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Jimmy Johns Workers Union (Industrial Workers of the World) Contact: Rikki Olsen, 612-750-9924; Matt Miranda 651-788-5192

MINNEAPOLIS- Spirits were high and the air full of song on picket lines outside Jimmy Johns this afternoon as over 100 workers and supporters brought business to a near standstill. The picket was prompted by the refusal of Mike and Rob Mulligan, owners of the Miklin Enterprise franchise, to meet with their employees to discuss improvements in wages and working conditions.

Union members say they are undiscouraged by the owners' absence from the negotiating table. "We'll be out here until the Mulligans realize that workers can't make it on these poverty wages. We need consistent scheduling and more respect on the job. We need sick days. We need change. We're fired up and we're not going away until we see the changes we want," said Rikki Olsen, a union member at the Block E Jimmy Johns.

So far, the only response from the company has been a craigslist post advertising openings at all locations, with starting pay at $7.50, 25 cents more than current workers make.

Workers walked off the kitchen floor and presented demands this morning at all nine Miklin franchise locations, declaring their membership in the IWW Jimmy Johns Workers Union.

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Fast Food Chain Rocked by Work Stoppages in Sign of Mounting Economic Frustration among US Workers

MINNEAPOLIS- Service was anything but 'freaky fast' at Jimmy Johns today as workers walked off the kitchen floor in an unprecedented move to demand improved wages and working conditions at nine Minneapolis franchise locations. Announcing the formation of the IWW Jimmy Johns Workers Union, the workers are seeking a pay increase to above minimum wage, consistent scheduling and minimum shift lengths, regularly scheduled breaks, sick days, no-nonsense workers compensation for job-related injuries, an end to sexual harassment at work, and basic fairness on the job.

"I have been working at Jimmy Johns for over two years and they still pay me minimum wage and schedule me one-hour shifts," said Rikki Olsen, a union member at the Block E location. "I'm working my way through school and can barely make ends meet. I'd get another job, but things are just as bad across the service industry. Companies like Jimmy John's are profitable and growing, they need to provide quality jobs for the community."

The Minneapolis franchise, owned and operated by Miklin Enterprises, Inc., pays the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr, offers no benefits, and has no full-time positions outside of management. Jimmy Johns corporate website lists $264,270 as the average yearly net profit for operating a franchise. Union members estimate that Rob and Mike Mulligan, owners of Miklin, Inc. made an annual profit of at minimum $2.3 million in the last year alone. The Miklin franchise plans to open four new locations this year at an estimated cost of over $1.2 million.

Jake Foucault, a delivery driver at the Riverside store, said, "If Mike and Rob Mulligan have the money to open four new stores, then they have the money to pay us more than minimum wage. We hope Rob and Mike do the right thing and come to the negotiating table."

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[Editor's note: Ms. Socrates is a science teacher in a high school in Brooklyn entering her second year. She blogs at Teacher's Diary where this post originally appeared.]

The day after I got back from my trip to Europe, I was already feeling the pressure to start getting ready for my upcoming year. As I have reflected on my first year this summer, I feel I have grown a lot as an educator — I will certainly start this coming year off very differently than last year. Still, everyone says the second year is in some ways harder than the first. In the first year, I was not as hard on myself when things went wrong, telling myself it was a rookie mistake that I would learn from. In my second year, however, I know I will not be as forgiving. I’ll still be experimenting a lot, trying new techniques and lesson ideas, but after seeing how poorly my students did on the Regents last year, I am determined to do much better with my second crop of students.

Here’s what I’m thinking about as the new school year approaches:

1. Lesson Planning — Having strong lesson plans and unit plans ready before the year starts was a goal of mine last year that didn’t really pan out. I only had about a week and a half fully planned before beginning the year and that set me back for the rest of the semester. This year, I already have a week planned out, plus the overviews for the following two weeks, and I still have plenty of time to plan. My goal now is to have the first two units (about 8 or 9 weeks) planned before I start. I will also have time to co-plan, so that both my special education co-teacher and I are on the same page with the lessons. If I can do that, I’ll be in great shape going in.

2. New Classroom Routines — I’m redesigning how certain things work in my classroom work, especially homework. Last year, I planned to give homework almost every night, but the excessive amount of time I spent grading made me cut back. After observing a friend’s system, I plan to give homework EVERY night, so that it becomes a routine, but not collect it every time. Instead, students will check each other and I will simply record whether it was done or not. I also plan to allow more time for students to go over homework and quizzes — I ran out of time last year, but with better planning, I can surely fit this in.

3. Creating a Student-Centered Classroom — I read the book “Work Hard. Be Nice.” this summer (review to come) and it gave me some ideas about how a classroom should run — crisp, smooth transitions and lots of back and forth between students and teachers, like having a conversation. I want to include more student choice and have more classes driven by their questions and interests. Obviously it will still need to be directed in a way that prepares them for the end-of-year tests, but giving them ownership and having stricter policies will help with my classroom management.

4. Making Learning More Fun — While fun in the classroom is a controversial issue, I feel that students learn much more when they are absorbed and enjoying what they are doing. With proper planning, I think I can avoid the common pitfalls of having fun destroy any learning. There are ways to have both. I love the arts, especially music and drama, and I know many of my students do as well. By incorporating those things into the classroom, I can differentiate instruction to reach all learners and create lessons that truly engage students.

5. Decorating the Classroom — First impressions are very important, and although most of my students already met me last year, I want their first glimpse into my classroom to tell them that this is a new year and it is now their classroom. I didn’t do a great job last year of having essential questions around the room and using the posters that I did have in my lessons. This year, I want my walls to be completely covered with student work, vocabulary words, reminders and colorful posters to get kids excited about the classroom.

There is much more to do, but these are my top priorities. I hope all the other teachers out there are feeling confident about the upcoming year!

The UFT and Merrick Academy Charter School on Sept. 2 reached an agreement in the case of 11 staff members dismissed this summer by the school. The UFT charged that Merrick had fired the workers — who make up approximately one-third of the professional staff of the school — for union activity. The union had asked the state’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to order Merrick to rehire the fired staffers.

Under the terms of the agreement the UFT obtained the reinstatement of the teachers who wished to return to Merrick this fall. They will be reinstated at their old salaries. Other teachers and staff have had their cases resolved to their satisfaction. Further details of the settlement remain confidential.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, “Teachers have a right to organize and bargain collectively, and we are happy to have confirmed that right for Merrick’s staff.”

The case began this summer when the 11 staffers were fired — with no warning — by FedEx letter to their homes. The UFT asked PERB to seek a preliminary injunction requiring the reinstatement of the fired staffers. PERB then sought a court order requiring their reinstatement.

PERB’s request for an injunction was being heard in Albany County Supreme Court by Judge Eugene Devine. As part of the settlement, the Public Employment Relations Board has withdrawn its court action against Merrick.

Merrick’s employees voted to join the UFT in 2007. The Public Employment Relations Board certified the UFT as the teachers’ bargaining agent in March 2008. After repeated fruitless attempts to negotiate a contract, the UFT filed for a declaration of impasse with PERB December 2009 and five mediation sessions have taken place.

Merrick Academy is administered by Victory Schools, a for-profit operator, which charges $1.36 million in fees per year, more than 21 percent of the school’s total budget, on management fees. Victory Management operates a total of six schools in New York City earning $4.41 million in fees per year.

Got mad web engineer skills? Comfortable with HTML5, CSS3 & PHP? Built any mobile apps? Want to work at Yahoo! and lead the global social bookmarking battle? You might be the perfect fit for the Delicious engineering team.

As you know, Delicious continues to lead the way in Social Bookmarking. And with some exciting new features and opportunities coming soon, we need a new teammate to join the crew and help create new experiences for our users. We’re a small team that still iterates like a start-up – we just happen to do it within a big company. This gives the Delicious team a tight family vibe but access and support from a leading global internet company.

If this sounds like something you want to be a part of, jump on careers.yahoo.com, search for ‘foosball’ (don’t ask) and look for Req# 32524.

Psst! If that sounds like too much effort, feel free to click here instead… ;)

We know a number of you are website owners and interested in Web Analytics. We’re hoping that those of you which are interested in web analytics are aware of the excellent Yahoo! Web Analytics service and it’s blog. Today the Yahoo! Web Analytics blog posted an article about their usage of the ‘ywa_support_resources‘ tag.

Check out the ‘Social Bookmarking with Delicious and YWA‘ article to see what they’re doing.

Social Bookmarking with Delicious and YWA

As our community grows, it is imperative that we preserve the things that got us here; namely, keeping Drupal a fun, welcoming, challenging, and fair place to play. The new Drupal Code of Conduct (DCOC) states our shared ideals with respect to conduct. Think of this as coding standards for people. It is an expression of our ideals, not a rulebook. It is a way to communicate our existing values to the entire community.

Our friends at Ubuntu have blazed a brilliant trail in this area. They use Drupal as their CMS, and in turn we have embraced their Code of Conduct. This code of conduct is essentially identical to that used by Ubuntu, except that the name of the project has been changed, and the conflict resolution process has been removed since we don't have one.

The DCOC has been under discussion for several months on groups.drupal.org and discussed further at Drupalcon Conpenhagen. Folks who are interested in talking more about the DCOC should do so in the Drupal.org Policies group.

The short version:

1. Be considerate
2. Be respectful
3. When we disagree, we consult others.
4. When we are unsure, we ask for help.
5. Step down considerately.

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I imagine what Rackspace gets out of this is, that if successful, they will at least have some sort of leverage with Amazon. Amazon is a machine. Amazon executes to perfection and they release new features at a relentless pace with no signs of slowing down. They don't leave much of a door open for others to get into the game. With a real open cloud alternative it might allow a lot of people to play in the cloud space that would have been squeezed out before.

What Amazon can't match is the open cloud's capability of simultaneous supporting applications that can run seamlessly in a private cloud hosted in a corporate datacenter, in local development and test clouds, and in a full featured public cloud.

via highscalability.com

OpenStack is the first development in the cloud space that hints at a future where there actually are more than half a dozen big platform / cloud providers (aka Hosting Apocalypse).

What does Rackspace get out of it? Well, they don't get obliterated and/or don't have to try and be a VAR on top of someone else's stack. This open source approach allows them a chance at controlling their own destiny.

What are other large hosting / data center providers doing? Nothing much - riding out the end of shared hosting and getting sold to by VMWare, from what I can see.

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By: David Bacon, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed, Friday 27 August 2010

Hashmeya Muhsin, head of the electrical workers union, talks with other union leaders at a meeting in Basra. (Photos by David Bacon)

Early in the morning of July 21, police stormed the offices of the Iraqi Electrical Utility Workers Union in Basra, the poverty-stricken capital of Iraq's oil-rich south. A shamefaced officer told Hashmeya Muhsin, the first woman to head a national union in Iraq, that they'd come to carry out the orders of Electricity Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to shut the union down. As more police arrived, they took the membership records, the files documenting often-atrocious working conditions, the leaflets for demonstrations protesting Basra's agonizing power outages, the computers and the phones. Finally, Muhsin and her coworkers were pushed out and the doors locked.

Shahristani's order prohibits all trade union activity in the plants operated by the ministry, closes union offices, and seizes control of union assets from bank accounts to furniture. The order says the ministry will determine what rights have been given to union officers, and take them all away. Anyone who protests, it says, will be arrested under Iraq's Anti-Terrorism Act of 2005.

So ended seven years in which workers in the region's power plants have fought for the right to organize a legal union, to bargain with the electrical ministry, and to stop the contracting-out and privatization schemes that have threatened their jobs.

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New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s decision to fire State Education Commissioner Brett Schundler over the state’s failure to win a spot in the Race to the Top competition is reminiscent of the late Yankee owner George Steinbrenner’s serial firings of manager Billy Martin: you keep looking for a way to root against both bullies.* Certainly, there is enough blame to share over New Jersey’s runner-up status.  Schundler’s embarrassing faux pas of failing to submit an up-to-date budget was in part the result of a hasty rewrite of the state’s application, an act necessitated by Christie’s last minute decision to pull the rug out from underneath the state education commissioner’s efforts to gain district and union support. And New Jersey lost far more points — more than enough to finish in the money — from Christie’s scorched earth refusal to seek common ground than from the budgetary gaffe. But Christie is the portly Queen of Hearts, much like the late Steinbrenner, so it’s off with Schundler’s head.

On the operative principle that there ain’t nothing these days you can’t blame on teachers and their unions, the New York Post rushes into the fray today with an editorial apology for Christie which asserts that it was all the fault of the New Jersey teacher unions that the state was a runner-up. Really? Is that why Christie, Schundler and their proxies are now engaged in a race to fling the most mud at each other? For what it is worth, if the issue is lying, the only question is who is better at that craft: the New Jersey agreement which Christie nixed was not all that different from the New York application which came in at the top of the competition, contrary to Christie’s assertion in the Post editorial.

It seems that the Race to the Top is ending with the equivalent of a whimper — a spinning race to nowhere. A number of the most ardent blogging fans of the ‘zero sum game’ nature of the competition, in which one state’s success had to be another state’s failure, are now engaged in a mass whining that their favored home teams did not win [see here, here and here, among other places.] While the knowledge that a number of these nay-sayers were also paid consultants to various states in the RttT process might lead a thoughtful observer to take the complaints with a grain of salt, the role of dogmatic ideology should not be underestimated. What goes unsaid in the bitter attacks on Maryland’s success, for example, is that the cause of the enmity lies in the fact that Maryland charter law does not allow the state’s charter schools to opt out of union representation for their teachers. In ‘education reform’ circles, nothing breeds a sense of entitlement like opposition to teachers and their unions.

______________________________

Reggie Jackson famously said of Steinbrenner and Martin: “They’re made for each other. One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted.”

There is an old myth that vampires cannot be seen in a mirror. A vampire has no real substance, the story goes, so light simply travels through him, rather than bouncing back and creating a reflection. That myth came to mind when Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project recently asked “who’s a member of the ‘blame the teacher’ crowd?” and could not find a single person. Apparently Daly cannot see himself in a mirror.

If there was ever a question about the existence of the ‘blame the teacher’ crowd, it was surely put to rest by the response of many in the self-identified ‘education reform’ community to the prospect of a wave of teacher layoffs as schools re-opened for the 2010-11 school year. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation, Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, Wal-Mart Professor of Education Reform Jay Greene: the blogging boys of the educational right have told all who would listen that the education funding crisis and the prospect of massive layoffs was a good thing, and that the passage of the edu-jobs legislation mitigating those layoffs was the real disaster. With Lenin, they embrace the formula “better fewer, but better”: public schools would be better off with fewer teachers. After all, what do teachers have to do with the education of students?

Joining the educational right were the ‘all power to the boss’ technocrats that run in Wall Street hedge fund and Democrats for Educational Reform circles. First, groups like Education Trust and the New Teacher Project lobbied hard to amend the legislation to allow districts to layoff anyone they wanted, without regard for collective bargaining agreements, in order to make it so unpalatable it would never pass. When that stratagem failed, Education Trust and the New Teacher project teamed up with Joel Klein’s Education Equality Project and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in a campaign to kill the bill by denying it funding, opposing the efforts of Representative David Obey to redirect a rather modest fraction of the funds in other US DoE educational programs such as Race to the Top to this purpose. When the bill actually passed, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had to broker a deal to have the funds taken from the budget for food stamps in 2014.

The fact that the cuts to food stamps will not take place for another three years gives the real advocates for families in poverty – which include congressional leaders like Obey and teacher unions – time to fully fund the food stamp program well before the cuts would go into effect. We fully expect to wage that fight without the slightest bit of assistance from Education Trust, the New Teacher Project, the Education Equality Project and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, all of whom are well known for insisting that alleviating the effects of poverty has nothing to do with providing equal educational opportunity to the students who struggle with them every day.

But that is not enough for the likes of Kati Haycock of Education Trust, together with her trusty ‘yes’ man Andy Rotherham of Eduwonk. Having done their best to sabotage the bill and create the mess around its funding that led to the Duncan deal, they now [here and here] blame… the teachers. And yet, there is no one in the ‘blame the teacher’ crowd, right Tim?

Have you no shame? At long last, have you no shame?

Last week, we talked about thinking creatively to preempt failure. In this installment of "Sensible Strategy", we examine how failure can be snatched from the jaws of success by being too focused on the ends and not being mindful of the means. I have discovered three simple tests that can help stop bad ideas or broken processes dead in their tracks. This is the second of them.

Test 2 - Synthesize the Approach
Once a decision to take action has been made, place it within a rollout framework, a "getting it done" work plan. Careful thought and attention to how the task is carried out and how this track of work relates to other activities in the broader project can make the difference between victory or defeat, success or failure. Even good ideas can fall apart here if they are not placed within a strategic context and carried out to complement the work that the rest of the organization is doing.

Case Study: Google Buzz

One of the most spectacular cases of recent epic failure is the much-maligned launch of Google Buzz. Back in February, Google acknowledged the magnitude of its catastrophe, but despite the fact that it was a late arrival to the social networking scene, the idea of Buzz (even though many couldn't quite figure it out) was actually a good one. Like the search innovator's other tech creation, Google Wave, Buzz featured some interesting twists on a familiar formula. But because Google had not considered how the rollout of Buzz might impact how people use its Gmail and Google Talk services, a significant communication (and later, technical) disconnect emerged. And so, no one used Buzz: pretty much everyone turned it off because they considered it noise and opted out because there wasn't anything revolutionary or game-changing about it. It's become little more than a tinkering toy these days, and like Wave - which only ever just showed promise, never caught on, and became failed and cancelled - Buzz has become sort of an expendable working laboratory for social networking features that might be used in a future Google Social Network.

Failure is nothing new for cutting-edge companies like Google and Apple, and what keeps them successful is their willingness to learn from mistakes and continue innovating. A misunderstanding of Google's own demographic derailed the launch of Buzz and even the government of Canada weighed in with opinions about the subsequent privacy issues. By rolling out a good idea that was not yet ready to see the light of day because it needed more time to cook, Google's shortcomings with Buzz were glaringly apparent when compared side-by-side with its own successful Gmail and Talk. By comparison, both Gmail and Talk were launched incrementally to staged audiences with cautious perspective on how these tools would mesh with the rest of the Google platform. Careful consideration of how Buzz might fit in with the suite of products and services Google offered would have revealed early on in development that the tool needed much more thought into how it could integrate and perform.

In our final installment of "Sensible Strategy", we'll examine the third test - Calibration of Consequence - and review how the world's greatest success story mishandled the launching of its most successful product ever.

In a bold dramatic headline of the type associated with reports of international events that threaten global annihilation, a tabloid announced a few days ago that a handful of teachers were busted for faking illness in order to go on a honeymoon or for some other absurd motive. The story was accompanied by a spread of six pictures and had the flavor of a “perp walk.” The fruit of this investigative report was the revelation that some teachers took days off, with pay, to which they would have been entitled had they actually been a bit under the weather.

If they did in fact do this, they were wrong. Such practice must not be taken lightly and must not be condoned. We believe that the terms of our contract are binding on all parties and even though the DOE has taken liberties by various means of defiance and violations, we feel morally as well as legally bound and act accordingly.

Speaking for myself only, I do not necessarily condemn every single instance of teachers taking “sick days” to attend to special urgent matters in their lives. Often the difference between a “sick day” and “personal business” day is a technicality that does not significantly impact instructional continuity or cost the employer any money. It really does not rise to the level of “theft of service.”

Given that only three days per year can be taken for “personal business,” it is inevitable that many members will simply need some days during regular business hours to attend to any of a million ordinary emergencies that arise in our complex lives. Should someone lose a day’s pay when they have a hundred days in their sick bank to be drawn upon, generally without challenge? Does anyone actually deny that such practice is common among employees in other branches of the civil service as well as the private sector?

And although people who have never taught in a classroom tend to mock “mental health” days as just another scam by shirking teachers, it is recognized by psychiatric research that teaching is among the most intensive and stressful jobs and the finest instructors sometimes “need a break,” though this concept is not codified in law. Admittedly, this is an area that lends itself to abuse, which is intolerable from all standpoints.

In some instances we are forced by callous principals into fibbing about the cause for taking days off. Here is an actual case:

A teacher with no history of attendance abuse informed his principal that he would be “taking” a “personal business day” on a Tuesday eight days later. The teacher needed to accompany his wife to the hospital where her obstetrician, a specialist in high-risk pregnancy, would perform a test he deemed necessary as the patient had suffered a serious complication in a prior pregnancy. The test could only be done in the 16th week of pregnancy and Tuesday was the only day that the doctor was available. The principal was told all of this and was shown documentation. As a courtesy the teacher had given the principal plenty of notice.

The principal said: “You’re TAKING a personal day?? You mean you’re APPLYING for a personal day!” He wasn’t joking. His voice was raised with indignation and he turned down the request. Of course the teacher then took a “sick day” to accompany his wife and for many years thereafter never had cause to either “take” or “apply” for the principal’s consent again. He covered himself suitably and did what he had to.

The same principal, by the way, looked the other way when for several consecutive years an assistant principal took the first few weeks of the school year off for strictly elective cosmetic vanity surgery.

In some cases, teachers may be hesitant to take “personal business days” simply because they would be required to inform the principal of the specific reasons for the application and the teacher may regard it as a private matter. A person who has navigated through many decades of life may not wish to hear the principal’s opinion that the teacher’s colonoscopy can be rescheduled for the late afternoon hours after the completion of the 37.5 minutes.

In a perfect world these matters should be simply settled by means of common sense and a modicum of fairness. Usually they are. But sometimes a picayune fib is provoked by a system that so often seems to “game” its most conscientious employees far more egregiously than the other way around.

"How human beings make meaning together will essentially determine the utility of technology, never the reverse, no matter how awesome the technology.

We must never forget that community organizing occurs principally in our homes and communities not on our laptops.

With this in mind, we must begin to translate the power of community organizing into transferrable principles that can reign in the technology to be a tool that drives people to act with their hands, hearts and minds as well as their Smart Phone."

Over at Dissent Magazine, our own Leo Casey writes that the recent Mott’s strike is “the latest battle against the ‘race to the bottom,’ the process of undercutting labor market standards that has plagued American labor for the last three decades.” He also counters Matt Yglesias on the issue, saying that the usually reasonable progressive blogger “seems to lose the very capacity to empathize and understand” when writing about the plight of the working people at the center of the Mott’s story.

One of my earliest memories is standing on a street corner in the Mission district of San Francisco with my mom -- she’s handing out fliers and talking to passersby about the (first) Iraq War. Activism and working for social justice is in my blood. I’m filled with pride every time we launch a website or finish a project because I know how important our clients’ work is in bettering the world.

A few weeks back, we launched the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s new website. NAACP LDF is the nation’s oldest civil rights law firm. LDF works in the highest levels of our justice system and congress to protect our most basic rights. LDF came to EchoDitto in early March in desperate need of a site overhaul – their old site was difficult to manage, full of old content and didn’t reflect the quality of their work.

This new website is a product of over 5 months of planning, development, and testing by a team of over a dozen people. I was lucky enough to be the project manager and see it go from the initial idea to wireframes to a live website!

Some highlights:

• Cool search tool for cases and issues LDF works on: http://naacpldf.org/program-search & publications http://naacpldf.org/publication-search
• Dynamic home page with a list of news updates and related issues/cases.
• Dynamic program area landing pages. For example, http://naacpldf.org/category/criminal-justice
• Case spotlights on various pages like: http://naacpldf.org/ways-give

I’d like to thank Actual Size Creative who did a superb job on the design and all the great folks at LDF including Mel and Charles who never thought in a million years they would learn what a nodequeue was.

This past March, I decided it was time to put my skills as a Drupal developer to use and launch a new online business. I knew early on that I wanted this business to be product-based, and after several weeks of playing with different ideas, I settled on selling premium Photoshop layer styles. It was the perfect opportunity to combine my love of photography and Photoshop with my passion for web development and Drupal.

Several months of product development later, StyleWorks was born. The site runs on Drupal 6, and integrates with FastSpring for e-commerce capabilities.

Designing the site: To Zen or not to Zen?

After iterating through several hundred designs in Photoshop, I finally had the look I wanted to go with, and it was time to make it come alive in Drupal. But first, a key decision had to be made: Start from scratch, or go with Zen?

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Given the high profile of recent efforts to spread the Harlem Children’s Zone model of school and social reform to other parts of New York City and the nation, it’s not surprising that a recent Brookings Institute report criticizing one of the Zone’s charter schools has attracted a lot of media attention. Despite the study’s small scale, its emphatic rejection of the HCZ argument that social service provision is an essential element of urban school reform makes it important to understand whether or not its criticisms are valid. In fact, the report has some significant weaknesses which call its biggest claims into question. The study’s statistical methods are one issue, especially its failure to consider proportions of special education students when comparing HCZ with other charter schools and the decision to use snapshots of test scores rather than measuring individual students’ or cohorts’ progress over time.

More importantly, however, the researchers’ decision to use a few years of test scores as the sole measure of whether HCZ “works” represents a huge misinterpretation of the purposes and significance of this model of school reform. While Geoffrey Canada and his supporters are certainly concerned about raising student achievement (as measured both by standardized tests and other factors), the uniqueness and value of HCZ is that it is aimed at larger-scale reform which affects the life chances of all young people in a region, with charters as one element of broader improvements in public schools and social services. From the beginning, HCZ has defined its success not only in terms of raising test scores, but also by longer-term goals such as college attendance, student health and safety, and community stability. Given recent criticisms of the poor design and questionable significance of the New York state tests on which the authors’ conclusions are based, it would be incredibly unfortunate if this single study resulted in a decline in support and funding for one of the few models which provides an alternative to the overemphasis on standardized test scores on which so much current urban school reform is based.

Background

Over the past decade, the Harlem Children’s Zone’s model of combining social service provision with changes in local public schools — including the founding of two charter schools, Harlem Promise Academy I and II (HPA I and II) — has been one of the most well-known models of school reform in the country. It epitomizes the community school-based “Broader, Bolder” education reform model, a platform endorsed by both Arne Duncan and the NEA during the 2008 election; the UFT also recently partnered with HCZ founder Geoffrey Canada in an effort to create community schools in New York City. HCZ also serves as the model for the Obama administration’s “Promise Neighborhood” program, for which over $200 million in funding is currently being considered in Congress. This report is notable for its strong critique of the “Broader, Bolder” approach to education, arguing that the lack of evidence for its effect on test scores (relative to school reform which does not include social service provision) indicates that it may represent an inefficient use of public funds.

This new report was funded by the Brookings Institute’s Brown Center on Education Policy, which is known for its strong support of market-based education reform and for its advocacy of charter schools and school choice in general. Previous studies (including one by Harvard researchers Dobbie and Fryer) have found that HCZ’s two charter schools significantly outperform the surrounding district schools on standardized tests. This study is the first to compare the impact on test scores of a Harlem Children’s Zone charter school with other NYC charter schools, rather than solely comparing the HCZ schools’ impact with that of the district schools its students would have otherwise attended. Another unusual point is that in response to criticisms of the study posted by HCZ founder Geoffrey Canada, the researchers expanded on the original report’s research in a follow-up blog post. The analysis below includes discussion of all three sources.

Major Findings

The two questions the researchers address are “whether the HCZ works and whether it works as advertised.” They answer the first question in terms of levels of student achievement (as measured by test scores from 2007-2009) and the second in terms of comparing the test scores at HPA I (and later, HPA II) to other charter schools which do not provide social services.

On the first question, they conclude that (like the majority of the charter schools in NYC), HPA I and II do better than the average across the city for schools with their demographic profiles. However, they also conclude that HCZ does not work “as advertised,” because its two charter schools’ test scores are only average in comparison to other charters in New York City (which, they acknowledge, are unusually successful compared to charter schools nationally). If the HCZ model was truly better, they argue, then its charter schools should have higher test scores than those which don’t provide social services.

Considering mathematics and English language arts jointly, they find that half or more of the public charter schools in Manhattan and the Bronx produce test scores on state assessments that are superior to those produced by the HCZ Promise Academy. They conclude that “the same general pattern holds for math and English language arts considered separately, but it appears that mathematics is HCZ’s stronger suit.” This is true both for actual scores as well as scores adjusted for student demographics.

Their (somewhat confusing) table below summarizes these findings. Taken from the follow-up blog post, it combines data for HPA I alone (“Previous Analysis”) and from HPA I and II combined (“New Analysis”). Each number represents the percentage of charter schools with lower average scores than the HPA schools — this means that the higher the number, the better HPA did relative to other charter schools in the study. (For example, the “48” in the first column means that 48% of the NYC charter schools the researchers studied had lower average math scores than HPA I did; i.e., 52% had higher math scores.) The column labeled “Adj.” presents data adjusted for some of the demographic characteristics of the students in the schools (The researchers controlled for the percentages of students who received free lunch or reduced lunch, were limited English proficient, were African American, or were Hispanic, but did not control for the percentage of students in special education programs.)

Percentile Scores of the HCZ Promise Academy Charter Schools

Previous Analysis

New Analysis

Actual

Adj.

Actual

Adj.

Mathematics, relative to charter schools in Manhattan and the Bronx

48

55

51

55

English language arts, relative to charter schools in Manhattan and the Bronx

37

39

40

43

Grand Mean

42

47

46

49

Based on these numbers, the researchers come to “the inescapable conclusion…that the HCZ Promise Academy is a middling New York City charter school.” Citing their results as well as other studies, they argue that “there is no compelling evidence that investments in parenting classes, health services, nutritional programs, and community improvement in general have appreciable effects on student achievement in schools in the U.S.”

Validity of the Findings

The validity of these conclusions is questionable, due to several issues with the research. Perhaps most importantly, the researchers failed to include data about the proportions of special education students when comparing HPA I and II to district schools and to other charters. As we have noted repeatedly here at EdWize, it is essential to consider the relative proportion of special education students (especially those with high needs) when comparing schools’ performance, especially in terms of how many students require more than a few hours of extra help per week.

Another issue is their decision to exclude Harlem Promise Academy II from the original study while using the research to make claims about the HCZ model as a whole. The researchers’ explanation for doing so was “to avoid confusing the results from the newer Academy II with those from the Promise Academy and to circumvent the HCZ from competing against itself in the school rankings.” However, the response from the HCZ to the researchers on this point noted that HPA I is only one year older than HPA II, and pointed out that the researchers were willing to include four KIPP schools within the rankings. If HPA II as a separate school had been assessed using the study’s methodology, they claimed, it would have been in the top quarter of the charter school rankings. The researchers’ response was to re-do their calculations by combining the scores at HPA I and II; this method again put the HPA model in the middle of the rankings. Without access to the data, it is impossible to know why these two different methods regarding HPA II resulting in such different rankings.

In addition, the researchers used combined average cohort scores over multiple years and grades to measure charter school performance, rather than using individual student or cohort growth over time (currently considered a stronger method of evaluation). The researchers compared the average 2007-2009 state test scores in ELA and Math at the HPA charters with those at all other charter schools in Manhattan and the Bronx, as well as with district schools. (For 2007, they examined grades 6-8; for 2008, they examined grades 3, 7, and 8; for 2009, they examined grades 3-5 and 8). The researchers then ranked the charter schools using two different methods, each of which had slightly different outcomes.

In the first method, all charter schools’ test scores in ELA and Math (for the grades listed above) were averaged across the three year period, and then schools were ranked on each of these averages separately as well in combination (“Grand Mean” = ELA + Math, divided by 2). In the second method, the researchers used demographic data from all district and charter schools in NYC to create “predicted scores” for each subject, year, and grade in each charter school, based on its percentage of students who received free lunch or reduced lunch, and the percentage who were limited English proficient, African American, or Hispanic. They then calculated the difference between these adjusted scores and the school’s actual scores for each subject, year, and grade, and re-ranked the charter schools based on the average of these “difference scores.”

This methodology is both overly complicated (especially in terms of reporting findings) and less statistically rigorous than other methods. Again, the HCZ response provides several relevant critiques. First, they note that this method fails to measure HCZ and other charters’ ability to improve student test scores over time, as it uses cohort-level snapshots of different grades in different years rather than tracking individual students or even individual cohorts over several years. The researchers defend their methods by noting that individual student and cohort level data was not available to them, and argue that including the 8th grade scores is sufficient to measure growth; however, the weakness of the original data sources lessens the validity of their conclusions.

Second, the HCZ response notes that because of a reporting error on their own part, the Brookings researchers understated the proportion of reduced price/free lunch students enrolled in HPA, thus comparing it to district schools with wealthier student bodies and lowering it in the rankings. The researchers respond to this by recalculating their rankings with the higher proportions of combined reduced/free lunch students reported by HCZ (their “new analysis” on the graph), with little change to the results — however, this new method fails to distinguish between proportions of students who receive free lunch as compared to reduced price lunch, groups with significant differences in income.

The HCZ response also challenges the report’s interpretation of Dobbie and Fryer’s research, which, the researchers claim, found “that students outside the Zone garner the same benefit from the HCZ charter schools as the students inside the Zone…proximity to the community programs had no effect.” HCZ notes that students from outside the Zone also benefited from “community” programs such as “free medical, dental and mental‐health services; access to social workers and counseling; afterschool tutoring; healthy meals; test prep; college tours; after‐school, weekend and summer enrichment classes; and recreational opportunities.”

Most importantly, the HCZ response also emphasizes that the researchers’ single-minded focus on test scores in a single school as a measure of the model’s success is a serious misunderstanding of the HCZ model, which is based on affecting all children in the Zone (not just those in the charter schools), especially in terms of guiding them into college, and is designed “to support development of the whole child, not just how they perform on standardized tests.” As noted in the beginning of this post, this issue is central to the importance of both HCZ and to the possible impact of this report on its future. It would be incredibly unfortunate if this narrow perspective on both the program and on the goals of urban school reform weakened the Harlem Children’s Zone model before we have the opportunity to see if it truly “works.”

At a “town hall” meeting perched on the airwaves of Sirius XM Radio earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan acknowledged the “need to do a much better job of listening to and empowering teachers.”

The tone and wording of that confession suspiciously lacks that Agency’s familiar ring of omniscience. Have they really reached the point of admitting that they don’t have all the answers?  Teachers are, with good reason, wary of freely-given deference to their expertise emanating from those non-professionals, whether high profile or behind the scenes, who agitate and set crucial education policy.

Teachers sense that an absence of overt criticism may be more a ploy to get them to let down their guard than a genuine solicitation of partnership. ( A field application of the concept that “you can attract more flies with honey than with vinegar”).

In his radio discussion, Secretary Duncan referred to teacher evaluation systems (which kept teachers in good grace and sufficed for generations when America led the world) as though he were talking about the Siegfried Line that needed to be breached. “Thanks to unions and school boards and superintendents working together,” he said, “real breakthroughs are being made.” (An aside: Are some team members are more equal than others?)

Still, however, “great teachers don’t get rewarded, teachers in the middle don’t get the help they need, and at the bottom…nothing happens there as well,” Duncan decries.

Definitions that won’t be pinned-down pay the price of being up-for-grabs. What does “great” mean? By whose reckoning and by what proper authority do they judge, other than the mere and often arbitrary political power invested in them?  What quality control standard is used to designate competent human resources who will intervene to assist “deficient” teachers? To whom will these mentors be beholden and how will their independence be safeguarded?

In some schools, mentoring of veterans is provided by “coaches” with scant instructional experience or class management skills but who were nonetheless hired because of their social or sentimental affinity with principals. Duncan clearly seeks to garner leadership “cred” by capsizing the dream careers of a greater percentage of teachers for reasons without necessarily distinct ties to performance accountability.

To evaluate teachers, Duncan claimed to be “much more interested in gain and growth than absolute test scores.”  (That was music to the ears of his studio audience at Sirius, but the tune was not part of his melody archive.)

Too remarkably audacious queries were posed almost submissively by the Secretary. It is doubtful that he would have asked them if he weren’t positive that he was the sole custodian of the correct answer.  Duncan wanted to know “How do you professionalize the profession?  How do you build real, meaningful career ladders so teachers will want to stay in the profession for 10,20, 30 years?” Was Duncan’s tongue “in cheek”?

Begin by putting educators in charge of their own profession. Theirs is a unique and tricky craft.  It requires creating and interpreting, not solely parroting. Don’t treat education as a “Stepford Wife” among professions. The staying power of teachers will increase exponentially if they experience respect not only in the abstract but also in the workplace.

The Obama Administration’s Blueprint for Reform of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which Duncan is the lead salesman, supports a well-rounded curriculum, rather than the narrowed syllabus that Duncan concedes teachers have been complaining about. As proof, he cites the government’s $300 million earmarked for competitive grants for teaching in the “STEM” fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

He didn’t address his Agency’s role in the neglect, some would say to the extent of abandonment, of a balanced course of study. The federal government, by its criteria for winning coveted Race to the Top dollars (such as standardized test scores in restricted areas), is “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”  Time and energy are lavished on targeted subjects that are relevant to RTTT at the expense of other academic disciplines that are no less vital.

For better or worse we must continue to work with Secretary Duncan.  It is to his credit that although he may not be amenable to absorbing into policy those views that clash with his own, he is neither violently allergic to them, unlike our local chancellor.

At least with Duncan we can have dialogue rather than simply “have words.”

Duncan does not come off as patronizing or condescending.  Could he maintain a cordial and non-dismissive tone when replying to the following comments of a blogger identified as “TFT” on the U.S. Department of Education website:  “You have demonized the profession and scapegoated teachers…claimed that charters can bring reform to scale…created a system of coercion (RTTT) that pits politics against the welfare of children.” That’s a harsh indictment that many classroom-based “grand jurors” would refer for prosecution.  School systems are carpeted wall-to-wall with potential evidence.

The blogger also argues that “universal health care and free early childhood education would do more to close the gap than all the school reform nonsense claims…Poverty is the cause.”

Now that’s another story.  Or is it?

The State Public Employment Relations Board of New York will petition the State Supreme Court for an injunction to prevent last month’s mass-firing of 11 Merrick Academy Charter School staff members, counsel to PERB notified the UFT and the school today.

After being petitioned by the UFT in July, PERB has reached the conclusion that “there is reasonable cause to believe that an improper practice has occurred and it appears that immediate and irreparable injury, loss or damage will result.” PERB will seek an injunction prohibiting Merrick from implementing its decision to discontinue the Merrick Teachers pending a full hearing and final disposition.

Last month the Queens charter school delivered termination notices to eight teachers and three teaching assistants, representing approximately one-third of the professional staff, via FedEx. Employees received no prior notice.

“The State Public Employment Relations Board’s decision to seek an injunction against the mass-firing of Merrick’s staff is an important step in vindicating the right of these educators to organize a union and bargain collectively without fear of retaliation,” said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.

Merrick’s employees voted to join the UFT in 2007. The Public Employment Relations Board certified the UFT as the teachers’ bargaining agent in March 2008. After repeated fruitless attempts to negotiate a contract, the UFT filed for impasse with PERB December 2009 and five mediation sessions have taken place.

“After two years of obstruction, harassment and intimidation it is time for the Merrick board to follow the law, rehire all of the staff and negotiate a contract in good faith,” said Mulgrew.

Parents and teachers at the 500 student school have raised questions about heating and plumbing problems, textbook shortages, a leaky roof and unchecked financial mismanagement. Some teachers still earn the 2006 wage for New York City public school teachers.

Merrick Academy is administered by Victory Schools, a for-profit operator, which charges $1.36 million in fees per year, more than 21 percent of the school’s total budget, on management fees.  Victory Management operates a total of six schools in New York City earning $4.41 million in fees per year.