collaboration that once saw Weingarten settle a contract with billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg at a Yankees game has given way to an all-out war on teachers. These days, Bloomberg is trying to get rid of displaced teachers still on the payroll, close "underperforming" schools and unilaterally imposed a punitive evaluation system that could lead to the firing of teachers after two years of unsatisfactory ratings.

Public-sector strikes are illegal under New York state's anti-union Taylor laws. When Weingarten ran the UFT, the union sent out mail ballots to authorize a strike, but reached a deal before the votes were counted. These days, Michael Mulgrew, the UFT's tough-talking president, won't even allow delegates to bring discussion of a strike to the floor of the meeting, lest the union run afoul of the law.

Despite her defensive approach, Weingarten did issue a statement supporting the CTU after its strike authorization vote was announced. "It represents not just anger and frustration, but also a real commitment to Chicago's students and a desire to be active participants in building strong public schools that help all Chicago children thrive," she said. This statement opens the way for organizing solidarity resolutions and financial support from every AFT local in the country.

However, Weingarten subsequently made it clear that she's far more comfortable in making deals with school districts and Democratic politicians than confronting them--even when teachers take a hit.

When members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) voted to accept the latest in a series of concessions that cut pay in order to save jobs, Weingarten issued another statement hailing their decision. "This agreement demonstrates how to address budget challenges without making the kinds of cuts that hurt kids, silence the voices of teachers and other school staff, and undermine our public schools," she said of UTLA, which is affiliated with both the AFT and NEA.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

STILL, WHILE official support for the CTU from the labor movement may be uneven, a groundswell of backing for teachers is evident across the city.

A recent poll in the Chicago Tribune showed that more than twice as many more people trusted the CTU on school issues than Emanuel. The task now is to turn that favorable sentiment into active support.

"Everyone's been talking about the teachers at work," said Don Schraffenberger, a member of Teamsters Local 705, who works at the huge UPS facility just outside Chicago. Frustrated by their own union's slowness in dealing with workplace safety issues, the workers were excited by the CTU's high-profile rally and strike vote, he said. "They are seeing a union that's actually fighting back," Schraffenberger said. "I think they see it the way people saw the 1997 Teamsters strike at UPS."

For unions, steps to back the CTU can start with resolutions of support, pledges of financial assistance, and commitments to walk picket lines. In Chicago, CTU members are available to speak at union meetings, and could call or Skype into meetings elsewhere.

Such labor backing for the CTU has far more than symbolic importance. In the event of a strike, it's possible or even likely that a judge would issue a temporary restraining order, sending teachers back to work and threatening them with fines and jail time if they don't. That's what happened when the UTLA planned a one-day strike in 2009 and when bus and subway workers in New York City's Transport Workers Union Local 100 struck for three days in 2005. If the CTU's assets are seized or heavy fines are imposed, union members and supporters everywhere must be prepared to send funds to keep the union operational and defend teachers' right to strike.

At the same time, parent and community groups aligned with the CTU have a critical role to play--not only by offering political support to the teachers, but by being prepared to operate freedom schools that give students a safe place to go during a strike. Such efforts were key to successful CTU strikes in the past and will be critical in countering teacher-bashing from Emanuel and a network of paid preachers and "community groups" that are really appendages of the local Democratic machine.

But where Emanuel will try to line up his forces by spreading money around, the CTU and its allies can count on organizations and individuals who are prepared to do the one-on-one organizing that's needed, from leafleting in neighborhoods and summer festivals to visiting churches and community groups.

Such organizing efforts are already well underway among CTU members and their allies. The union will use the teachers' summer break to send them into the communities to organize, as well as gear up union operations for an all-out fight.

For their part, supporters of the teachers aim to have connections in every neighborhood in the city, with activists prepared to answer City Hall's lies and distortions with a clear and principled defense of public education against the budget-cutters, business elites and charter school operators.

The battle lines over public education are being drawn in Chicago. But it's a fight with nationwide implications--and everyone who supports fully funded public education and teachers' rights should stand with the Chicago Teachers Union.
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jul 16, 2012 2:18 am


http://www.detroitnews.com/article/2012 ... dyssey=tab

The Detroit News

July 13, 2012

New Detroit schools contract allows up to 61 students in grades 6-12

* By JENNIFER CHAMBERS



Detroit— Class sizes in Detroit Public Schools could get much larger this fall — up to 61 students each in grades 6-12 and 41 students in grades kindergarten through 3 — before school officials take action to level them out.

Under a new three-year contract imposed last week on the teachers' union, DPS will "make reasonable efforts" at reorganizing class sizes for students in K-12 when they exceed contractual limits.

In grades K-3, the class maximum is 25. But under the new contract with the Detroit Federation of Teachers, which took effect July 1, a class would need to reach 41 students before DPS moves to reduce it.

In grades 4-5, where 30 is the limit, it would take 46 students to trigger a response. In grades 6-12, where class sizes were increased to 35, leveling efforts would begin once the class reaches 61 students.

DPS said it will reorganize the classes starting after the fourth Wednesday in the fall and the second Wednesday in the spring semester if overcrowding develops from "additional pupils entering school" or results from "inequitable school organization."

Steve Wasko, spokesman for DPS, said class reorganization standards in the new contract remain the same as the last contract.

"The reorganization is what takes place after the count days twice yearly, and at other times as necessary. The district does not intend to have classes at those sizes listed," he said.

Asked why numbers for triggering reorganization were set in the contract, Wasko declined to comment.

In 2011, DPS made international news when, under then-Emergency Manager Robert Bobb, it issued a plan calling for high school classes of up to 60 students in an effort to reduce its $327 million budget deficit.

DPS officials later said the plan — which was filed with the state Department of Education as a pledge to reduce the deficit under an emergency manager — was never meant to come to fruition.

Keith Johnson, president of the DFT, said the district does not have classrooms to accommodate 60 students, and the union would pursue legal action if class sizes became excessive.

"This is part of their reduction process and plan to minimize teacher service. It would have an adverse effect on student achievement," he said. "This is completely unacceptable. You would not hear talk of this in any surrounding community. This is disregard for children and parents in DPS."

Last October, the Detroit fire marshal investigated overcrowding at DPS buildings after his division found more than 50 students in a kindergarten class at Nolan Elementary.

A Nolan parent called fire officials to complain that 55 students were in her son's kindergarten class, well over the 35-student limit.

Fire officials investigated a second DPS school — Gompers Elementary-Middle — after a teacher there said nearly 45 students apiece were in two seventh-grade classes.

During fall 2011, union officials said more than 200 classrooms at 42 DPS schools had oversized classes, based on a survey by the DFT.

Until 2011, DPS paid a fine to teachers if class sizes exceeded contractual limits. But when Emergency Manager Roy Roberts imposed a 10 percent pay cut on all employees in July 2011, he also took away the compensation for oversized classes. The change saves the district about $700,000 for that year.

School and union officials said several factors contribute to excessive class sizes, including fluctuations in enrollment and attendance.

The district projects a certain number of students will show up on the first day of school, but many students will show up later this school year, creating oversized classes.

Union leaders also said DPS contributes to the problem in some buildings by laying off all of its teachers each spring, then calling some back for the fall. According to the DFT, the district doesn't recall enough teachers.

The yearly reorganization of classrooms has sometimes gone into November, more than two months into the new school year. DPS said it expects to have nearly 52,000 students across 100 buildings this school year.

All DPS teachers and DFT staff were laid off this spring. Callbacks are expected to begin next month, Wasko said.

Debra Olesky, a math teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. High School, said research clearly indicates students do better in smaller class sizes.

If the numbers hit 61 in high school, Olesky said, "I don't think there would be any teaching going on. It would be babysitting."

Monica Davis-Huey, a DPS parent with a daughter entering 4th grade this fall, said allowing class sizes to reach larger levels such as 45 would serve no one and would likely result in her daughter being bored, because the teacher would have to help so many other children catch up.

"That's too many. My concern is for all the children as a whole. Regardless of how many are in their class, there has to be an assistant," she said. "It's absolutely ridiculous. I think you will have a lot of teachers changing careers."


jchambers@detnews.com
(313) 222-2269

* © Copyright 2012 The Detroit News. All rights reserved.



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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Aug 07, 2012 2:23 am


http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/educ ... z1sdTrdb00


Shuttering of Imagine charter schools in St. Louis is daunting


ST. LOUIS • As they move to close down a network of St. Louis charter schools over the next several weeks, state education officials face a task as monumental and complicated as dismantling an entire school district.

As many as 3,800 children — or about 11 percent of those attending public schools in the city — must find new schools. Their records must be properly preserved and transferred. The school buildings they attended have to be scoured for equipment and materials paid for with federal funds. The 288 teachers and staff who work at the schools must have a better idea of their remaining pay and benefits. And that's not counting the thousands of questions by parents who demand answers.

Charter schools in Missouri have closed in the past. But never on this scale.

In fact, the decision this week by Missouri's Board of Education to shutter six Imagine charter schools in St. Louis will likely result in the largest charter school closure of its kind nationwide, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. "This is definitely one of the biggest that I'm aware of," said Todd Ziebarth, of the alliance. "It's complicated enough when it's a single school of, lets say, 300 kids."

In Los Angeles last year, the closure of six charter schools affected 1,200 students — one third of the number affected by Imagine in St. Louis.

The scale of the expected Imagine closures leaves Missouri educators in foreign territory.

"We don't have a blueprint in place, but we're building one," Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro said. "Our success will be measured by the outcome of every child being placed successfully in a school in August."

The governing boards of the Imagine schools have talked with St. Louis school officials about the district potentially sponsoring a different version of the schools — one that would not include Imagine Schools Inc. as an operator and would have them in different buildings. This would involve submitting a new charter application to state Board of Education. The school boards have until May 15 — the next Board of Education meeting — to file one.

The potential for the schools to reorganize and remain open leaves some charter school advocates nervous.

"The track records of charter schools that are opened within less than 12 months, let along six months, are not good," said Doug Thaman, executive director of the Missouri Charter Public School Association.

Despite the possibility, state and city education officials are working under the assumption the schools will close on June 30. The process to enroll students elsewhere is under way, with enrollment fairs scheduled for April 28 and May 12. Staff fairs are planned for May.

A state transition office at Harris-Stowe State University has a transition coordinator and an assistant employed by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. The team they are working with includes representatives from the Missouri Public Charter School Association and St. Louis Public Schools.

On Wednesday, Gwen Westbrooks, the state's transition coordinator, met with about 100 anxious teachers, parents and students in the gymnasium of Imagine College Prep Academy, 706 North Jefferson Avenue. She told them they must proceed as if the schools will close.

Parents asked if other schools would accept their children's transcripts. Teachers asked when their paychecks would end. Some expressed anger that Missouri Baptist University had withdrawn its sponsorship of the schools, and then the state board had voted to close them. Others wanted to know if the children could transfer together and still attend school together.

"Our plan is to keep all our kids together following reorganization," said Reynaldo Anderson, president of the Imagine Academy of Careers board. "No one wants to see these kids scattered to the wind."

An estimated 500 to 700 seats are available in the city's remaining charter schools. This does not include available slots at St. Louis Language Immersion's Chinese School or Gateway Science Academy's second location, the two charter schools scheduled to open in August.

St. Louis Schools Superintendent Kelvin Adams, who helped oversee the dramatic displacement of tens of thousands of students in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, has several district staff members working on the Imagine transition. As many as 130 to 150 new teachers may need to be hired, he said.

Space in city schools is not a problem, Adams said. "The challenge here is placing them where they want to go," he added.

Even more challenging would be to successfully enroll in a county school through the Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation. Nearly 3,000 city children have applied for 677 available spots in the student transfer program for the 2012-13 school year, according to David Glaser, executive director. Applying now will prioritize a student's application for 2013-14.

The Today and Tomorrow Education Foundation provides need-based tuition assistance to private and parochial schools in the city. There are still scholarships available for the 2012-13 school year, executive director Sharon Gerken said.

The Imagine schools had been on shaky ground all year.

Their scores on the state's standardized tests were well below those of St. Louis Public Schools. The schools were deficit spending. Rent and administrative costs took dollars from the classroom to the for-profit management company that runs them.

At the meeting at Imagine College Prep Wednesday, Anderson distanced the schools from Imagine. "We don't have anything to do with what Imagine decides to do from this day forward," he said. The governing board of Confluence Academy, with four charter schools and nearly 3,200 students, is working to cut ties with its for-profit operator, EdisonLearning Inc., to improve academic achievement. Test scores at three of the schools are also below those of St. Louis Public Schools.

State education officials intend the process of closing the Imagine schools to go more smoothly than charter school closures of the past, most recently Ethel Hedgeman Lyle or Paideia Academy, which either didn't involve the state or occurred on much shorter notice.

"This time we clearly do have a role," Nicastro said. "We've taken on that responsibility."

On Wednesday, parents at the meeting on the Imagine closures said the thought of transferring their children fills them with dread. Many are holding onto hope that the schools will remain open with a different sponsor and Imagine out of the picture.

"This is a lot like déjà vu to me," said one mother who rose from the crowd to speak. "I went through this three years ago with Ethel Hedgeman Lyle. All I want to know is, are you going to be around next year? Are you going to find a sponsor for this school?"

Westbrooks, the transition coordinator, told the mother what she had been telling parents all evening.

"We don't know what the end will be," she said. "The bottom line is, right now you're going to have to plan for the closing of these schools."

Elizabethe Holland and Jessica Bock of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Aug 13, 2012 12:24 am


https://sites.google.com/site/philwpjou ... /reforming

Reforming School Reform

by Matthew L. Mandel, NBCT


It’s not about the children.

The education reform movement, at least here in Pennsylvania, may be about a lot of things, but it certainly isn’t about our children.

If it were, efforts to bridge the achievement gap and advance opportunities for all children would look a hell of a lot different.

If it were about children, each and every public school would be awash in resources and technology. A licensed school nurse would be in each and every building so that the health and safety of kids were not compromised. All schools would have these necessities, not just “experimental” and privately-managed schools who are flooded these and then labeled a success.

If it were about children, students in the poorest neighborhoods—those most at-risk—would step into vibrant learning environments each morning—schools that met their intellectual, artistic, and athletic needs and inclinations. Schools would not be turned into grim test-prep facilities, with a curriculum narrowed to core, state-tested subjects. Children would be given a reason to be excited about coming to school, aside from making AYP.

It’s not about the children.

If it were about children, we wouldn’t value differentiated instruction, then test children all the same way.

If it were about children, schools would be as safe as the offices of those politicians in Harrisburg who cut funding to public schools, and then hand out EMO contracts to campaign contributors and others once a school has been labeled a “failure.”

If it were about children, those who cut funding for vital family services would realize the inextricable link between childhood poverty and educational outcomes. These same politicians would be as incensed by children in their state having inadequate nourishment, dental, vision, and medical care as they are about whether same-sex partners have a right to be married.

If it were about children, in Philadelphia, a state takeover charged with both improving financial management and educational outcomes would be put to rest as a failed experiment. A district’s management team wouldn’t be able to run a district into insolvency, say they are sorry, and then move on to lucrative consultant positions. Reformists like Michelle Rhee and Arlene Ackerman—who help to cultivate a culture of testing “irregularities”—wouldn’t be allowed to exit with a golden parachute before being held accountable for the results under their leadership.

If it were about children, boisterous, spotlight-seeking politicians who wax poetic about school vouchers as an elixir for what ills public schools would be required to do their own homework and examine research that compellingly indicates that vouchers don’t work. These same politicians would also be too embarrassed to call the fight for vouchers in Pennsylvania “the Civil Rights battle of our generation.” Our nation’s true Civil Rights leaders died trying to create greater opportunities for those without. Proponents of Senate Bill 1 are crusaders for someone’s interests, just not for our children’s.

If it were about children, legislators who stump for vouchers would have to guarantee a source of funding to bridge the gap between the value of the voucher and the cost of tuition at elite public and private schools. They wouldn’t be allowed to get away with deceiving families with the notion of “choice” when such choice belongs solely to the schools, not to the students and their families.

If it were about children, no Federal mandates could exist unless they were adequately funded.

If it were about children, big money philanthropy wouldn’t be the driving force in education reform; it would be research instead . As in the field of Medicine, what works in the field of Education would be replicated in schools and districts throughout the country. Theories and strategies that do not work would be discarded. Academic historians like Diane Ravitch wouldn’t be labeled “traitors” because they no longer support business-model reforms. An intellectual, not a politician, Ravitch lets research and outcomes influence her conclusions. What a novel idea.

If it were about children, teachers would be held in the highest regard. Those politicians who were bullies with a microphone when I debated them at Bright Hope Baptist Church wouldn’t be allowed to posture that they are the ones “fighting for children.” They are not in classrooms, every day—knee to knee, often amid poor conditions and with inadequate resources—advocating for our youngest and most at-risk.

If it were about children, those who judge me would be able to do my job—today—not just be able to read a book in front of the cameras. My competency and teaching acumen would not be reduced to elements—such as the quality of my bulletin boards or organization of my students’ constructed response folders—that do not adequately convey my skill and my passion.

And if it were about children, teachers would be respected partners in any dialogue on necessary reforms. In what other profession are practitioners in the field given so little respect for their knowledge, insights, and contributions?

And if it were about children,
teachers would be respected partners
in any dialogue on necessary reforms.


None of the above is an apology for what improvements are necessary. No self-respecting professional believes he or she can’t do better and that things don’t need to improve.

But I choose to believe that a state that can build billion-dollar stadiums, raise millions to save works of art from being relocated, and create impenetrable bubbles of security around visiting dignitaries (in a country that can allocate trillions of dollars in resources to fight with such gallantry and precision in foreign lands) can surely have the ability to effect change that works for all children.

Education reform, here and elsewhere, is about a lot of things. It’s about access to billions of public dollars. It’s about politics and kickbacks for friends and donors. It’s about retaliation and retribution. It’s about religion, right-wing values, and anti-unionism. It’s about creating more, but for fewer, and to hell with the rest. It is, in effect, a form of child abuse in a digestible political wrapper.

But it certainly isn’t about children.



Matt Mandel is a National Board Certified literacy teacher at the CCA Baldi Middle School. A 1997 PhilWP Summer Institute fellow, he was honored as a finalist for the School District of Philadelphia's 2011 Ruth Wright Hayre Teacher of the Year Award. In addition, Matt is in his eleventh year as a member of the PFT Executive Board.


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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Aug 16, 2012 12:24 pm

From Cathy O'Neil's blog, mathbabe.org.

Image
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Sep 13, 2012 5:34 am

.

Until this week, most of us probably missed that the "War on Teachers" policy is now producing the biggest resistance and confrontation yet, possibly of a climactic nature. Facing the mayoral control and total "reform" approach of a leader as symbolically important as Rahm Emanuel (the obnoxious counterpart to Rove within the "New Democrats" and, following on his dismaying stint as White House Chief of Staff, effectively an envoy from the Obama-Duncan administration) Chicago teachers voted in an all-new anti-"reform" union leadership. Now 98% of them voted to go on strike as their contract comes to an end. They are fighting Emanuel's demand for standardized-test-based teacher evaluations and the privatization agenda in general. This is the first full-scale uprising against the Bush-Obama education agenda since No Child Left Breathing. Officially they have to pretend it's about wages, because of a clever (and surely unconstitutional, but who cares) law that dictates that they are only allowed to strike over compensation. Here's some great coverage from

Democracy Now, Monday, Sept. 10.
http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2012/9/10

Transcripts:

Democracy Now, 9/10/12, Part 1 wrote:
Monday, September 10, 2012
Chicago Public Teachers Stage Historic Strike in Clash with Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Education Reforms

More than 29,000 Chicago public school teachers and support staff have gone on strike today after union leaders failed to reach an agreement with the nation’s third-largest school district over educational reforms sought by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. It is the first teacher strike in Chicago in a quarter of a century. Unresolved issues include the cost of health benefits, the makeup of the teacher evaluation system, and job security. Emanuel, who is President Obama’s former chief of staff, wants teacher evaluations tied to the standardized test results of students. We hear the voices of union leaders, teachers and parents on Chicago’s strike. [includes rush transcript]
Filed under Education, Voices from Chicago’s Teachers’ Strike

Guest:
Voices from Chicago's Teachers' Strike,

Related
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Sep 11, 2012 | Story
Thousands Rally in Chicago Teachers’ Strike, Pushing Back Against Corporatized Education Reform
Sep 11, 2012 | Story
Chicago Teachers Strike Could Portend Referendum on Obama Admin’s Approach to Education Reform
Sep 10, 2012 | Story
Striking Teachers, Parents Join Forces to Oppose "Corporate" Education Model in Chicago
Sep 10, 2012 | Story
"Who’s Killing Philly Public Schools?": Daniel Denvir on Plan for School Closings, Privatization
May 25, 2012 | Story


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AMY GOODMAN: Twenty-nine thousand public school teachers and support staff have gone on strike after union leaders failed to reach agreement with the nation’s third-largest school district over education reforms sought by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. It’s the first teacher strike in Chicago in a quarter of a century. Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis announced the strike would go forward late last night.

KAREN LEWIS: We do not intend to sign an agreement until all of the matters of our contract are addressed. Again, we are committed to staying at the table until a contract is in place. However, in the morning, no CTU members will be inside our schools. We will walk the picket lines. We will talk to parents. We will talk to clergy. We will demand a fair contract today. We demand a fair contract now.

AMY GOODMAN: Union leader Karen Lewis said key unresolved issues include the cost of health benefits, the makeup of the teacher evaluation system, and job security. Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff, wants teacher evaluations tied to the standardized test results of students.

It remains to be seen what impact the strike could have on the presidential election. Many of the policies at issue in Chicago are being pushed a national scale by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former Chicago Public Schools chief. Emanuel remains a close ally to President Obama. Last week, he announced he’s stepping down from his position as co-chair of President Obama’s re-election campaign to help raise money for a pro-Obama super PAC called Priorities USA Action.

In a moment, we’ll be joined by three guests in Chicago, but first to the voices of union leaders, teachers and parents responding to the call to strike. We start with Matt Farmer, a parent of a Chicago public school student.

MATT FARMER: As a local school councilmember and a Chicago Public Schools parent, I support the efforts of the Chicago Teachers Union in this labor negotiation, because I believe they are fighting to make schools in Chicago better for all kids. The reason I say that is because the mayor talks at length about providing a, quote, "world-class education," end-quote, for Chicago’s kids, but what we know is that the mayor’s kids are getting one at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Why, we should ask, aren’t the reforms the mayor is trying to push through the same as those that are working at the lab school? More art, more music, libraries for kids—those are not the types of resources and classes that we are seeing.

XIAN BARRETT: My name is Xian Barrett. I’m a junior and senior high school teacher at Gage Park High School here in Chicago. There’s no way to exaggerate how important it is. It’s completely an unwinnable, untenable situation without community support. And I believe strongly we can completely turn around this corporate onslaught—and I don’t even want to say with community support, but in full collaboration and, you know, righteous struggle together with communities.

GABRIEL CORTEZ: My name is Gabriel Cortez. I’m an assistant professor at Northeastern Illinois University. I support the strike because teachers’ backs are against the walls. I mean, not only that, but communities—I mean, they’re advocating for children in poor communities to have the equal amount of resources in their schools, right? Teachers are overwhelmed with classroom size. The resources aren’t there. The same type of curriculum are not being, you know, given to these poor communities. So, this is a fight for everybody.

PAULINE LIPMAN: My name is Pauline Lipman. I’m a professor of education policy studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and I’m part of the coordinating committee of Teachers for Social Justice. What is happening here in Chicago is also strategically significant nationally. Chicago, as you probably know, was the birthplace of the neoliberal, corporate, top-down education reform agenda—privatizing public education, closing and sabotaging public neighborhood schools, high-stakes testing, paying teachers based on test scores—that whole agenda. And Chicago is now the epicenter of the fight back against it. What happens here in Chicago will really have an implication for whether we are able to turn back this national agenda. And the eyes of the country are really on Chicago today.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’ll be joined by Professor Pauline Lipman, but first we go to two other guests in Chicago.

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Part 2 wrote:Striking Teachers, Parents Join Forces to Oppose "Corporate" Education Model in Chicago

To discuss the Chicago teachers’ strike, we’re joined by two guests: Phil Cantor, a teacher and strike captain at Chicago’s North-Grand High School and member of Teachers for Social Justice, and Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, the mother of two public school students in Chicago and a member of the grassroots group Parents 4 Teachers.

Guests:

Phil Cantor, has taught science for the last nine years. He currently teaches at North-Grand High School in Chicago. He is a strike captain at his school. Cantor is also part of the group Teachers for Social Justice.

Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, mother of two public school students in Chicago and a member of the grassroots group, Parents 4 Teachers. Her kids attend Coonley Elementary School.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’ll be joined by Professor Pauline Lipman, but first we go to two other guests in Chicago: Phil Cantor, teacher at North-Grand High School, he’s a strike captain at his school and part of the group Teachers for Social Justice, and Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, the mother of two public school students in Chicago, a member of the grassroots group Parents 4 Teachers.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Phil, why don’t we go to you first? The strike has just been announced. Explain what this is all about, in the nation’s third-largest school district.

PHIL CANTOR: We’re striking for a lot of reasons. If you just see what’s in the mainstream media, all they talk about is that teachers want more money. But that’s really far from the truth. We’re fighting for reasonable class sizes. We’re fighting for wraparound services for our students. I teach in a school with a thousand students; we don’t even have one social worker in that building for most of those kids. So we’re fighting for the education our students deserve in Chicago. We’re fighting against reforms that we see, from the classroom level, are not going to work.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain why the emphasis on salary then. Is that the legal issue of what allows you to strike?

PHIL CANTOR: That’s absolutely right. You know, Rahm Emanuel has pushed through laws in Illinois, basically designed for his political gain, in my opinion. We’re not allowed legally to strike over anything but compensation. But teachers are not most interested in compensation; we’re most interested in being able to do our jobs for the students we serve. So, you know, I think we’re trying to tie other issues that we feel are very important to compensation, so they’re part of the bargaining table agreement.

AMY GOODMAN: Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, you’re the mother of two students and member of Parents 4 Teachers. Where do your kids go to school? How old are they? And what are you doing today on this day of a strike?

RHODA RAE GUTIERREZ: Hi, Amy. Thanks for having us.

So, my kids are at Coonley Elementary School here in Chicago on the Northwest Side. My youngest is a kindergartner, and my oldest is a second grader. What we’re doing today is, actually, we’re joining the teachers on the strike line, and we’re showing our support for the call for a fair contract, because what we know and what we believe in is that the working conditions of teachers are the learning conditions of our children. And when we fight for the rights of teachers for a fair contract, fair compensation, lower class size, well-resourced schools—and we mean having psychologists, enough social workers, enough support staff, enough aides in the classroom, nurses. This is what we’re fighting for. And when teachers have these resources in their schools, we know that our children can do incredible things.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, the issue of high-stakes testing, how does it affect the students, Rhoda?

RHODA RAE GUTIERREZ: Well, so last night we watched Rahm Emanuel on his—Mayor Emanuel on the—at his press conference, and I was incredibly disappointed. I was disappointed because he said that one of the things that he’s going to measure teachers on is essentially test scores. And what I know as a parent is that when teachers are measured in terms of their performance because of test scores, what happens is that teachers are forced to teach to the test, and they have to narrow the curriculum on very—on very, like, minor skills that are taught—that are tested on these standardized tests. And so, he calls for a rich curriculum, and yet he calls for, what he says, merit pay, but what it is is test-based pay. And that is not a rich curriculum. It is narrowing the curriculum. And it was incredibly disappointing to me when he said that at the press conference yesterday.

AMY GOODMAN: Phil Cantor, explain what high-stakes testing means for teachers and what it means when your pay is related to that.

PHIL CANTOR: At my school, I looked at the calendar for the year, and there are about 15 days where students are being tested on standardized tests. These tests are not designed to help the students. Many of these tests are designed because of No Child Left Behind to measure the school. And now, because of Race to the Top and these new reforms, now these tests are being used to measure teacher performance. So, what does that mean? It means that rather than planning rich-inquiry, interesting lessons for our students, we have to focus on very specific tested standards in a very narrow way that students have to then demonstrate those skills.

To give an absurd example, this week I’m supposed to give a district-mandated test to my ninth grade biology students, who I’ve known for one week, on DNA-to-RNA transcription and translation in protein synthesis. The reason they’re getting this test, on material they’ve never seen before, is so that I can be measured from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. It is putting our students in a terrible position to do something that was never—it’s an insane way to try to measure teachers. It’s clearly sort of the business model, the corporate model of people who don’t understand the classroom, saying, "Oh, we’ll test them at the beginning of the year and the end of the year and see growth." But it’s an absurd sort of test that is not going to work even for that purpose, and it’s certainly not going to help our students.

AMY GOODMAN: And the issue of charter schools, how does that play in here, Phil?

PHIL CANTOR: Charter schools are being used to privatize the school system. There’s research that shows that charter schools actually tend to be used as a tool of gentrification in the city. The threat is that if we don’t do well on standardized tests, then our school will be turned around, meaning it will be turned over to a private charter school operation. So there’s this constant threat over teachers that if you don’t get test scores up, your school will be privatized into a charter, you’ll lose your job, your community will lose a community-based school, and students will have to sort of lottery to get into your school.

What I see at the school at the neighborhood school level—where I work is a neighborhood school—I see the best students of my neighborhood sort of getting pulled out toward the charters, because their parents have the impression that they’re better. And then, when the charter struggles with a student with behavioral difficulties or learning disabilities or language disabilities, that kid ends up getting pushed out of that charter, and then I see them at my school.

AMY GOODMAN: And the level of unionization of teachers in the charter schools?

PHIL CANTOR: Most of the charters are not unionized at all.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. We’re going to continue the conversation after break with Professor Lipman. Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, mother of two students, will be out on the picket lines with her kids today. Phil Cantor, teacher and strike captain at North-Grand High School, member of Teachers for Social Justice. This is Democracy Now! We’re talking about the teacher strike today, first time in a quarter of a century teachers striking the third-largest school district in this country, in Chicago. Stay with us.



Chicago Teachers Strike Could Portend Referendum on Obama Admin’s Approach to Education Reform

The showdown in Chicago — the nation’s third-largest school district — pits teachers against Mayor Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff. Emanuel remains a close ally to Obama, while many of the policies at issue in Chicago are being pushed on a national scale by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former Chicago Public Schools chief. We’re joined by Pauline Lipman, professor of education and policy studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago, director of the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education and member of Teachers for Social Justice. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Pauline Lipman, professor of education and policy studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She is also the director of the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education at the university and is on the coordinating committee for Teachers for Social Justice.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re continuing on the teachers’ strike in Chicago, the largest—well, the first strike in a quarter of a century in the third-largest school district in this country. The mayor is Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff of President Obama.

Pauline Lipman is with us, professor of education and policy studies at University of Illinois, Chicago, also director of the collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education and on the coordinating committee for Teachers for Social Justice.

So, the teachers have just gone out on strike. Professor Lipman, put this in a national context, what this means, what the Chicago strike means for the nation.

PAULINE LIPMAN: Yes, good morning.

As I said in the clip that you showed earlier, Chicago was the birthplace of this neoliberal corporate reform agenda of high-stakes testing, paying teachers based on test scores, closing failing neighborhood—disinvesting in neighborhood schools and then closing them and turning them over to charter schools—the policies that both Phil and Rhoda just described. And it was really a model which was picked up by cities around the country and then made a national agenda when Arne Duncan, who had been the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, became Obama’s secretary of education.

Chicago is now an epicenter of the pushback against it, as I also said before. And very much at the center of that is a new Chicago Teachers Union, with a new leadership that is really challenging this whole agenda with a different vision of education, a vision of education that involves a rich curriculum for all students, that puts equity at the center. They’ve named what these policies have resulted in in Chicago "education apartheid," especially for African-American and also Latino students. So, this is a battle that is being watched by people around the country. And a really strong victory for the Chicago Teachers Union, backed up by parents and community members, will send a signal that we can actually turn around this agenda. So I think it has tremendous significance. And I get the news feeds from the Chicago Teachers Union, the reports of this strike, and it’s being covered not only nationally, but internationally.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Lipman, talk about the current leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union. Talk about Karen Lewis.

PAULINE LIPMAN: Yeah, so, one thing is that, you know, in the corporate media in Chicago, we keep reading about union bosses. Well, the leadership of the teachers’ union are teachers, they’re not union bosses, first of all. Karen Lewis is a National Board certified teacher. She teaches and has been—had been teaching chemistry at Martin Luther King High School on the South Side of Chicago. She is well known in the—by students, former students, other teachers, beloved as a teacher.

She’s part of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, which is a new caucus that really came on the scene just about four or five years ago. But because the previous leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union was really not challenging this whole agenda, CORE acted like the leadership of the union. They fought the school closings that were happening every single year in Chicago. They fought for teachers who were laid off. And rank-and-file teachers, who simply had enough of these policies after just absorbing the punishment for 15 years, overwhelmingly elected Karen and the other leadership team from the CORE caucus.

And I do have to say also that Karen has just been incredibly courageous. She’s been vilified often in the media, and she has stood very firm and in a principled way fighting for the schools that Chicago students deserve.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what this means for the nation, the whole Race to the Top that President Obama has adopted—

PAULINE LIPMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —Arne Duncan coming from Chicago. Explain all of these ties.

PAULINE LIPMAN: Right, right. So, as you said, Arne Duncan was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools. And under his watch in 2004, Chicago launched a policy called Renaissance 2010, which was actually designed by the Commercial Club of Chicago in 2003. The Commercial Club is an organization of the biggest CEOs and bankers in the city, essentially. And Arne Duncan pushed through this agenda of closing neighborhood schools, turning them over to private operators or expanding charter schools and having charter schools come in, and increasingly putting more pressure on teachers to respond to the high-stakes tests that Phil was talking about earlier.

And so, that agenda, which has been really devastating in Chicago and had already been very clearly very devastating in 2008, after four years, was the agenda that Duncan took to Washington when he became secretary of education, and it’s embedded in Race to the Top. So, Race to the Top has a set of provisions that really basically means states are competing for $4.3 billion in federal funds. And in order to get those funds, they must do certain things. And those things are the kinds of things that have been done and have failed and have been devastating in Chicago. They must close failing schools or turn them around, expand charter schools, pass legislation that allows charter schools to be expanded. They must have some kind of evaluation system of teachers that’s tied to testing students. And these policies now are the national agenda.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama famously said in 2007—he said, to unions, "I will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States."

PAULINE LIPMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you heard from President Obama?

PAULINE LIPMAN: As far—I haven’t heard from him. But as far as I know, the Chicago Teachers Union has not heard from him, either. You know, Rahm Emanuel was his chief of staff, and he’s now the mayor of Chicago. And as maybe our listeners do or don’t know, the mayor appoints the school board in Chicago. And the school board is made up of, again, corporate CEOs, financiers, a hotel magnate, real-estate developers. And part of the agenda of forcing the teachers’ backs up against the wall, I think, is an attempt to actually weaken the Chicago Teachers Union, because the Chicago Teachers Union is not—the new leadership has not only reinvigorated the union in this city, it’s reinvigorating the trade—teachers’ union movement nationally.

It’s really energized—electrified, really—teachers nationally, because this is not a traditional union, and it’s not a traditional labor struggle. It’s a union that has a different vision of education and is fighting for that. It’s a union that’s a social movement union, or trying to be a social movement union, in which it’s very democratic. Their bargaining team is made up—includes 40 rank-and-file members of the CTU. And it has energized the rank and file. So I was at the strike headquarters yesterday, and there were just hundreds of teachers showing up to pick up picket signs, talking about the issues. It’s not just Karen Lewis and her leadership that are leading this union; it’s the rank and file that are leading that union. And that is—

AMY GOODMAN: There’s going to be a large rally today at 3:00?

PAULINE LIPMAN: There is. There is. There’s going to be a rally from 3:30 to 6:00 at the CPS headquarters, and I’m sure there will be thousands of people. It will not just be teachers. It will certainly be parents and students and community members, as well, because there is—have been really strong ties built between the teachers’ union and community organizations, because they fought together with communities against school closings and for the schools our children deserve. And so, we’re expecting a really large rally, that—I’m expecting a really large rally, and I think parents and teachers are, as well, to really send a message to Rahm Emanuel that Chicago Public Schools—and he’s really behind it—that they really need to give in to the demands of the teachers and have better working conditions for teachers and better learning conditions for students.

AMY GOODMAN: How long do you expect this to go on, the strike to go on, Professor Lipman?

PAULINE LIPMAN: You know, that’s a really good question, and I certainly don’t have a crystal ball. I think a very strong showing on the part of the public backing up the teachers, who are very solid—as you know, 98 percent of the teachers in the union voted to authorize the strike. So, a very strong, solid showing, I think, should send a message to city hall that they need to settle this. But, you know, Rahm Emanuel is very unpredictable, so we don’t know.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, Pauline Lipman, professor of education and policy studies at—

PAULIN LIPMAN: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: —the University of Illinois, Chicago, also director of the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education at the university, and she’s on the coordinating committee for Teachers for Social Justice. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Sep 13, 2012 8:45 am

Here are two stories on what will inevitably serve as the backbone behind the Billionaire Boys Club school reform: Criminalize truancy. Militarize the school.



http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/11/ ... ancy/print

September 11, 2012

Should Kids be Jailed for Skipping School?
Criminalizing Truancy


by ANNETTE FUENTES



The judge peered down at Ashley Derrick from the bench and scolded her for being late to a 9 a.m. hearing in his Garland, Texas, courtroom. Derrick, 26, explained that she’d hit traffic coming from one of her two jobs as a phlebotomist. Her alleged crime: contributing to her child’s non-attendance at school, a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500 and community service for each unexcused absence.

“Your son has six lates to school and two leaving early,” Judge John Sholden declared. “How do you plead?

“Not guilty,” answered Derrick. The judge set a pretrial hearing for June 27.

Outside the courtroom, Derrick, who was dressed in brightly printed scrubs, looked weary but resigned. Her son Marcus, 7, had indeed missed class time but it was for medical appointments. “My son has chronic asthma and also ADHD,” she said, “and he panics a little when he has breathing problems. So we have him seeing a counselor.” Marcus’ doctor had been tardy herself in providing mandatory excuse notes to his school, prompting the principal to file a truancy case in the Texas court. “There’s no flexibility,” Derrick said. “But I know I will have the doctor’s notes, so I pled not guilty.”

The harried African American single mom was among the hundreds of parents and students who attended truancy court on that single May day in Dallas County. Unlike Derrick, most pled guilty or no contest and were given a fine of at least $195, due in 30 days. Students risked losing their drivers licenses, too, and those who failed to appear in court for one reason or another risked arrest warrants.

Dallas-area school districts are not uniquely harsh on suspected truants. Around the country, school administrators, elected officials, and prosecutors are tackling the truancy problem through the criminal justice system, ratcheting up enforcement, slapping students and parents with big-dollar fines, and threatening jail time. Atlanta, Georgia, and Lynchburg, Virginia sharpened their truancy policies this year with the aim of increasing prosecutions. In Detroit, Los Angeles, and Compton, the police sweep the streets for truants and enforce daytime curfew laws.

Supporters say the truancy crackdown is critical to improving test scores and high school graduation rates, but there’s a fiscal motivation, too. With school budgets cut to the bone, every dollar counts, and each absent child represents lost state funding. Some districts get a share of fines levied by the courts, providing an additional incentive for issuing tickets. While a recent study from the non-profit Get Schooled found that truancy cuts across all demographics, those most affected by harsh enforcement are low-income families whose financial struggles can contribute to attendance problems, and students like Marcus Derrick with health problems or learning disabilities, who may require costly educational interventions that school districts want to avoid by punting the problem off to the courts.

The absurdities of harsh truancy policies made headlines in May when a Houston-area judge jailed Diane Tran, 17, for missing too much school and fined her $100. News reports revealed that Tran was an 11thgrade honor student working two jobs to support siblings after her parents divorced and moved out of state. Tran’s treatment attracted the public’s attention, but thousands of students and their parents are regularly churned through similar courts without public scrutiny of the process, its costs, or its effectiveness.

For their part, education experts welcome the focus on attendance but say fines and threats of jail are the wrong approach for all but exceptional cases. “We’re paying more attention because education is more necessary than ever before,” said Joanna Heilbrunn, senior research and policy analyst at the National Center for School Engagement. “But there is always a reason a kid is not in school, and just fining the family doesn’t do anything. Most families are low income and the barriers stem from income issues.”

That’s true in Atlanta, where families are still swamped by unemployment and foreclosures from the busted housing market, says Jessica Pennington, executive director of the nonprofit Truancy Intervention Project. “Since the economic downturn, the state budget is shrinking and schools are dealing with the same problems and lot less resources,” she said. “In the past two years, we’re seeing families we wouldn’t have seen before. Construction workers who haven’t worked in two years. Lots of middle-class families who lost their houses and moved to apartments. The stress level in the home is high, kids are acting out, and parents are struggling with sustenance issues. Kids missing school is not such a priority. They are dealing with keeping the lights on.”

There are no accurate nationwide data on truancy in part because states employ different definitions. California considers a child truant after three incidents of either unexcused absence or being late 30 minutes or more. Chronic truancy is missing 10 percent of class–or 18 days–during the school year. Texas defines truancy as missing three full or partial days in a four-week period, or 10 days in six months.

But may education advocates say districts should be looking into the deeper reasons for chronic student absences. “If what matters is attendance, it matters how many days you miss for whatever reason,” said Robert Balfanz, of the Center for the Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins. Balfanz co-authoreda May 2012 study that estimates chronic absenteeism at 10 percent to 15 percent among U.S. public school students, with highest levels among poor students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. “Chronic absenteeism… is how poverty manifests itself on school achievement,” Balfanz said. “It isn’t an argument for making truancy criminal.”

The Truancy Fine Factories

Tyler M., 16, and his mother stepped up to Judge Sholden’s bench in the Garland, Texas truancy court that same May morning. Sholden read the charge: 12 unexcused absences, a first offense. The teen pled guilty and the judge hit him with a $195 fine. Stung by sticker shock, Tyler asked, “Why do I have to pay a fine?”

“It costs $450,000 to run this courtroom. Who’s going to pay for it?” an annoyed Sholden said. “Do you think the taxpayers of Garland should pay for it?”

The economics of truancy enforcement are boldly on display in Texas’ courts. From 2005 to 2009, truancy cases filed by public schools in the Lone Star state grew annually, from 85,000 to 120,000. Truancy courts are the traffic courts of public education, processing hundreds of parents and students daily in assembly-line fashion–even during summer months. The Dallas courts alone handle an average of 35,000 cases a year, and their revenue is eye-popping: just over $2 million in FY 2009 and nearly $1.8 million in FY 2011. Truancy court was founded in 2003 because the problem of unexcused absences was overwhelming the juvenile court system; now Dallas has five truancy courts, each with its own judge and staff. “They’ve developed a whole system in Dallas that has to feed itself to justify its existence,” said Deborah Fowler, deputy director of the legal advocacy group Texas Appleseed.

As in other states, truancy prosecutions seem motivated at least in part by the loss of state education dollars from student absenteeism. (Public schools receive funding based on their daily census, which is why attendance is taken every morning.) “In Texas, $4 billion has been cut from the education budget,” Fowler says. “When they start looking at where they’re losing money, truancy and low attendance are an obvious place. It’s a way to increase funding.”

There’s another potential revenue stream flowing from truancy courts. Under the Texas education code, school districts may enter into a memorandum of understanding with the truancy courts in their county to divide up the booty. “For some districts, it’s standard operating procedure to share fines with the court,” said Lisa Graybill, former legal director of the ACLU of Texas. “Too many people are unaware or indifferent to that.” Fines can cost up to $500 per truancy, due within 30 days unless a judge gives an extension. For many students and families, it’s another debt they can’t pay. And if fines aren’t paid, they can convert into an arrest warrant when a student turns 17.

In Hidalgo County, in southwest Texas, that’s exactly what happened to some 60 teenagers from poverty-level families who racked up thousands of dollars in truancy penalties. In 2010, the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of two 18-year-old plaintiffs who’d been sent to adult detention facilities for failure to pay their fines. Francisco de Luna owed more than $11,000 in truancy fines, accumulated over five years; he was sentenced to 132 days in jail. Another student, Elizabeth Diaz, was sentenced to jail for 18 days because she couldn’t pay $1,600 in fines assessed when she was 14 years old. “Our clients were indigents. They weren’t prepared for the choice of going to jail or paying exorbitant fines,” said the ACLU’s Graybill.

Diaz’s owed her school absences to chronic illnesses when she was younger–fibromyalgia and bipolar disorder–but she was on track to graduate high school until she was jailed. When her school learned of her arrest, it withdrew her enrollment, and she missed critical state exams, Graybill said.

De Luna also faced serious challenges that contributed to his absenteeism. His father died when de Luna was 13 and his family’s finances, along with the teen’s mental health, suffered. “He got into trouble in school for saggy pants, talking back to teachers–not unusual,” Graybill said, “and he started accruing these criminal tickets.” Eventually, De Luna dropped out. “It’s sad because with some intervention he could have stayed in school,” Graybill said. “Dropping the hammer on these kids is not an effective way to keep them in school.” The ACLU lawsuit forced a change of policy in Hidalgo. The court must now determine if students are indigent, and if so, judges cannot jail them for failure to pay fines.

Exorbitant fines and jail time also plagued families in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where the public school district has been using the courts to deal with a very real attendance problem. Last year, the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia and the NAACP filed suit against the Lebanon School District, charging officials there with imposing fines far in excess of legal limits. The complaint alleges that the district went on a veritable ticketing spree between 2005 and 2010, filing 8,000 truancy violations and collecting $1.3 million in fines, all of which ended up in the district’s coffers. One plaintiff, a single parent named Omary Rodriguez-Fuentes, received 29 truancy tickets over three years along with fines totaling just under $7,000. To take care of the debt, Rodriguez-Fuentes was paying $150 a month from her disability income. State law limits fines to $300 but Lebanon schools and the truancy court routinely violated those limits, according to the complaint. In July, the court hearing the lawsuit granted it class action status, adding 170 more plaintiffs to the original four.

Lead attorney Michael Churchill says that shifting demographics over the last decade are at the core of Lebanon’s truancy woes, with newer Latino residents now forming a majority in the schools and longtime white residents feeling resentment. Truancy is at 14 percent and the dropout rate is 45 percent. “For the most part, the Hispanics don’t have lot of interaction with the rest of the community,” he said. “Lots of students aren’t comfortable or doing well in school, so there’s a high dropout rate. The schools’ reaction was, instead of offering services, they went after truants.”

The lawsuit is far from resolved but it has forced the district to repay about $400,000 in illegal fines to families; the courts there are now following the letter of the law in imposing new fines. Churchill is still fighting for $108,000 more in refunds for plaintiffs, and a trial is scheduled for September. Rebecca Young, an attorney for the district, declined to comment for this article. Meanwhile, the district’s ticketing blitz has slowed, which school officials attribute to the lawsuit making parents more careful about truancy.

Truancy Court’s ‘Secret Society’

In Rhode Island, the truancy court program has become infamous, not for sky-high fines and voluminous dockets but for the large proportion of students with learning and other disabilities who have landed in its iron grip. For Rozanne Thomasian and her daughter Cheyenne, the nightmare began in 2007 when Cheyenne was in seventh grade. Cheyenne, who attended a public school in South Kingston, had an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) because of severe ADHD and Tourette Syndrome and the medications she was taking for anxiety. The meds caused stomach problems, which in turn caused school absences and tardiness.

Thomasian learned that the school had filed a truancy petition for Cheyenne’s excessive absences when a truancy officer came to their home. She had no idea she needed doctor’s notes to justify her daughter’s absences. “There were no set guidelines,” Thomasian said in a phone interview. “Each district had their own definition of truancy–if a child is late once, or five times–there was no consistency from school to school, even in the same district.”

Thomasian, a single mom who works as a nurse, and Cheyenne fell into the rabbit’s hole of the family court’s truancy diversion program. There they remained stuck for three years. Without understanding the legal process or possible penalties, mother and daughter signed away their right to be heard in either family court or truancy court at their very first hearing. The magistrate didn’t question the merit of the school’s petition but instead ruled Cheyenne “wayward,” putting her under court supervision that required weekly meetings. Due process didn’t seem to mean much during the hearing; no transcripts were made of the court proceedings, making it impossible for the mother to appeal her case.

“It’s like a secret society. How many parents and children can we scare?” said Thomasian, who attended many of the hearings with Cheyenne. When the judge threatened to send Cheyenne to detention during one meeting, Thomasian contacted the ACLU. Soon after, the magistrate declared that Cheyenne had “graduated” from truancy court.

“What’s going on with Rhode Island is schools are using the truancy program for kids who are difficult to educate,” said the ACLU’s Courtney Bowe. She is the lead attorney on a lawsuit against the courts and school districts that participate in the truancy program. “Rhode Island is not alone, but because of the way they define truancy, they’ve thrown the rule book out of window,” Bowe said.

Cheyenne was not the only student with disabilities ensnared in the truancy program. ACLU attorneys and their allies found that one-third of students under truancy court supervision had Individualized Education Programs. A much higher number had disabilities that had not been diagnosed by their schools. One plaintiff, Alin N., 13, had sickle cell anemia and missed school during bouts of extreme pain. Truancy court founder Judge Jeremiah Jeremiah issued an arrest order for the boy and threatened his mother with jail if he didn’t go to school one day in February 2010. His mother sent him to school, but once there, his condition became critical and the school had to call an ambulance.

“Our state law is so clear that kids with disabilities are not supposed to be caught up in truancy proceedings if their absences are related to their disabilities,” said Anne Mulready, supervising attorney at the Rhode Island Disability Law Center, who is involved in the lawsuit. “But as more cities face budget cuts, we’ve seen schools unwilling to do things that five years ago, before the economy took a turn for the worse, they would have done. Sometimes it appears schools have done an end run around special ed services by using truancy court.”

Fifteen plaintiffs have joined the suit, which is currently bogged down in procedural issues. After it was filed in 2010, five districts dropped out of the truancy program altogether and Judge Jeremiah retired. A new judge issued clearer guidelines for truancy court, including a rule that all hearings must be recorded. Family Court spokesperson Craig Berke declined to comment on the pending lawsuit but he said the court is proud of what he described as a successful program. Some school districts dropped out of the program, Berke said, because they did not want to incur the cost of litigation, but he said that they planned to use the truancy courts once the matter is settled.

L.A.’s Curfew Problem

Los Angeles has attacked its truancy problem, which reached about 36 percent last year, with a daytime curfew and aggressive policing and tickets for all those violating it. The crackdown hasn’t managed to improve attendance, but it has sent thousands of kids and their parents to court and incited a student revolt against the policies.

Cinthia Gonzalez joined the campaign against the truancy sweeps as a sophomore at Roosevelt High, where she was editor of the newspaper and a college-track student. But good academics didn’t shield her from truancy enforcement. “Three cops stopped me one day a block from school,” she recalled. “I wasn’t even supposed to be in school anyway. I was really mad. It was embarrassing.” She was lucky the police let her go without a fine. “My friends who got tickets were outraged. They had to pay $250 and their parents would have to miss work to go to court,” Gonzalez said.

From 2009 to 2011, L.A. school police issued 33,500 tickets to students on or near school campuses; nearly a third were for violations of the daytime curfew, according to data obtained by the Community Rights, the ACLU of Southern California, and public counsel. City police also conducted truancy sweeps and were known to ticket tardy students on their way to school, sometimes handcuffing them.

Curfews are a popular prescription for curbing crime, but there is scant proof they work. A widely cited 2003 study by Kenneth Adams, funded by the National Institute of Justice, surveyed the research and found little “to support the argument that curfews reduce crime and criminal victimization.” Enforcement generates arrests for curfew-related violations, which Adams suggests “needlessly add to the criminal histories of some juveniles.”

The Community Rights Campaign spent five years fighting rampant curfew ticketing of L.A.’s public school students, who are overwhelmingly black, Latino, and low-income. They spoke about unreliable public bus service, neighborhood violence, health issues, and financial hardships at home as hurdles to kids getting to school on time. Many students told of ditching school rather than risking a fine for being late.

In the spring of 2011, the L.A. police halted ticketing tardy students and stopped running truancy sweeps during the first hour of school. In October, the school police followed suit. Last February, the L.A. City Council amended the daytime curfew: no tickets for students late to school; no fines or court appearances for the first two curfew violations; and fines for a third offense limited to $20.

But the campaign’s broader agenda is to improve the quality of L.A.’s public schools to entice students to attend, not avoid, class. Truancy is a symptom of schools’ failure, not the students’, says campaign director Manuel Criollo. “Officials say if you don’t go to school, you’re going to end up in jail. The automatic assumption is that you’re up to no good, and that’s the wrong response to what’s happening in public schools,” he said. “What is the responsibility of the school? If they have a 50 percent failure rate, it should indicate something is wrong.”


Annette Fuentes is an EHRP contributor and a Bay Area journalist and author of “Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse” (Verso).

This story was produced by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.





http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/10/ ... ters/print

September 10, 2012

Violating the Privacy Rights of Students
Why is Georgia Secretly Giving Student Test Scores to Military Recruiters?


by AZADEH SHAHSHAHANI



In 2006, Marlyn, a mother who lives in Gwinnett County with her children, was surprised to hear that her son Kyle, a senior at Brookwood High School, had taken the ASVAB test. ASVAB or the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test is the military’s entrance exam, given to recruits to determine their aptitude for military occupations. Marlyn does not recall consenting to her son’s taking of the test or for the results to be sent to military recruiters. Her son did not know either that the results will be sent to recruiters. Kyle was subsequently contacted by recruiters and Marlyn had a tough time getting them to stop once Kyle had made a college selection.

Marlyn and Kyle are certainly not alone. In fact, Georgia’s record in terms of protecting the privacy of students who take the ASVAB test has gotten even worse over the years.

With the start of the school year, the ACLU Foundation of Georgia sent a letter to Georgia’s State School Superintendent, Dr. Barge, asking for protection of privacy rights of Georgia’s high school students who take the ASVAB. Even without a student’s or parent’s consent, the ASVAB test may be used to send highly sensitive information about a student to the military for purposes of recruitment. After the administration of the ASVAB test, military representatives may directly communicate with youth to suggest military career paths, based on the individualized profiles ascertained from their test data.

U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command (USMEPCOM) Regulation 601-4 identifies the options schools may choose regarding the administration and release of their students’ ASVAB results. These options include Option 8, which provides high schools and their students with the students’ test results, but does not entail automatically sending the results to military recruiters.

In its letter, the ACLU of Georgia asks that a state-wide policy that requires schools to protect such information be adopted in Georgia, specifically, a policy that requires the selection of option 8 by school officials.

States such as Maryland and Hawaii and cities such as New York City have required that their public schools respect student privacy by enacting laws and policies in which schools must choose Option 8 when the ASVAB test is administered.

In documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, not a single high school in Georgia selected option 8 during the 2010-2011 school year, while the ASVAB test results of more than 26,000 students was marked by Options 1-6, meaning test results and student information may be released to recruiters without prior consent. The data for 2011 covering more than 29,000 students indicates the same.

If school officials do not select a release option, the school’s Educational Support Specialist will select Option 1 which entails automatically releasing the information to military recruiters. In 2009-2010, 83.9% of the children in Georgia were tested under Option 1. This percentage had increased to 87.7% of Georgia’s students in 2010-2011.

This lack of protection for students’ privacy also contravenes the obligations of the U.S. government and the State of Georgia under international law.

The U.S. ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict in 2002. The Protocol is therefore binding on the U.S. government and state and local government entities and agents, including Georgia public schools.

As part of the treaty mechanism, the U.S. has to submit a report every four years to the Committee on Rights of the Child (CRC), the United Nations body that monitors compliance with the Optional Protocol.

The U.S. government’s latest report to the CRC will be reviewed by the Committee in January 2013. The list of issues to be discussed during this review includes the use of the ASVAB test in schools including the age of children who were given this test and whether parents have the possibility to prevent their children from taking it.

We hope that this will be an opportunity for the U.S. government and Georgia schools to provide needed transparency and to be held accountable to their international obligations as well as obligations to protect the privacy of Georgia students.


Azadeh Shahshahani is the Director of the National Security/Immigrants’ Rights Project at the ACLU of Georgia. She is the president-elect of the National Lawyers’ Guild.
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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Sep 20, 2012 1:20 pm

Chicago strike settled, treated as win for teachers - more later on actual settlement. Meanwhile, there was this of interest:


http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/17/ ... ores/print

September 17, 2012

The New York Times vs. the Teachers
The Chicago Teachers and Their Students’ Test Scores


by ANN ROBERTSON and BILL LEUMER



Many crucial issues are at stake in the Chicago Teachers Union strike. But the school district’s insistence that student test scores constitute a major basis of teacher evaluations seems to have become a particularly contentious point, leading to the vilification of teachers by the mainstream media, particularly The New York Times.

Joe Nocera of The New York Times, for example, wrote:

“On Sunday night, when she announced that the teachers were going on strike, Lewis said that teachers should not be at risk of losing their jobs over new evaluations that rely heavily on standardized test scores, which don’t account for outside factors like poverty and homelessness. Reformers have long complained that teachers’ unions too often use poverty as an excuse for poor performance. Lewis’s remarks would seem to justify that complaint” (“In Chicago, It’s a Mess, All Right,” September 10, 2012).


Is Joe Nocera right to imply that allusions to poverty as a major factor in determining students’ test scores is merely “an excuse?” We can look to Joe Nocera himself for the answer. On April 25, 2011, he wrote: “Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn” (“The Limits of School Reform, The New York Times, April 25, 2011). We’ll give Nocera an ‘F’ for failing to uphold basic canons of consistency.

Nicholas Kristof, also of The New York Times, weighed into the debate with at least the intelligent admission that “… the main reason inner-city schools do poorly isn’t teachers’ unions, but poverty” (“Students Over Unions, September 12, 2012).

He proceeded to offer a more sophisticated attack on teachers: “There’s now solid evidence that there are huge differences in the effectiveness of teachers, even within high-poverty schools.”

He continued: “The study found that strong teachers in the fourth through eighth grades raised the game of their students in ways that would last for decades. Just having a strong teacher for one elementary year left pupils a bit less likely to become mothers as teenagers, a bit more likely to go to college and earning more money at age 28.”

Finally, he raised the crucial question: “How does one figure out who is a weak teacher? Yes, that’s a challenge. But researchers are improving systems to measure ‘value added’ from beginning to end of the year, and, with three years of data, it’s usually possible to tell which teachers are failing.”

But this basically concedes the argument to the teachers. Kristoff acknowledges that such a reliable procedure does not yet exist when he states the current one only “usually” works. This could be as low as 51 percent of the time, which would mean it is no better than a toss of the dice. One must keep in mind that what is at stake is a teacher’s career and livelihood. Employing an evaluation system that is only “usually” accurate commits a grave injustice to anyone subjected to it.

New York Times columnist David Brooks also felt compelled to jump on the bandwagon:

“Though the final details are still uncertain, there will also be a serious teacher evaluation process. The various elements of those evaluations will change for each teacher year by year, but, as teachers progress in their careers, student performance will become more and more important. That’s vital because various studies have shown that evaluations that rely in part on test scores really do identify the best teachers” (Apres Rahm, Le Deluge, September 13, 2012).


Brooks’ formulation goes a step beyond Kristof by suggesting that these evaluations “really do” identify the best teachers, although he might have been exaggerating their effectiveness. Nevertheless, his claim still leaves open the question: Are good teachers being correctly identified because of the student test-score component of their evaluation or because of all the other factors that are employed?

Perhaps more importantly, here is what The New York Times itself had to say about measuring the value added by teachers where test scores are a major component: “Several studies have shown that teachers who receive high value-added scores — the term for the effect that teachers have on student test performance — in one year can score poorly a year later. ‘There are big swings from year to year,’ said Jesse Rothstein, associate professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley.” (“National Schools Debate Is on Display in Chicago,” by Motoko Rich, September 11, 2012).

Teachers are not opposed to evaluations, although one would not know this by reading the op-ed page of the New York Times. They rightfully oppose evaluations that do not provide an accurate reflection of their performance. Shockingly, none of the above writers is troubled by teacher evaluations with accuracy that fluctuates wildly. It would be interesting to discover if their convictions remained firm when faced with the prospect of being evaluated themselves by an equally unpredictable procedure for journalists.

Even The New York Times itself editorialized against the striking Chicago teachers, claiming “Teachers’ strikes, because they hurt children and their families, are never a good idea” (September 11, 2012). What The Times fails to understand is that teachers also oppose a strong emphasis on standardized test scores because they know first-hand that students are harmed in the process. As the picket sign of one striking Chicago teacher said: “I want to teach to the student, not the test.”

Here is how Diane Ravitch, who served as deputy secretary of education during the George H. W. Bush administration, described the problem: “And so I concluded that value-added assessment should not be used at all. Never. It has a wide margin of error. It is unstable. A teacher who is highly effective one year may get a different rating the next year depending on which students are assigned to his or her class. Ratings may differ if the tests differ. To the extent it is used, it will narrow the curriculum and promote teaching to tests. Teachers will be mislabeled and stigmatized. Many factors that influence student scores will not be counted at all” (The Washington Post, October 10, 2010, “Ravitch: Why teachers should never be rated by test scores,” by Valerie Strauss).

When standardized test scores are emphasized, teachers are compelled to teach to the test or risk losing their jobs. Not only do the tests narrow the curriculum, as Diane Ravitch correctly observes, they undermine the entire teaching endeavor. Great teachers love their students and love to instill in them a love of learning. And the students in return love their teacher and become open to horizons of knowledge that were unimaginable to them before. This is the foundation that nurtures wonderful, sometimes, magical learning experiences in the classroom. No standardized test can possibly penetrate or measure this domain, and the attempt to apply such a ruler only reveals the ignorance of those who pretend to know better.


Ann Robertson is a Lecturer at San Francisco State University and a member of the California Faculty Association.

Bill Leumer is a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 853 (ret.). Both are writers for Workers Action and may be reached atsanfrancisco@workerscompass.org.




Apropos NYT, and in case you've ever doubted that largely eliminating teachers is the endgame, here comes a flanking action from The Magazine:



http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magaz ... nted=print

September 14, 2012

The Machines Are Taking Over

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL



Neil Heffernan was listening to his fiancée, Cristina Lindquist, tutor one of her students in mathematics when he had an idea. Heffernan was a graduate student in computer science, and by this point — the summer of 1997 — he had been working for two years with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University on developing computer software to help students improve their skills. But he had come to believe that the programs did little to assist their users. They were built on elaborate theories of the student mind — attempts to simulate the learning brain. Then it dawned on him: what was missing from the programs was the interventions teachers made to promote and accelerate learning. Why not model a computer program on a human tutor like Lindquist?

Over the next few months, Heffernan videotaped Lindquist, who taught math to middle-school students, as she tutored, transcribing the sessions word for word, hoping to isolate what made her a successful teacher. A look at the transcripts suggests the difficulties he faced. Lindquist’s tutoring sessions were highly interactive: a single hour might contain more than 400 lines of dialogue. She asked lots of questions and probed her student’s answers. She came up with examples based on the student’s own experiences. She began sentences, and her student completed them. Their dialogue was anything but formulaic.

Lindquist: Do you know how to calculate average driving speed?

Student: I think so, but I forget.

Lindquist: Well, average speed — as your mom drove you here, did she drive the same speed the whole time?

Student: No.

Lindquist: But she did have an average speed. How do you think you calculate the average speed?

Student: It would be hours divided by 55 miles.

Lindquist: Which way is it? It’s miles per hour. So which way do you divide?

Student: It would be 55 miles divided by hours.

As the session continued, Lindquist gestured, pointed, made eye contact, modulated her voice. “Cruising!” she exclaimed, after the student answered three questions in a row correctly. “Did you see how I had to stop and think?” she inquired, modeling how to solve a problem. “I can see you’re getting tired,” she commented sympathetically near the end of the session. How could a computer program ever approximate this?

In a 1984 paper that is regarded as a classic of educational psychology, Benjamin Bloom, a professor at the University of Chicago, showed that being tutored is the most effective way to learn, vastly superior to being taught in a classroom. The experiments headed by Bloom randomly assigned fourth-, fifth- and eighth-grade students to classes of about 30 pupils per teacher, or to one-on-one tutoring. Children tutored individually performed two standard deviations better than children who received conventional classroom instruction — a huge difference.

Affluent American parents have since come to see the disparity Bloom identified as a golden opportunity, and tutoring has ballooned into a $5 billion industry. Among middle- and high-school students enrolled in New York City’s elite schools, tutoring is a common practice, and the most sought-after tutors can charge as much as $400 an hour.

But what of the pupils who could most benefit from tutoring — poor, urban, minority? Bloom had hoped that traditional teaching could eventually be made as effective as tutoring. But Heffernan was doubtful. He knew firsthand what it was like to grapple with the challenges of the classroom. After graduating from Amherst College, he joined Teach for America and was placed in an inner-city middle school in Baltimore. Some of his classes had as many as 40 students, all of them performing well below grade level. Discipline was a constant problem. Heffernan claims he set a school record for the number of students sent to the principal’s office. “I could barely control the class, let alone help each student,” Heffernan told me. “I wasn’t ever going to make a dent in this country’s educational problems by teaching just a few classes of students at a time.”

Heffernan left teaching, hoping that some marriage of education and technology might help “level the playing field in American education.” He decided that the only way to close the persistent “achievement gap” between white and minority, high- and low-income students was to offer universal tutoring — to give each student access to his or her own Cristina Lindquist. While hiring a human tutor for every child would be prohibitively expensive, the right computer program could make this possible.

So Heffernan forged ahead, cataloging more than two dozen “moves” Lindquist made to help her students learn (“remind the student of steps they have already completed,” “encourage the student to generalize,” “challenge a correct answer if the tutor suspects guessing”). He incorporated many of these tactics into a computerized tutor — called “Ms. Lindquist” — which became the basis of his doctoral dissertation. When he was hired as an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, Heffernan continued to work on the program, joined in his efforts by Lindquist, now his wife, who also works at W.P.I. Together they improved the tutor, which they renamed ASSISTments (it assists students while generating an assessment of their progress). Seventeen years after Heffernan first set up his video camera, the computerized tutor he designed has been used by more than 100,000 students, in schools all over the country. “I look at this as just a start,” he told me. But, he added confidently, “we are closing the gap with human tutors.”

Grafton Middle School, a public school in a prosperous town a few miles outside Worcester, has been using ASSISTments since 2010. Last spring, I visited the home of Tyler Rogers, a tall boy with reddish-blond hair who was just finishing seventh grade at Grafton and who used the program to do his math homework. (While ASSISTments has made a few limited forays into tutoring other subjects, it is almost entirely dedicated to teaching math.) His teachers described him as “conscientious” and “mature,” but he had struggled in his pre-algebra class that year. “Sometime last fall, it started to get really hard,” he said as he opened his laptop.

Tyler breezed through the first part of his homework, but 10 questions in he hit a rough patch. “Write the equation in function form: 3x-y=5,” read the problem on the screen. Tyler worked the problem out in pencil first and then typed “5-3x” into the box. The response was instantaneous: “Sorry, wrong answer.” Tyler’s shoulders slumped. He tried again, his pencil scratching the paper. Another answer — “5/3x” — yielded another error message, but a third try, with “3x-5,” worked better. “Correct!” the computer proclaimed.

ASSISTments incorporates many of the findings made by researchers who, spurred by the 1984 Bloom study, set out to discover what tutors do that is so helpful to student learning. First and foremost, they concluded, tutors provide immediate feedback: they let students know whether what they’re doing is right or wrong. Such responsiveness keeps students on track, preventing them from wandering down “garden paths” of unproductive reasoning.

The second important service tutors provide, researchers discovered, is guiding students’ efforts, offering nudges in the right direction. ASSISTments provides this, too, in the form of a “hint” button. Tyler chose not to use it that evening, but if he had, he would have been given a series of clues to the right answer, “scaffolded” to support his own problem-solving efforts. For the answer “5-3x,” the computer responded: “You need to take a closer look at your signs. Notice there is a minus in front of the ‘y.’ ”

Tyler’s father, Chris Rogers, who manages complex networks of computers for a living, is pleased that his son’s homework employs technology. “Everyone works with computers these days,” he told me later. “Tyler might as well get used to using them now.” But his mother, Andrea, is more skeptical. Andrea is studying for a master’s in education and plans to become an elementary-school teacher. She is not opposed to the use of educational technology, but she objects to the flat affect of ASSISTments. In contrast to a human tutor, who has a nearly infinite number of potential responses to a student’s difficulties, the program is equipped with only a few. If a solution to a problem is typed incorrectly — say, with an extra space — the computer stubbornly returns the “Sorry, incorrect answer” message, though a human would recognize the answer as right. “In the beginning, when Tyler was first learning to use ASSISTments, there was a lot of frustration,” Andrea says. “I would sit there with him for hours, helping him. A computer can’t tell when you’re confused or frustrated or bored.”

Heffernan, as it happens, is working on that. Dealing with emotion — helping students regulate their feelings, quelling frustration and rousing flagging morale — is the third important function that human tutors fulfill. So Heffernan, along with several researchers at W.P.I. and other institutions, is working on an emotion-sensitive tutor: a computer program that can recognize and respond to students’ moods. One of his collaborators on the project is Sidney D’Mello, an assistant professor of psychology and computer science at the University of Notre Dame.

“The first thing we had to do is identify which emotions are important in tutoring, and we found that there are three that really matter: boredom, frustration and confusion,” D’Mello said. “Then we had to figure out how to accurately measure those feelings without interrupting the tutoring process.” His research has relied on two methods of collecting such data: applying facial-expression recognition software to spot a furrowed brow or an expression of slack disengagement; and using a special chair with posture sensors to tell whether students are leaning forward with interest or lolling back in boredom. Once the student’s feelings are identified, the thinking goes, the computerized tutor could adjust accordingly — giving the bored student more challenging questions or reviewing fundamentals with the student who is confused.

Of course, as D’Mello puts it, “we can’t install a $20,000 butt-sensor chair in every school in America.” So D’Mello, along with Heffernan, is working on a less elaborate, less expensive alternative: judging whether a student is bored, confused or frustrated based only on the pattern of his or her responses to questions. Heffernan and a collaborator at Columbia’s Teachers College, Ryan Baker, an expert in educational data mining, determined that students enter their answers in characteristic ways: a student who is bored, for example, may go for long stretches without answering any problems (he might be talking to a fellow student, or daydreaming) and then will answer a flurry of questions all at once, getting most or all correct. A student who is confused, by contrast, will spend a lot of time on each question, resort to the hint button frequently and get many of the questions wrong.

“Right now we’re able to accurately identify students’ emotions from their response patterns at a rate about 30 percent better than chance,” Baker says. “That’s about where the video cameras and posture sensors were a few years ago, and we’re optimistic that we can get close to their current accuracy rates of about 70 percent better than chance.” Human judges of emotion, he notes, reach agreement on what other people are feeling about 80 percent of the time.

Heffernan is also experimenting with ways that computers can inject emotion into the tutoring exchange — by flashing messages of encouragement, for example, or by calling up motivational videos recorded by the students’ teachers. The aim, he says, is to endow his computerized tutor “with the qualities of humans that help other humans learn.”

But is humanizing computers really the best way to supply students with effective tutors? Some researchers, like Ken Koedinger, a professor of human-computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, take a different view from Heffernan’s: computerized tutors shouldn’t try to emulate humans, because computers may well be the superior teachers. Koedinger has been working on computerized tutors for almost three decades, using them not only to help students learn but also to collect data about how the learning process works. Every keystroke a student makes — every hesitation, every hint requested, every wrong answer — can be analyzed for clues to how the mind learns. A program Koedinger helped design, Cognitive Tutor, is currently used by more than 600,000 students in 3,000 school districts around the country, generating a vast supply of data for researchers to mine. (The program is owned by a company called Carnegie Learning, which was sold to the Apollo Group last year for $75 million; Apollo also owns the for-profit University of Phoenix.)

Koedinger is convinced that learning is so unfathomably complex that we need the data generated by computers to fully understand it. “We think we know how to teach because humans have been doing it forever,” he says, “but in fact we’re just beginning to understand how complicated it is to do it well.”

As an example, Koedinger points to the spacing effect. Decades of research have demonstrated that people learn more effectively when their encounters with information are spread out over time, rather than massed into one marathon study session. Some teachers have incorporated this finding into their classrooms — going over previously covered material at regular intervals, for instance. But optimizing the spacing effect is a far more intricate task than providing the occasional review, Koedinger says: “To maximize retention of material, it’s best to start out by exposing the student to the information at short intervals, gradually lengthening the amount of time between encounters.” Different types of information — abstract concepts versus concrete facts, for example — require different schedules of exposure. The spacing timetable should also be adjusted to each individual’s shifting level of mastery. “There’s no way a classroom teacher can keep track of all this for every kid,” Koedinger says. But a computer, with its vast stores of memory and automated record-keeping, can. Koedinger and his colleagues have identified hundreds of subtle facets of learning, all of which can be managed and implemented by sophisticated software.

Yet some educators maintain that however complex the data analysis and targeted the program, computerized tutoring is no match for a good teacher. It’s not clear, for instance, that Koedinger’s program yields better outcomes for students. A review conducted by the Department of Education in 2010 concluded that the product had “no discernible effects” on students’ test scores, while costing far more than a conventional textbook, leading critics to charge that Carnegie Learning is taking advantage of teachers and administrators dazzled by the promise of educational technology. Koedinger counters that “many other studies, mostly positive,” have affirmed the value of the Carnegie Learning program. “I’m confident that the program helps students learn better than paper-and-pencil homework assignments.”

Heffernan isn’t susceptible to the criticism that he is profiting from school districts, because he gives ASSISTments away free. And so far, the small number of preliminary, peer-reviewed studies he has conducted on his program support its value: one randomized controlled trial found that the use of the computerized tutor improved students’ performance in math by the equivalent of a full letter grade over the performance of pupils who used paper and pencil to do their homework.

But Heffernan does face one serious hurdle: any student who wishes to use ASSISTments needs a computer and Internet access. More than 20 percent of U.S. households are not equipped with a computer; about 30 percent have no broadband connection. Heffernan originally hoped to try ASSISTments out in Worcester’s mostly urban school district, but he had to scale back the program when he found that few students were consistently able to use a computer at home. So ASSISTments has mainly been adopted by affluent suburban schools like Grafton Middle School and Bellingham Memorial Middle School in Massachusetts — populated, Heffernan said ruefully, by students who already have the advantages of high-functioning schools and educated, involved parents. But, he told me brightly, he recently received a grant from the Department of Education to supply ASSISTments to almost 10,000 public-school students in Maine — a largely poor, largely rural state in which all seventh and eighth grade students are supplied with a laptop, thanks to a state initiative. Heffernan hopes that by raising the Maine students’ test scores with ASSISTments, he will inspire more officials in states around the country to see the virtue of making tutoring universal.

The morning after I watched Tyler Rogers do his homework, I sat in on his math class at Grafton Middle School. As he and his classmates filed into the classroom, I talked with his teacher, Kim Thienpont, who has taught middle school for 10 years. “As teachers, we get all this training in ‘differentiated instruction’ — adapting our teaching to the needs of each student,” she said. “But in a class of 20 students, with a certain amount of material we have to cover each day, how am I really going to do that?”

ASSISTments, Thienpont told me, made this possible, echoing what I heard from another area math teacher, Barbara Delaney, the day before. Delaney teaches sixth-grade math in nearby Bellingham. Each time her students use the computerized tutor to do their homework, the program collects data on how well they’re doing: which problems they got wrong, how many times they used the hint button. The information is automatically collated into a report, which is available to Delaney on her own computer before the next morning’s class. (Reports on individual students can be accessed by their parents.) “With ASSISTments, I know none of my students are falling through the cracks,” Delaney told me.

After completing a few warm-up problems on their school’s iPod Touches, the students turned to the front of the room, where Thienpont projected a spreadsheet of the previous night’s homework. Like stock traders going over the day’s returns, the students scanned the data, comparing their own grades with the class average and picking out the problems that gave their classmates trouble. (“If you got a question wrong, but a lot of other people got it wrong, too, you don’t feel so bad,” Tyler explained.)

Thienpont began by going over “common wrong answers” — incorrect solutions that many students arrived at by following predictable but mistaken lines of reasoning. Or perhaps, not so predictable. “Sometimes I’m flabbergasted by the thing all the students get wrong,” Thienpont said. “It’s often a mistake I never would have expected.” Human teachers and tutors are susceptible to what cognitive scientists call the “expert blind spot” — once we’ve mastered a body of knowledge, it’s hard to imagine what novices don’t know — but computers have no such mental block. Highlighting “common wrong answers” allows Thienpont to address shared misconceptions without putting any one student on the spot.

I saw another unexpected effect of computerized tutoring in Delaney’s Bellingham classroom. After explaining how to solve a problem that many got wrong on the previous night’s homework, Delaney asked her students to come up with a hint for the next year’s class. Students called out suggested clues, and after a few tries, they arrived at a concise tip. “Congratulations!” she said. “You’ve just helped next year’s sixth graders learn math.” When Delaney’s future pupils press the hint button in ASSISTments, the former students’ advice will appear.

Unlike the proprietary software sold by Carnegie Learning, or by education-technology giants like Pearson, ASSISTments was designed to be modified by teachers and students, in a process Heffernan likens to the crowd-sourcing that created Wikipedia. His latest inspiration is to add a button to each page of ASSISTments that will allow students to access a Web page where they can get more information about, say, a relevant math concept. Heffernan and his W.P.I. colleagues are now developing a system of vetting and ranking the thousands of math-related sites on the Internet.

For all his ambition, Heffernan acknowledges that this technology has limits. He has a motto: “Let computers do what computers are good at, and people do what people are good at.” Computers excel in following a precise plan of instruction. A computer never gets impatient or annoyed. But it never gets excited or enthusiastic either. Nor can a computer guide a student through an open-ended exploration of literature or history. It’s no accident that ASSISTments and other computerized tutoring systems have focused primarily on math, a subject suited to computers’ binary language. While a computer can emulate, and in some ways exceed, the abilities of a human teacher, it will not replace her. Rather, it’s the emerging hybrid of human and computer instruction — not either one alone — that may well transform education.

Near the end of my visit to Worcester, I told Heffernan about a scene I witnessed in Barbara Delaney’s class. She had divided her sixth graders into what she called “flexible groups” — groupings of students by ability that shift daily depending on the data collected in her ASSISTments report. She walked over to the group that struggled the most with the previous night’s homework and talked quietly with one girl who looked on the brink of tears. Delaney pointed to the girl’s notebook, then to the ASSISTments spreadsheet projected on a “smart” board at the front of the room. She touched the girl’s shoulder; the student lifted her face to her teacher and managed a crooked smile.

When I finished recounting the incident, Heffernan sat back in his chair. “That’s not anything we put into the tutoring system — that’s something Barbara brings to her students,” he remarked. “I wish we could put that in a box.”

Annie Murphy Paul is the author of “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives” and is at work on a book about the science of learning.

Editor: Sheila Glaser



This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 18, 2012


An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to aspects of an initiative in Maine that provides students with laptops. Seventh and eighth graders are supplied laptop computers, not all students. The students are given the laptops for the school year; they do not own them.


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Re: The War On Teachers

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Sep 26, 2012 10:46 pm

Montreal and now Chicago - movements had almost forgotten the taste of (partial) victory. How about Spain next?


http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/19/c ... aren_lewis

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis: Deal Ending Strike a Victory for Education

Chicago public school teachers are returning to the classroom today nine days after launching their first strike in a quarter century. On Tuesday, 800 delegates of the Chicago Teachers Union voted overwhelmingly to suspend the strike to put an agreement with the city before the entire membership. The deal calls for a double-digit salary increase over the next three years, including raises for cost of living, while maintaining other increases for experience and advanced education. Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis joins us to talk about the strike, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and what this means for education reform across the country. "We’ve been micromanaged into doing things that we know are harmful for children," Lewis says.

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: We’re on the road in Chicago as part of our 100-city election 2012 tour. Chicago public school students are returning to classes after the governing body of the Chicago Teachers Union voted to suspend its nine-day strike, the first teachers’ strike in Chicago since 1987. The decision came after hours of closed-door talks among union members who had asked for time to review details of their proposed new contract. Union President Karen Lewis spoke to reporters shortly after the vote.

KAREN LEWIS: We are trying to have people understand that when people come together to deal with problems of education, the people that are actually working in the schools need to be heard. And I think that this has been an opportunity for people across the nation to have their voices heard. And I think we’re moving in the right direction.

AMY GOODMAN: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel framed the end of the strike as a victory for the city’s children. This came after he sought a court injunction to force an end to the walkout. Following Tuesday’s vote, Mayor Emanuel said the new contract could bring welcome changes to the city’s public schools.

MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL: This settlement is an honest compromise. It means returning our schools to their primary purpose, the education of our children. It means a new day and a new direction for the Chicago public schools. In this contract, we gave our children a seat at the table. In past negotiations, taxpayers paid more, but our kids got less. This time, our taxpayers are paying less, and our kids are getting more. Because of the past contracts, teachers and principals had to make false choices about where they spent their time, because there was so little of it. This contract is a break with past practices and brings a fundamental change that benefits our children.

We have been discussing the need for more school time as a city for over a decade but lacked the ability to achieve our primary educational goal. We have been discussing the need for more reading and more recess, for more science and sports, for more math and music, geometry and gym. For as long as I can remember, we’ve been discussing that. Each time, it was postponed or rejected because the changes were considered too difficult. Today, that era and those false choices come to an end.

AMY GOODMAN: Since the 800 delegates of the Chicago Teachers Union voted overwhelmingly to suspend the strike, the agreement will now go before the entire membership. The deal calls for a double-digit salary increase over the next three years, including raises for cost of living, while maintaining other increases for experience and advanced education. This is teacher and union delegate Adam Heenan, who voted to end the walkout.

ADAM HEENAN: I feel like we got something that we can go back to the classroom with dignity with. We didn’t win as much on fair compensation, but we have positions that are going back—arts positions, PE positions. We have a promise to hire a hundred more support staff and social workers, psychologists. We have an anti-bullying clause. You know, anti-workplace bullying is something that, you know, even our mayor is joining in on. And I think that we’re going to go back being able to be advocates for better classroom conditions. We have a parents’ member on each class-size panel. Even though, you know, we fought on class sizes, that was some of the non-permissible material. We fought off merit pay. There’s no merit pay in our system. We were able to fight back on a—on the Performance Evaluation Reform Act, that was designed to get rid of 6,000 union members in two years, and kind of reinventing seniority. I feel really good right now.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined here in Chicago by the woman who led the city’s first teachers’ strike in a quarter of a century. Karen Lewis is president of the Chicago Teachers Union. She’s also part of the union’s Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, known as CORE. She used to teach chemistry at Martin Luther King High School on the South Side of Chicago.

Karen Lewis, welcome back to Democracy Now!

KAREN LEWIS: Thank you for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is a momentous week right now in Chicago. This is the first morning after the decision the teachers have made to go back. Do you feel you have won this strike?

KAREN LEWIS: Oh, absolutely. I think that teachers across the country realize how important it is to stand up as a union together and fight back against things that are actually bad for children. And I want to tell you that, as we went through the contract, basically article by article, one of the things that got the absolute most applause of the night was lesson plans, that teachers could do their own lesson plans. You know, I mean, it’s like things like this that are making our lives absolutely insane, that we’ve been micromanaged into doing things that we know are harmful for children. So, to finally stand up and say, you know, this is not a good way of doing school, because somebody in an air-conditioned building with a spreadsheet thinks that’s a good way of doing it, this has been a real victory.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about what you believe you have achieved. On the strike end of things, that had to do with salary and other issues like that.

KAREN LEWIS: Sure, it did, because we are prohibited from striking for just about everything else that other districts in the state can strike for. So it’s about compensation and benefits and procedures. So, we were able to strike over the salary piece. We were able to strike over the procedure of evaluations. And we were also looking to do some other things that, even though they’re not permissible and not strikeable, that we couldn’t settle the contract without. So, that included what the content of the evaluation piece looked like.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to talk about the evaluation piece, but in terms of salary, what did you achieve?

KAREN LEWIS: Well, we fought off merit pay, which was something that they were absolutely adamant about. They wanted to take away our lanes, which are for achievement of advanced degrees. They wanted to take away our steps, which are for experience. And it’s the way we’ve been doing things traditionally for some time. They wanted to replace that with some sort of merit pay piece, or, as they call it, "differentiated compensation," that would tie to evaluations. And we were adamantly against that, and for a variety of reasons. And that took an awful lot of wrangling. So, in terms of that, you know, I mean, austerity contract compared to what we had before, but at least we were able to maintain this. And when we argued about it, they said, "Well, we’re giving you your lanes and steps." And I said, "But you need to understand, we had never lost them. So, that was something in your mind that you are giving." And I think that’s problematic.

We also got a right to recall in schools that—where enrollment drops. If that enrollment comes back up, if they projected incorrectly, then we got the right to recall, which we’ve never had, by the way. So, in many districts, when things like this happen, the right to recall is no big deal. But now we actually have it. So, there are small things. We got an anti-bullying measurement—I mean, an article. And one of the issues about that is that our members have been so miserable in the schools. We’ve had a lot of problems with principals changing people’s programs in order to set them up for failure. It’s like I know of a National Board certified teacher in science who taught seventh and eighth grade science, and she was given a kindergarten class. I mean, this is like an inappropriate—you know, there’s no pedagogical reason for this. So, these are the kinds of things that were going on in Chicago that were really driving people to easily decide to make a decision to strike, so...

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play for you comments by two Chicago teachers who participated in the strike. James Cavallero is a special education teacher in Chicago.

JAMES CAVALLERO: We’d like to see our class sizes be smaller. We’d like to see more wraparound services, so more social workers, more nurses, other services that our kids can get. In special ed, we’d like to see, you know, more special ed teachers hired so that we can really benefit those kids that really need as much one-on-one attention and even in just smaller group attention.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is Garth Liebhaber, a fifth grade teacher in Chicago, speaking about the impact of the strike.

GARTH LIEBHABER: We’ve gained dignity. We’ve gained respect for our profession and for our school communities. We have regained unionism and what it means for working people. Today, our struggle has not just been about simply a contract, because a contract is worthless unless there are people to enforce it. This has been about returning power to where it belongs: amongst the working people and the communities they serve.

AMY GOODMAN: Two teachers talking about the strike. We’re joined by Karen Lewis. She is the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, just came out of the negotiations. Their responses, what they have said, what this meant for the teachers, as well as parents and students. What’s been fascinating, watching this from afar and then coming in to Chicago, is the level of support you had, even though kids were out and teachers were scrambling, overall, from the community.

KAREN LEWIS: Yeah. Well, we’ve been working on that for quite some time. I mean, before we ever gained office of the union, we worked very hard against the school closings that had been going on. And we have reached out into the community, worked with parents, worked with students, and when you build relationships like that, it just grows. So, to us, the whole idea of a union movement in school means you have to have all the stakeholders there. And that’s something that’s been missing, I think, from people in general across the country, that unionism has been sort of like the school system: it’s been very top-down.

And the two gentlemen that you actually spoke to are on our big bargaining team. So we had—we had members from all over the city in different areas—high school, grammar school, our paraprofessionals, our clinicians—all on our big bargaining team, so that they could actually see the process of negotiations, that it wasn’t like a little room with just two or three people in it just haggling out, you know? So that made a difference, too, because people felt involved. And it was also the reason why we were not able to come to an agreement on Sunday night, because people had not seen the language. And because of the lack of trust between the staff and management, they really wanted some time to look at that agreement, as opposed to just looking at a framework. So, it took them a couple of days, and it happened.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to come back to this discussion. Our guest is Karen Lewis. She’s president of the Chicago Teachers Union. "Back to school." That’s the word today all over Chicago. And we’re going to talk about what this means for the country. Chicago is an incubator for what is called school reform around the country. What does this strike mean? Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Rebel Diaz, Rebel Diaz singing "Chicago Teacher." Rebel Diaz are graduates of the Chicago public schools. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’re on the road in Chicago on our 100-city tour. I’m Amy Goodman.

The new Chicago teachers’ contract could allow Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to solidify his main reform objective of lengthening what had been one of the nation’s shortest school days and years. He spoke about this on Tuesday.

MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL: Our elementary students will gain an extra hour and 15 minutes every day and two additional weeks every year. Our high school students will be in front of a great teacher for the extra 30 minutes, just like here at Walter Payton, each day, and two additional weeks each year. For the 6,000-and-plus students who are entering kindergarten, the additional kindergarten students we put in, they will have an extra two-and-a-half years in classroom by the time they graduate high school. That two-and-a-half years of additional education is a new day and a new direction for Chicago’s children and Chicago’s schools.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff of President Obama. Karen Lewis, our guest, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, just after the vote for suspending the teachers’ strike, the first teachers’ strike called in a quarter of a century. Your response to what Rahm Emanuel considers his greatest achievement, the lengthening of the school day?

KAREN LEWIS: Well, I mean, that was his mantra from the very beginning. I think it’s interesting that when he first started out, he claimed that students would have four extra years because, you know, of this horrible, horrible short school day. Now it’s down to two-and-a-half years. You know, we know that quantity is not quality. And from the very beginning, we didn’t actually fight him on this longer school day, because the law gave him the opportunity to impose it. But we wanted to make sure it was a better school day. And a better school day for us included a broad, rich curriculum for our students. We were concerned that the direction of school reform is about standardized testing, so it’s about math and reading all day, which doesn’t engage children. So we wanted to make sure they had art, music, PE, world languages. These are the kinds of things that also stimulate critical thinking. And we wanted to also bring the joy of teaching and learning back into the classroom.

AMY GOODMAN: I was speaking to some people last night who were pointing out that Rahm Emanuel’s own children go to the Lab School, as did President Obama’s. Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, also went there himself. What are the standards of the Lab School when it comes to number of teachers per—the ratio of kids to teachers, the length of the school day?

KAREN LEWIS: Well, I’m not really sure about the ratio. I know it’s a lot smaller than the one that we have—

AMY GOODMAN: It’s a private school here that’s run by the University of Chicago.

KAREN LEWIS: —because it’s a private school. However, I also know that the Lab School has nine art teachers and quite a few music teachers and a real commitment to a rich, broad curriculum. As a matter of fact, when we heard that the mayor was sending his children to the Lab School, we went on the Lab School’s website, pulled down what their educational program looked like, and we said, from the very beginning, we’re glad that Rahm Emanuel knows what a good education looks like, so we’re going to make sure that every child in Chicago has that opportunity, too.

AMY GOODMAN: The role of the Democratic Party? I mean, you’re a union. Unions traditionally support the Democratic Party, but wasn’t it the Romney-Ryan ticket, Congressman Ryan, applauding Mayor Rahm Emanuel and what he was trying to do in this?

KAREN LEWIS: Right. Well, the school reform issue is an issue of billionaire elites, by and large, and it’s very nonpartisan. So it’s no surprise that the Romney-Ryan ticket would support any anti-union, you know, beef that the mayor has. I mean, so, other people that ran for mayor were actually told, "Oh, so, are you going to crush the unions? You know that’s part of your—your in-for-a-dollar, in-for-a-dime with us." So, I mean, that doesn’t surprise me.

But politically, I really wasn’t thinking about that, and none of us were. We were just trying to build some unity in our union, which had been extremely fractured and kind of moribund for a while. And what we wanted to do was to empower our rank-and-file teachers so that the real work of the union is in the buildings, not in an office downtown. We wanted to go from a service model to an organizing model, so that people that are feeling empowered can also do what’s best for children.

AMY GOODMAN: What about President Obama? He comes from here. Where was the Democratic Party? Where was the president in showing support, expressing support? You had the Republican ticket supporting Rahm Emanuel. What about the Democratic ticket and the president of the United States?

KAREN LEWIS: I don’t know. I mean, nobody contacted us, so I’m not—I mean, again, you know, we weren’t looking for a political solution to this. And I think that there are other ways to deal with the political solution, but in terms of this strike and this aggregation of power to the rank and file, I think that’s kind of threatening to just about every political institution, so I don’t think it really matters.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about a comment made by Bruce Rauner, a wealthy venture capitalist who’s helping lead a drive for more charter schools here in Chicago. He is also a close behind-the-scenes adviser to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. On Tuesday, he said, quote, "The critical issue is to separate the union from the teachers. They’re not the same thing. ... The union basically is a bunch of politicians elected to do certain things—get more pay, get more benefits, less work hours, more job security. That’s what they’re paid to do. They’re not about the students. They’re not about results. They’re not about the taxpayers." Karen Lewis, you’re the president of the Chicago Teachers Union. Your response?

KAREN LEWIS: I actually know Bruce Rauner. I met him when I first took this job. And he was actually quite impressed with me and invited me to join a board that he was on. He and I also went to the same undergraduate school. And so—

AMY GOODMAN: Where did you go to school?

KAREN LEWIS: We both went to Dartmouth. I’m a few classes ahead of him. And so, we’ve seen each other a variety of times. And he’s always made it clear that he did not believe in unions or any collectivism.

I mean, the problem is, he has the wrong idea of what this union is. Now, that may be so for other unions, but we purposely tried to change the culture of union so that the union is about education, is about empowering teachers and paraprofessionals and clinicians. And as a result, the union officers took pay cuts, significant pay cuts, so that we can have an organizing department, so that we can have a research department, so that we didn’t do the union the way the old union was done, because those days are over, because then people like Bruce Rauner can separate the union from the teachers. And this is where they’re wrong. They’re absolutely wrong, and they acted that way the entire time, because they didn’t understand what we were really doing, which was organizing our members, not about the whole—yes, we have to negotiate for whatever, but that’s not our main focus.

So our main focus is trying to make education better, because we feel like we can solve some of the problems. The longer school day was a hot, buttery mess until we sat down with them and said, "OK, look, you can’t afford to pay us this entire length of day, because the arbitrator told you that, so here’s a way to figure this out by staffing up so that you can save some money." We actually brought that to the board, because they were clueless. They were absolutely clueless in trying to figure out the problem. We’re teachers. We’re problem solvers. And for—Bruce Rauner has to remember, I’m two years out of the classroom, so, for me, not a bureaucratic union hack. Sorry, that tag just won’t hang on us.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about that, your background, chemistry teacher at Martin Luther King High here in Chicago, the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators. Explain what CORE is and where you came from.

KAREN LEWIS: Right. Well, we were sitting around a table, literally, eight of us, reading about the school closings in Chicago and understanding that this was basically a real-estate plan—and it still is, by the way—and not an educational plan. So, we were trying to figure out how do we actually use our voices to attack that? We read—we did book clubs, literally. We started as a book club. We read Shock Doctrine.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein’s book.

KAREN LEWIS: Yeah, Naomi Klein’s book, which was very helpful to us to kind of put in perspective what these people were doing and how they amassed this power over the last 30 years. And then, all of this started in Chicago at the business school, right? So we started just trying to take off small bites of the apple by going to the school closing hearings, demanding that the Board of Education come to these hearings. They weren’t. And again, we have an appointed mayoral-controlled board. They’re not accountable to anyone. And they’re certainly not accountable to the community.


When the community would come and beg for their schools, this is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen in my life. Children, teachers—and not so much teachers at first, but parents and community members begged for their schools. And that fell on deaf ears. So people felt completely unempowered, that if a decision was made, it was made, and there was nothing you could do about it.

Well, in the first year we started this, we got six schools taken off the hit list. That had never happened before. We changed the way the Board of Ed did things. The board members actually came to the schools. And we said, "You should at least come to the schools you’re going to close and look these people in the eye and explain to them why." And that had never happened.

AMY GOODMAN: What happens when a school closes? Where do the kids go?

KAREN LEWIS: It depends, you know. A lot of times the kids will go to another school, or some just get lost in the shuffle. I mean, none of this stuff had been taken into consideration. They had no plans for closing a school and doing anything appropriately for the children. They had no plans of bringing the faculties of the two schools together to have some conversation so there’s some continuity of instruction for children. But none of that, and no safety plan. So, you know, Chicago is a pretty dangerous place, as you may have heard, and this—absolutely no plan for how are we going to get kids safely through different territories. None of that was ever—and when we bring this up and we beg them, "Don’t do this. It’s a mistake," and they just absolutely ignored the community. And this year, there were parents from more affluent communities that got ignored. So, I mean, there was this whole kind of feeling of the Board of Education is completely unaccountable. There’s something wrong with this.

AMY GOODMAN: Actually, on the issue of accountability, before the vote to suspend the teachers’ strike, Mayor Emanuel spoke about the need to hold teachers and principals accountable. Let’s go to that clip.

MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL: I want people to understand, this is a crux of whether we’re going to make any improvements in our education of our children and create a culture where people are held accountable for the results. And these principals, like the others who signed the letter, are being clear that one of the goals they want to—they chose this. They want to be held accountable. They expect to produce results. To do that, they have to be able to also choose that the teachers that work in the building—third grade, fifth grade, what class it is—these individuals are trained. Some of them are former teachers, now principals, as in Dr. Hines’s case. And it’s a key issue about which direction we’re going to take and whether we’re going to have a school system built for accountability that holds our principals accountable—in the schools, rather than downtown, making the choice.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Karen Lewis, your response?

KAREN LEWIS: Well, I mean, the whole accountability movement is a disguise for pushing forth another agenda. Here’s the problem with the so-called principal accountability and flexibility. In Chicago, the shelf life of a principal is about four-and-a-half years. So, the question to us is, are we going to just have a lot of turn, every four years or so? Now, that means—that’s the average, so we have less than that on some ends. The days when the principal was in the school for a significant period of time, knew families, understood the neighborhood, those days are over. So, what they’re doing is turning through principals, and then they also want to turn faculty through that, too. So there are some schools where you have absolutely no veteran staff and nobody in the middle part of their career, but they have brand new teachers. So second-year teachers are mentoring first-year teachers. That is a plan for disaster, quite frankly.

So, you know, a lot of the whole—we want to know who is accountable for destroying neighborhoods? Who is held accountable for the lack of stability throughout the city that has all of these other implications? So, the whole accountability movement is just geared in one direction. So, where is the accountability upwards? Who loses their jobs for the hot mess they create for the rest of us?

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, have other teachers’ unions around the country been calling you?

KAREN LEWIS: Absolutely. They’ve not only been calling us, they’ve been sending us letters of support. They’ve been sending us, actually, money. Local 2, the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, sent us $10,000, I mean, for our solidarity fund. It’s just been amazing. Boston took out an ad refuting Rahm Emanuel’s, you know, "Oh, why can’t we just settle like Boston did?" I mean, it was just a really wonderful outpouring of support—

AMY GOODMAN: But are they going to—

KAREN LEWIS: —not just from the country—

AMY GOODMAN: Are they turning to you for what they can do in their cities, like around issues of what’s called merit pay?

KAREN LEWIS: We haven’t talked about it yet, but I’m sure those conversations are going to get started, because I think we have changed the conversation in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: And the issue of school reform nationally and what even that term "school reform" means? The person who is hailing this is Arne Duncan from—former head of the schools here, now secretary of education, the whole Race to the Top, as they call it.

KAREN LEWIS: Yeah. We’ve never liked it, and we’ve never liked those programs. We found them to be extraordinarily destabilizing. And also, the idea of the market approach for public education, as far as we’re concerned, tramples on democracy. You know, public schools are the place where you get to learn about democracy, and it’s been trampled out. And Chicago has the potential for that. We have local school councils of elected parents and community members and staff who are supposed to choose principals, evaluate principals, look at how the discretionary funds are spent. And the local school councils in schools that are very high-functioning, the local school councils are also high-functioning. But in the schools that aren’t so much, you find those aren’t functioning as well, and it’s due to a lack of training and will.

AMY GOODMAN: And evaluating teachers according to these high-stakes tests?

KAREN LEWIS: Well, that is something that the law requires now, so it’s not like, you know, we had a choice around it. But what we didn’t like is that the mayor and CPS decided to pile on and add extra—

AMY GOODMAN: Chicago Public—

KAREN LEWIS: —extra things that were not in the law. So, I mean, and that’s part of what we see. There is like this whole thing about, "Oh, I’m tougher on my teachers than you are," you know, like it’s some kind of competition amongst the elite to have who’s the baddest person in the room. But, you know, my concern about all of this is that we care about kids because that’s the work we do. And this mayor has said he cares about students. I would like to hope that he does. I know that he cares about some of them. But 25 percent, he told me, were never going to be anything, never going to amount to anything, and he wasn’t going to waste money on them. So, if we decrease wages for everybody across the board, then we see that, and we see those lack—that lack of resources coming into play. All of this makes perfect sense when you understand what their calculus really is.

AMY GOODMAN: Karen Lewis, you were a stand-up comic. Was there anything funny about this strike or what you see coming?

KAREN LEWIS: Well, I mean, I find humor in just about everything, to be perfectly honest with you. It’s how I get through the day. No, there have been some funny moments, but, by and large, this has been absolutely serious. I think the sea of red and the show of support—I mean, there’s something to be said when people are bootlegging your T-shirts, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about the red T-shirts.

KAREN LEWIS: Oh, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And they’re going to wear them back in the schools today.

KAREN LEWIS: Oh, yes. We told everybody, walk together. Meet each other in the parking lot and walk together as a union back into the buildings.

AMY GOODMAN: Karen Lewis, I want to thank you for being with us. Karen Lewis is president of the Chicago Teachers Union. She led the city’s first teachers’ strike in a quarter of a century and is part of the union’s Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, known as CORE. She was a teacher in the Chicago schools, a chemistry teacher at Martin Luther King High School on the South Side of Chicago. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.


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http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/26/ ... cago/print

September 26, 2012

The Meaning of the Chicago Teachers' Strike
What Really Happened in Chicago


by GUY MILLER



First, there was Madison, a welcome flash of lightning awakening us from the long, quiet night of labor passivity. The events came fast and hard and thousands flowed into the capital square and were ready for a showdown.

But, with a vacuum of street leadership, it only took a few weeks for the Democratic Party and the union bureaucracy to channel this potential energy into a moribund recall Governor Walker effort.

Half a year later came the Occupy Movement, involving tens of thousands of new activists, in a brave stand against Wall Street’s plan of austerity for us, and profits for them. Again, lack of leadership and direction slowed this movement to a crawl and provided an opening for the forces of repression to step in.

Building on these fight-backs, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) was preparing to confront Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his billionaire cronies in a fight for public education. I was a participant in the Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign, an organization formed to support the CTU during the strike, and these are some of my observations.

To begin with, don’t confuse the strike with the contract. The strike was an overwhelming huge victory which I will explain. The contract, on the other hand, is a small victory for the teachers. In another period, it would have to be portrayed as a major concession. But, we are not in another period, rather, we are in a period of deep neoliberal attacks.

We are in a world where the rich class has had its way for over thirty years, with a working class and trade union movement so timid and on the defensive that all they seem to want is to hide and not be noticed. A trade union movement, whose answer to every question is to cling to the outside of a lifeboat with “Democratic Party” stenciled across its bow. There they cling, frightened of sharks, dehydration and drowning.

Since the middle of the 1970s, a very organized and coordinated attack has come down on the working people of this country. Phase one was to establish a narrative of greedy workers and put-upon management. Phase two was to begin chipping away at the private sector unions. Here, of course, they had a couple of advantages—outsourcing and downsizing.

Slowly, they either moved jobs out of the North to the South or sent them overseas, or forced those remaining industries to accept less and less.

By the 1990s they had the private sector union movement small enough to drown in Grover Norquist’s bathtub. The labor union bureaucracy didn’t want to live to fight another day, but merely to stay on life support.

By this time phase three was in full assault mode. Go after the last bastion—the public sector.

At the same time, they increased the ideological fight against “big government.” The wealthy class never reconciled itself to the Progressive Era, The New Deal, or the Great Society. These were times of gains for us and, therefore, as they viewed it, losses for them. They regrouped, no longer willing to tolerate interference with their heightened need to accumulate capital in this long period of increased international competition.

The public sector seemed to be as easy pickings as did the private sector. Again, the wealthy class didn’t try to be a python and absorb the whole meal at once.

Instead, they initiated an ideological campaign backed by think tanks, foundations, and the media. Here, the lynchpin was, and is, the teachers’ unions across the country.

It is not an accident that the richest of the rich have been in the forefront of this narrative of failing schools, failing kids and failing teachers.

Start with Bill Gates, who has moved from mosquito nets to charter schools, testing and union busting as his idee fixe.

Next the Walton Family, who never saw a union they didn’t want to bust. The Kochs. The Pritzkers. Almost all the hedge fund managers, bankers and other CEOs are united in their hatred for public education.

Here, it must be pointed out that both the Democrats and Republicans have bought into this “reform” story. Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel, and Barack Obama buy totally into this approach, and they ain’t Sarah Palin.

Over the last ten years or so these people have had their way. Cowardly and complicit union leaders—American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten being exhibit A—have gone along with this BS until blaming the teachers has become the default position of much of the country.

No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are two sides of the same coin. Flip that coin and the problem is—the teachers. Not poverty. Not lack of childcare. Not crumbling infrastructure or adequate funding, just greedy teachers and their obstructionist unions.

No one, nowhere, has challenged this vicious cycle. Then along comes the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) victory, electing Karen Lewis to the CTU presidency in 2010, and with it a whole new ballgame.

The CTU now had a leadership and program not willing to play ball with the Democratic Party or the union bureaucracy. This is a leadership with many experienced class struggle people who understand what must be done—Say no to Rahm. Say no to the Gates and Say no to the Pritzkers. Say no to a corporate agenda for the schools. Say no to a vision of the future where children are drones taught just enough to become cogs in their machine.

This union leadership knew the first step in their counteroffensive was to engage their rank-and-file. They went school by school and teacher by teacher, to involve them in their union. Unlike the Vaughn and Stewart union administrations before it, they valued input from the ranks.

Next, they went to the communities. They were there when the parents protested for a library in the Pilsen neighborhood and they were there to protest every school closing that came up. They were on the offensive.

This leadership also understood the importance of solidarity. I remember marching behind their banner in Madison. They were there for UNITE-HERE, they solidarized with the postal workers, they solidarized with the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) workers.

This leadership kept the membership mobilized. Town Hall meetings. Mass demonstrations at the Auditorium Theater. Labor Day rallies. And more. They did not run and hide.

This leadership fought against racism. They stood for ending the disproportionate firing of African Americans teachers. This leadership stood for libraries, smaller class sizes, art teachers, music teachers, gym teachers, nurses and counselors.

When Rahm and his arrogant school board came with their one-sided proposals and their insulting refusal on the four percent raise, they thought they could roll right over the CTU and have their way.

After all, didn’t Rahm get his way as Obama’s-Chief-of-Staff ? Didn’t he get his way as Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee? Antiwar Democrats? Irrelevant. Progressives? Fucking retards. Yes, he had his way until he ran into Karen Lewis and the class-conscious leadership of the CTU.

The CTU stayed visible. The CTU engaged allies; other unions, the community and students (the Voices of Youth high school students were really inspiring). They did not fold up at the first sign of adversity.

So my evaluation is—the strike was a huge success. It serves as a template and a model of how to fight the seemingly invincible juggernaut. The juggernaut that thinks it controls the future.

Long Live the CTU! Long Live solidarity!


Guy Miller is a 66-year-old native Chicagoan. He worked for 38 years as a switchman on the Chicago Northwestern and Union Pacific Railroads, a proud member of local 577 of the United Transportation Union before retiring in 2008. Currently, he works in a Chicago supermarket and is a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 881.

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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