Edwize

From the UFT press release:

Teachers and staff at the Bronx Academy of Promise Charter School in the South Bronx announced on March 12 their intention to join the UFT.

The entire teaching staff, along with other staff members at the school, have signed union authorization cards.

In a letter given to the school’s principal, the teachers’ organizing committee called for a more formal and collective voice in the school community to “ensure the quality of our students’ education.”

The UFT filed a formal petition today with the school’s board of trustees, and notified the state’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) that Bronx Academy of Promise teachers are seeking union recognition. If the school’s board does not recognize the union as the bargaining representative within 30 days, the UFT can ask PERB to certify the bargaining unit on the basis of the authorization cards.

“These teachers want the best for their students. They are dedicated to their school and creating the best learning environment that they possibly can. We are proud to welcome them into our union,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew.

“This is about job security, but it is also about making sure the school moves in the right direction,” said teacher Reagan Fletcher. “We are with our kids eight hours a day and deserve a voice in the policy decisions that affect them. Ultimately, this will benefit our children.”

“This will let us fulfill the mission of our school: to give the students the best possible school and the education they deserve,” said teacher Melissa Garcia.

The school, located at 1166 River Avenue in the Bronx, has been in operation since the fall of 2008, and currently serves approximately 240 students in kindergarten through 4th grade. The school employs 17 teachers, four teaching assistants, a social worker and several other staff members.

The UFT represents educators at ten other charter schools in New York City and co-operates a school in collaboration with Green Dot, a successful and labor-friendly charter school operator based in Los Angeles.

Additionally, in January, educators at the NYC Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries (AECI) in Queens voted overwhelmingly to unionize. On January 13, the AECI staff filed a formal petition with PERB seeking union recognition; a pre-hearing conference with both parties and PERB is scheduled for April 7th at PERB’s office in Downtown Brooklyn.

In December, the MTA announced plans to cut student MetroCards as part of a package of budget cuts, a move strongly opposed by the UFT. Without the free passes, a half million New York City school children will be left to finance their own way to school.

On March 17, students from the Urban Youth Collaborative and Students for Transportation Justice will meet with the chairman of the MTA, Jay Walder, to urge him to work with Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Paterson to save their MetroCards.

The Working Families Party has put together a “teachers and parents petition” that the students will take along to the meeting. They want to walk in with thousands of teachers and parents at their back, to make clear to the MTA — and the media — how important free student MetroCards really are.

Please take a minute to sign this online petition and share it with other teachers, parents or family members of students who might be interested.

www.savestudentmetrocards.org

The petition says:

“We are parents, teachers, and family members awed by the enthusiasm of NYC students who are going all out to save their school MetroCards. These students shouldn’t pay for Albany, the City and the MTA’s budget troubles. We support them in their fight. Please save Student MetroCards.”

The students’ goal is to gather 5,000 signatures before the March 17 meeting. They have been fighting for months to pressure leaders from the MTA, City Hall and Albany to save their MetroCards, and it’s time to show that teachers and parents have a huge stake in this too.

Sign the petition telling the MTA, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Paterson to save student MetroCards:

www.savestudentmetrocards.org

[Editor's note: Ms. Socrates is a first-year 10th-grade science teacher in a school in Brooklyn. She blogs at Teacher's Diary where this post originally appeared.]

It is a frequent occurrence in many 10th-grade classrooms: A lesson is underway, when suddenly, from the back of the room, comes the exclamation that no teacher wants to hear: “Miss, your class is so boring!”

Midway through my first year of teaching, I’ve been really getting into improving as a teacher. I’m excited about trying out new techniques and receiving criticism on my teaching. I have learned to detach myself much more from the day-to-day incidents and distractions in the classroom. However, no teacher likes to be told his class is boring, especially not one who is consciously trying to be the best teacher possible. As a first-year teacher, I know I could be more engaging at times, but hey, at least I’m giving it my all!

Since the beginning of the school year, I have dealt handily with comments about my breath, my hair and even my handwriting, never batting an eyelash. But for some reason, the boredom comments always throw me — either into rage or despair.

Fortunately, in my weekly “Fellow Blast,” I found the following advice from another Teaching Fellow:

“I’ve learned not to take it personally when I hear my students say, “This is so boring!” Instead, I try to figure out why the student is reporting feeling bored.

Often, “this is boring” means, “I am so confused.” It also may mean, “I need some attention right now. “ Instead of feeling offended, I’ve learned to realize that the student declaring boredom is really saying that she needs some help. If the student were uninterested, she wouldn’t have called attention to herself and to the lesson.

If boredom isn’t truly the problem, then we shouldn’t treat it as such. I direct the student to the task at hand, and explain the teaching point in another way. Sometimes I model part of the task for the student, guide her through the next portion of the task, then say, “Great, you’re ready to do the rest yourself.” The student who previously declared boredom will often be more likely to share at the end of the lesson, because she has gained confidence.”

Using this as fodder to better my own practices, I let a comment on how boring my class was roll off my back. I did not confront the student, as I often had in the past. However, the following day, I found the student during lunch and asked her to sit with me for a while. We chatted a bit and I brought up her comment from the previous day. Immediately, she admitted that she did not understand the material, and was further frustrated because she had encountered this material before. She agreed that she should come for extra help and was more engaged in class today, although I still have not totally won her over.

But how to approach students also depends on each one’s unique personality. Another student of mine is constantly complaining about my class, especially the current topic of geology. He is a funny kid, with a witty sense of humor, so I chose to make use of this trait. I started off our conversation, mock crying, “You really hurt my feelings yesterday.” Continuing in this sarcastic manner, we discussed how he loves astronomy, and I was quick to point out that studying other planets’ composition was just like studying rocks here on Earth and that we can better understand other planets by better understanding our own planet. My AP joined in and together we cornered him, concluding that, in fact, he loves rocks!

Miraculously, the next day he participated non-stop, while also making off-hand comments about how he does not like rocks. It was clear that my rapport with him had improved and he was feeling less bored in class. He even came up at the end of the period to apologize to me for making too many jokes in class. I can’t wait to see how he is during the astronomy unit!

I am slowly learning that, yes, I must make the classroom engaging, but I also have to accept that not all students are going to understand, regardless of how exciting the presentation. And when students don’t understand, they react in different ways. They may shut down, or they may express their frustration by lashing out at those around them. Rather than getting offended, I have to use these clues to reach out to those students and help them connect with the material. They could feel the excitement of science, if only they could understand the basics I’m trying to teach them.

What’s most disturbing about the crude politicization of Texas textbooks and curricula by the Texas State Board of Education?

[a] The removal of United Farm Workers c0-founder Dolores Huerta from Texas social studies textbooks because she is a democratic socialist, despite the fact that even the Ladies Home Journal has recognized her as one of the 100 most important American women in the 2oth century?

[b] The defense of this exclusion through a comparison of Huerta with Helen Keller, who “exemplifies good citizenship.” [Keller was a life-long socialist.]

[c] Pulling the children’s literature classic “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” from the literature standards because its author, Bill Martin, has the same name as the author of a text Ethical Marxism. [The Board must have been worried about all of the possible MLA papers. Just imagine it: "The Bear As Other: The Fetishism of Commodity Relations in Bare/Bear Racial Identity."]

[d] The influence of the Texas State Board of Education “know nothingism” on textbooks across the country. [Texas authorizes textbooks centrally to create a large market which then shapes how textbooks are written and published across the United States.]

Photo by Jessica Ann Mills

With last week’s announcement that New York was a Race to the Top Finalist, shocked charter management bosses were attempting to explain away weeks of argumentation that a failure to capitulate to their agenda would keep New York from achieving that goal. Spinning faster than the magic teacup ride at Disney World, Peter Murphy of the New York Charter School Association absurdly postulated that New York’s initial success will have a negative impact on education funding. This insight came from the same crystal ball which had Murphy prophesying that New York’s RttT proposal was too weak to become a finalist not two weeks ago. Joining Murphy on the magic teacup ride was Thomas Carroll, the proprietor of the Brighter Choice charter schools recently exposed for denying admissions to students with special needs; Carroll had been madly promoting his list of RttT finalists — sans New York — a few days before the announcement. Charter management’s hours organs — the puerile tabloid and Wall Street press — were called in. Fresh from its visit to Disney World, the Daily News decided that it would take a “magic spell” to win funding. And the usual coterie of anti-union bloggers were brought in for reinforcements. All in all, it’s a sight that would leave any teacher with her feet on the ground quite dizzy.

In the original charter management pitch, UFT and NYSUT stood in the way of New York becoming an RttT finalist simply because we insisted that the charter schools had to be real public schools, educating all students, for the charter cap could be raised. Now that this fairy tale has come up against the real world, charter management mouthpieces like NYCSA’s Murphy are attempting to claim that teacher unions will cause the downfall of New York’s RttT proposal at the next stage of the process. Part of this accusation rests on the suggestion that the entire application would rise or fall on the issue of raising the charter cap: in fact, on the U.S. Department of Education rubric for evaluating RttP applications, charter caps are only one of five points in the category “ensuring successful conditions for high-performing charter schools and other innovative schools,” and the category as a whole is assigned only 40 out of a total 500 points. Given the relatively small number of points available, one could only reach the conclusion that the charter cap issue was decisive if you assumed that RttT was a politicized process in which the rubric was nothing more than window dressing. One would have to believe that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was lying when he said that “there are many, many factors we are looking at. Charters were never going to be the determining factor. We said that from day one.”

Just as importantly, the second point in the innovative schools category demands that charter schools “serve student populations that are similar to local district student populations, especially relative to high-need students.” The way to score higher in the category, then, would have been to adopt the legislation sponsored by State Senate leader John Sampson and State Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver and supported by the UFT, which combined an increase in the cap for charter schools with measures that would have had charter schools educate their fair share of high-need students. It was the opponents of this legislation — the New York Charter School Association, the New York City Charter School Center, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein, among others — that bear responsibility for what few points New York may have lost on this count.

New York has more of the higher achieving charter schools in the U.S. because of the balance of oversight, accountability and effective regulation struck in our state; no doubt, those factors contributed to NY’s score in this column. The calls by charter management to remove all regulation could only diminish the quality of New York charter schools.

Unfortunately, it’s not likely the view from inside the charter management crystal ball will get much better very soon, if we judge by their reaction to the news that New York was a RttT finalist. Neither evidence nor common sense play much of a role in their complaints about the results, or their disappointment that the RttT application was not the invitation to union bust they so desperately wanted.

There is, of course, another route. Charter management could work with the UFT, NYSUT and elected officials to push for responsible legislation. A charter school law that combines an increase in the cap with regulations that require charter schools to educate all students, especially high need students, seems to be exactly what the Obama administration is looking for. The Post may see equity, oversight and accountability as “poison pills,” but the RttT guidelines clearly include those three elements with the raising of the cap.

[Editor's note: Mr. Foteah is a second-year teacher in an elementary school in Queens. He blogs at The World As I See It, where this post originally appeared.]

Inspired by some ideas I found on the blogosphere as well as the thoughts culled from interactions with my colleagues, I recently launched an exciting new vocabulary enrichment program in my classroom.

It started after I did some nifty reorganization that opened up the area in the front of the room, reduced the amount of clutter near my desk, and afforded me space to institute the new charts we’d be creating. I told the class, when they came in, to look for the changes in the room, and they all seized on the area I hoped they would: the newly empty board, on which I had drawn the Olympic rings and written “Something special is going here.” For period three, they may have noticed, all I wrote on our flow of the day was “Something special.”

Seizing on the students’ interest in the Winter Olympics (which, regrettably, I didn’t incorporate into any elements of my teaching until today – keeping in mind, though, the restraints of the curriculum as well as the fact that we were off from school for the first week), I told the students we would be launching our own Olympics, and that our neighborhood had been chosen as the host city. Only our Olympics wouldn’t be about sports, it would be about words. This thrilled them to no end, and with that, they sat comfortably nestled in the palm of my hand.

I proceeded to display a chart on which I had written “Honorable Mention.” I told them that even those Olympians who don’t win a medal do get some kind of recognition – they’re told they did a good job. And this chart, I explained, would house similar words. These are the words that do a good job when needed, but not the best words we can think of. The class named some words that deserved honorable mention: happy, sad, nice, good, bad. We all agreed that even though those words work sometimes, we can almost always find better ways to express our ideas.

Next, I pulled up the “Bronze” chart. It was empty, but the kids volunteered some examples of words that mean the same thing the honorable mention words do, but are more mature. So now it was words like: gloomy, joyful, and blue. We were off to a good start, and excitement was mounting.

Then, it was silver’s turn. I had placed some words on the chart already, and admittedly, I’ve forgotten them now (hey, give me a break. I just had an exhausting hour and 20 minutes commute home). These were words, I told them, that they may have heard before but didn’t know the meaning of. Or, they were really good synonyms for bronze or honorable mention words.

Finally, it was time to unveil gold. Again, there were words already on the chart. The only ones I can remember now are intrigue and incessant, but essentially (oh! that’s another one), these were brand new words they had never heard before.

The kids were nearly at a fever pitch over all the words and the Olympics motif when I asked them who watched the Opening Ceremonies. Many had, and one of the students remarked that the cauldron was faulty (one of our Olympic words!) and wouldn’t come up from the floor. I told them we’d have no such problem and we proceeded to the front of the room, where, on the blackboard I had earlier written the intriguing (GOLD MEDAL WORD!) message: “Something special will be going here.”

I hung our Olympic Words logo and then raised the banners for each word. First, it was honorable mention, which was met with polite applause after I reminded them that all words were important. Next, bronze was raised, and the applause increased. Silver drew a big reaction, and then, with my mouth tooting the Olympic theme song, I raised gold. The claps and hoots were loud and vibrant.

Of course, just like in the real Olympics, things can go wrong during the Opening Ceremonies, and so it was as my magnets slid down the board, and the bronze chart ripped. But I fetched (BRONZE MEDAL WORD!) some scotch tape and announced I would avert the conflict (SILVER MEDAL WORD!). That done, we decided avert needed a space on our podium, and awarded it the gold medal.

I had noticed as I left the room yesterday that one of the girls had made a flower out of paper and left it on her desk. To me, it looked like an Olympic cauldron, and you know what? That’s what it became. I asked her if I could use it and she said yes. I took red and orange markers, colored in the pointy part to look like fire, and stapled it to the board. With this, I declared the Olympics open and announced, “Let the games begin!”

From here, I said it was time to compete. Olympians train and train for their sports — just like we do with words – in order to compete. In their notebooks, I had the class write about anything they wanted, the only catch being that they had to be resourceful (SILVER MEDAL WORD!) and use the idiom, simile, and now, Olympic charts we have fashioned. You would think I asked them to go eat a gallon of ice cream while playing Xbox on the first day of summer. They flew around the room, sitting in front of the charts, conversing, assisting each other. Would you believe some even grabbed dictionaries and asked each other how to spell words? Their seeming newfound appreciation of words was very apparent, no more so than when I said it was time to finish up. This drew the “Awwwwww” that always makes me say, “Fine, five more minutes.” That drew the “YAY!” that always makes me feel chipper (GOLD MEDAL WORD!)

We’re onto something here. Tonight, the class is publishing what they started working on in school today, and we are running with this. They are studiously stalking similes and Olympic words in their books (by the end of the day we had anointed “hamlet” as gold and “conquer” as silver). It’s exciting to see such excitement about words. I’m very optimistic. Our cauldron is burning bright. May it never cease!

One additional point on this that is worth mentioning: The words I started them off with (I had a bunch prepared, for which they voted) are all pulled from one of three sources. Either they are words found in shared reading, words found in read alouds, or words I decided to use in my own speech and then emphasized. I will aid the growth of our Olympic word lists, but the students also need to invest in mining their text for more.

Highlights from the March 4 issue of New York Teacher:

Tensions were high as parents, students, teachers and community members from PS 30 and Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academy 2 faced off at a public hearing on Feb. 22 over Department of Education plans to site the charter school in PS 30’s building.

Former city councilwoman and now charter founder and operator Eva Moskowitz has a relationship with Chancellor Joel Klein that any school leader would envy. It goes way beyond Klein appearing at her school functions when requested; it goes beyond her successfully enlisting his support for $1 million in funding from the Eli Broad Foundation.

At the Feb. 24 Panel for Educational Policy public hearing, Harlem Success Academy 2 got the green light to move into PS 30 in Harlem. Fifteen additional schools, including 12 other charter schools, also got the go-ahead to move into or expand within existing district school buildings.

The UFT filed 1,324 class-size grievances in 41 schools citywide on Feb. 24, as an estimated 46,968 high school students began the school year’s second semester in oversized classes for all or part of each day. Several of the same high schools that were guilty of stuffing their classrooms with more students than allowed last fall are again up to their old tricks.

For nearly 80 years, the corporate-backed nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission has asked the wrong questions about city and state financing: What government spending and taxes can we cut? What public sector workers can we lay off? What can we privatize? The self-appointed “commission” markets itself as a good government organization, but it is far from a neutral body representing the interests of all New York City citizens.

Twenty-eight Career and Technical Education teachers — chosen by their peers — were honored Feb. 11 at the UFT’s 2010 Awards Recognition Ceremony at UFT headquarters in Manhattan. The teachers, most introduced by their appreciative students, might never think of themselves as — in the words of one student — “super special,” but it was clear that the term fit nicely to describe the important work going on in the city’s CTE classrooms.

At the Bowling Green subway entrance on Feb. 18, UFT President Michael Mulgrew joined other union and community leaders, students and elected officials in hammering the MTA for threatening to charge students for weekday MetroCards. “Students have a right to a free public education,” he said. “This shouldn’t even be in negotiation. Take it off the table!”

The Department of Education is once again overhauling its special education program. But will its new guidelines do what no preceding plan has done: ensure not just that the law is followed and special needs students get the services their Individualized Education Programs demand — but that students actually achieve and graduate with diplomas?

UFT Federation of Nurses members at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn overwhelmingly ratified a new contract that raises salaries by 8 percent over three years, keeps health and pension benefits intact and requires no givebacks.

In a sobering budget report, UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the union’s delegate body on Feb. 24 that, should the state Legislature fail to produce a budget by April 1, the city and the Department of Education might propose layoffs in schools as a money-saving solution.

In Sam Dillon’s interesting New York Times column on Diane Ravitch and the controversy created by her new book, Checker Finn declares that Ravitch is a “conservative,” while he is a “radical.”

“Diane says, ‘Let’s return to the old public school system,’ ” he said. “I say let’s blow it up.”

As a stalwart, if somewhat superficial, critic of all things post-modern, Finn must know that words have meaning, and the way in which we use and misuse them has an impact on the real world. It is remarkable that someone who has dedicated a lifetime to opposing the Sixties in all of its dimensions, good and bad, would indulge himself in the very same sort of rhetorical excess and rhetorical violence that defined the dark side of that decade.

When one reads the rhetoric of a Finn on schools, it brings to mind the “revolutionary” assaults on the family which were prevalent during the Sixties. Without question, the patriarchal family needed to change, with the rule of the father giving way to an order of gender equality. But the notion that the family itself needed to be abolished was a profoundly mistaken and destructive one: children need the stable and secure families to grow and develop.

The same is true of schools. There is much in our public schools that needs to change, as we move from a factory model system to one aligned with a knowledge economy. But the notion that schools should be “blown up” and destroyed rather than changed is a mindless and destructive concept, one that ignores the consequences of such “revolutionary” ideas on the young people who attend those schools. Young people need stable and secure schools to grow and develop intellectually.

The full statement can be read here.

We are appalled at recent comments from President Obama and Education Secretary Duncan condoning the mass firing of the Central Falls High School teachers.  These comments are unacceptable, do not reflect the reality on the ground and completely ignore the teachers’ significant commitment to working with others to transform this school.

The comments are particularly disappointing in light of the recent state report, which found that the high school’s reading and writing proficiency have gone up 22 percent and 14 percent respectively over the past two years.  None of these facts is reflected in the comments from the Obama administration.

The affiliated unions of the AFL-CIO condemn the actions of the Central Falls superintendent in unjustly terminating the employment of the dedicated teaching faculty of Central Falls High School.  We stand in support of the Central Falls Teachers Union in its fight to improve the teaching and learning in Central Falls schools, preserve the rights of its members and keep the teachers where they belong—in the school, working with the students and making progress on academics.

You can find it here.

And you can read about all the details of what is happening here.

Here’s a report of the exchange on the NPR News Blog.

From the AFT statement:

President Obama’s comments today condoning the mass firing of the Central Falls High School teachers do not reflect the reality on the ground and completely ignore the teachers’ significant commitment to working with others to transform this school. We know it is tempting for people in Washington to score political points by scapegoating teachers, but it does nothing to give our students and teachers the tools they need to succeed.

What’s even sadder is that the firings and the President’s comments come in spite of a state report written last April that focused on the high school’s reading and writing proficiency, which have gone up 22 percent and 14 percent respectively over the past two years. Nowhere in the report is there any criticism of teachers’ efforts, skills or dedication to their job or their students. The report does, however, point to problems with constantly changing programs and the instability of school leadership. The report reinforces the fact that, today, teachers are being blamed unfairly for the schools’ problems.

“Because so many programs have been abruptly terminated, many teachers desire a formal program evaluation system to ensure that the strengths and weaknesses of programs are properly examined in the future before changes are made or new programs are implemented. Students share this concern,” the report said.

As for next steps, the report said, “Take the time to celebrate as a learning community the accomplishments, successes and positive changes that have taken place over the past few years.”

Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System is a tour de force. We will not recount the book’s argument here, although a couple of thoughts inspired by the book will follow in a separate post. Readers of Edwize need to read the book for themselves, as one can only fully appreciate the power of the argument in its original form. You can purchase the book from a unionized and employee friendly bookstore here.

Diane has agreed to do a virtual book tour appearance here at Edwize, in which she will answer questions inspired by the book from our readers. Send your questions to QuestionsForDiane@uft.org.

Al Gore in the New York Times on environmental issues:

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to… a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere.

That is an observation perhaps even more applicable to the last two decades of education policy.

Funding equity is an important issue in education for one simple reason: it is a matter of educational justice for students. Unfortunately, in the world of educational politics, it is easy to lose sight of that bottom line. The politics of division that Chancellor Klein has pursued on the charter school front has claimed as part of its collateral damage rational, fact-based evaluation of charter school funding: as of late, there has been a great deal more heat than light in such discussions.

For many years, the only serious scholarly study of the subject was a 2004 paper, Charter School Funding in New York, authored by Jonathan Gyurko, now of the UFT, and Robin Jacobowitz of NYU. The websites of the New York City Charter School Center and the New York Charter School Association linked to this detailed evaluation of the complicated funding formula, and Charter School Center CEO Merriman commended it in a New York Times interview. Last year, during the bitter debates that accompanied the funding freezes of district and charter schools, Gyurko updated that analysison Edwize  here and here. He concluded that “with the recent shift of ‘categorical funds’ into state ‘foundation aid’ and the placement of many City charter schools in Board of Education facilities,” the “modest funding gaps” that existed in 2004 had been considerably reduced, leaving “little to no operating disparities.”

On cue, Peter Murphy of the New York Charter School Association turned up the heat with the opposing claim, unsupported by any analysis or evidence, that there was as much as a 30% funding gap between district schools and charter schools.

Now New York City’s Independent Budget Office has done it own study, Comparing the Level of Public Support: Charter Schools versus Traditional Public Schools, which confirms Gyurko’s analysis. According to the IBO, charter schools housed in New York City public schools facilities received $16,373 per pupil, only $305 less than the $16,678 per student funding received by district schools — a minimal difference of approximately 1.8%. Charter schools housed in their own facilities received only $13,661 per pupil, for a $3,017 funding gap, but the great preponderance of New York City charter schools — and a growing percentage — are located in public school facilities.[1]

The IBO study did  not go into the same detail as the original Gyurko-Jacobowitz study or Gyurko’s Edwize updates. For example, it did not consider a number of the windfalls most charter schools receive. The funding formula for charters includes the pension costs of New York City public school educators, yet almost all non-union charter schools do not enroll their staff in the Teacher Retirement System. [NYCSA's Murphy was in the comments sections of Gotham Schools the other day calling for the elimination of educator pensions.] Charter schools are funded for the average of English Language Learners in district schools, even though on average, district schools have 300% more ELL students than the charter schools in their communities. And charter funding treats the funding of elementary and secondary schools the same, even though secondary schools are more expensive — and there are comparatively few secondary charter schools in NYC.

The notion that there is a significant funding disadvantage for NYC charter schools simply does not bear up to close scrutiny, as the IBO found. Yet that did not keep the charter management organizations — the New York City Charter School Center and the New York Charter School Association — from attempting to spin the IBO report to support that claim, with all of the obligatory attacks on unions. It seems that like Chancellor Joel Klein, they have decided the politics of division and strife will rebound to their benefit. And truth is the first casualty of their war.

[1] According to the edition of the NYC Department of Education’s Five Year Capital Plan published in February 2009, over two-thirds – 54 of 78 – of the NYC charter schools in existence in September 2008 were located in public school facilities. There is good reason to believe this is an understatement: an October 2009 Department of Education database lists 80 charter schools in NYC, with 65 located in public school facilities. Moreover, four charter schools are now in non-public school facilities that were built with DoE capital funds, with more to come. And some charter schools in private facilities are looking to move into public school facilities.

It’s all in the Joel Klein-Eva Moskowitz emails, courtesy of Juan Gonzalez who tells the story in his Daily News column. On October 3, 2008 [page 50 of the set] Moskowitz tells Klein she wants the P.S. 194 and P.S. 241 buildings. Shortly thereafter, both schools appear on a list of closing schools.

So much for an educational rationale for closing schools.

At a meeting with John White, now acting Deputy Chancellor, which took place shortly after the list was promulgated, I asked him if the DoE was planning to completely replace a closing school with a charter school. He allowed that this was the plan for P.S. 194, P.S. 241 and P.S. 150 in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Once we knew of these plans, the UFT took action. Together with PTA officers from the three schools and members of impacted Community Education Councils, we filed suit against the replacement of these three schools by charter schools. Recognizing that it would lose the suit, the DoE withdrew its closure plans for those three schools.

This year, all three schools earned ‘A’s on their School Progress reports.

Poor James Merriman. As CEO of the New York City Charter School Center, the charter management organization here in the Big Apple, Merriman woke up to some bad news Monday morning. His main publicist, Thomas Carroll of the Brighter Choice chain of charter schools, had a little credibility issue. Ever since the UFT issued its Separate and Unequal report which demonstrated that New York charter schools were not serving their share of high needs students, Carroll had been given carte blanche access to the op-ed pages of the Daily News and the Post by the tabloid powers-that-be to claim otherwise. [See here, here, and here.] But now the authorizer of Carroll’s charter schools, the SUNY Charter School Institute, was issuing a scathing report that one of Carroll’s own charter schools had an illegal policy of denying admissions to students with special needs, with the goal of inflating the school’s standardized test scores.

What to do? While the common practice of charter management is to attack the bona fides of the bearers of bad news, such an approach would not work in the case of the Charter School Institute, an institution held in high regard in the New York charter world. So on the principle that the best defense is an offense, Merriman decided to attack — who else? — the UFT, and what he calls our “present obsession with precise demographic balancing between charter schools and district schools.” That is an Aesopian rendition of our view that all public schools — charter and district — should serve all students in their communities, and especially students with the greatest needs.

When one compares students attending charter schools with students attending district schools, the differences are “minor,” Merriman declares. No support is given for this categorical conclusion, so the reader might be interested in knowing what Merriman understands to be “minor.” Let us reprise briefly some of what the UFT report found. Taking the common measure of poverty, free lunch status, district schools in the South Bronx enroll 30% more free lunch students than charter schools in the South Bronx, and district schools in central Brooklyn enroll nearly 50% more free lunch students than charter schools in Central Brooklyn. On average, district schools serve over 300% more English Language Learners than the charter schools serving the same communities. It doesn’t take a graduate degree in advanced statistics or multivariate regression tables to see those differences as something more than “minor.” A student who passed the 8th grade state math exam could provide a more accurate account.

Merriman then turns to New York City district schools. He has just discovered, it appears, what teachers and teacher unions have always known: district elementary schools reflect the socio-economic character of the neighborhoods in which they are located, such that schools in the South Bronx have a rather different student population than schools on the Upper East Side. We teach in the classrooms of New York City, where we grapple on a daily basis with the challenges faced by our students who live in poverty. For us, the existence of great economic chasms among the neighborhoods of New York City is not a debating point; it is our reality. That is why the UFT was the most forceful and powerful backer of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) and its efforts to win a fair share of education funding for all schools — district and charter — who serve high needs students living in poverty. It appears that our CFE work escaped Merriman’s notice, perhaps because many in charter school management, such as his far right friends in the leadership of the New York Charter School Association, were on the other side of the barricades, in the opposition to CFE. Indeed, as a union, our raison d’être is fighting against the growing economic inequality that has done such damage to the fabric of American society over the last two decades, and has widened the disparities between the South Bronx and the Upper East Side. Maybe that economic inequality is news to Merriman because while we were fighting for economic and educational justice, he was working for the Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart, without question the foremost corporate purveyor of growing economic inequality in the United States, not to mention the leading violator of American child labor laws. A life spent hobnobbing with the educational robber barons can be insular.[1]

When all the red herrings are put to the side, the issue is simple: the student populations of most New York City charter schools do not reflect the neighborhoods in which they are located. They educate many fewer students living in poverty, students with special needs and English Language Learners than district schools in those communities. The Brighter Choice scandal is a window into how much of this happens. It needs to be fixed, and Merriman’s NYC Charter School Center and New York Charter School Association are doing their damnedest to thwart that fix.

UPDATE: Looks like Merriman and the NYCSA have benched Carroll, and brought in a replacement from the farm team who is completely removed from actual charter schools to do the tabloid dirty work. If you are going to be disingenuous, it helps when you are not a living refutation of the points you make.

[1] It is interesting that Merriman would try to fault the UFT for the socio-economic differences among New York City neighborhoods and their schools. One would think that if any person was in a position to introduce greater integration among New York City public schools, it would be the man who has led them for the past eight years, the man who tirelessly repeats the motto that “education is a civil rights issue.” But that man — Joel Klein — sits on the board of Merriman’s Charter School Center, and is a fierce advocate for charter school management. Yet if you take your lead from the editorial pages of the Post and Daily News, as Merriman does, you begin to think you could blame New York City public school teachers and their union for global warming.

The federal Education Department’s What Works Clearinghouse just released a review of the city’s Leadership Academy, the principal training program that Joel Klein brought in with the help of “Neutron” Jack Welch, the former General Electric chairman.

Apparently it doesn’t work.

According to ED, there was no statistically significant differences in student math or English performance between those elementary and middle schools with Leadership Academy principals and comparison schools led by other principals.

In the high schools, LA principals delivered significantly lower pass rates on math and global history Regents exams. There were no differences with comparison schools on the English and Biology Regents.

A failed experiment might have been OK when it was privately funded. But starting last year taxpayers are publicly footing the five-year $53.8 million contract for the program.

The Clearinghouse cautioned that the results are not conclusive because they couldn’t be sure the schools were totally equivalent. However, the results are of a piece with reports in the New York Post two years ago that found half of all LA-led schools got Cs, Ds, or Fs and that the program itself had a high drop-out rate.

Neutron Jack is the management figure closely associated with the idea of cutting out the bottom-performing 10 percent from your organization. One can’t help wondering if that would apply to the Academy?

[Editor's note: Mr. Foteah is a second-year teacher in an elementary school in Queens. He blogs at The World As I See It, where this post originally appeared.]

My mother, a former principal, recently forwarded me this Edweek article, entitled “These Things We Believe.”

Although I’m still technically a neophyte, I empathize with and lift my voice in support of those teachers who are, according to the article, “so discouraged about the conditions under which they’re working and the daily criticism they’re hearing from political leaders, school reform groups, and media pundits who’ve identified teachers as the chief cause of public education’s problems.” In any school across this city, chances are the gripes are similar to those in my school, and many of them stem from our political “leadership.”

Too often it seems the public lacks any significant appreciation for the beleaguered teacher. Yet, the trick, implied in the article, is to insulate ourselves from the cacophony of insults directed toward us, and in spite of it, create atmospheres conducive to the success of our students and the sanity of their teachers.

Bob Williams, a high school math teacher featured in the article, asked a group of teachers to articulate the three things they believe in as educators, those ideals that, he said, “we support and are convinced will help improve our schools and our profession.”

Here are some of my favorites, and my thoughts (italicized) on each:

• “Every day I step into my classroom, I believe that the work I do is important and the skill with which I do my job makes a difference.”
  I am totally committed to the belief that I am a difference-maker and someone who can change lives through my attitude and aptitude. I am also constantly grappling with how to maximize my potential in this capacity.
• “I know that much of my success is because I invest time and energy into creating a sense of caring and community with my students. These are important components of being an effective teacher.”
  Establishing a classroom community begins at the beginning of the year, and doing so cultivates a family of learners who support each other through the struggles of class and life.
• “Content knowledge is no more important than content delivery. I would rather have an engaging teacher who learns with her students then the content expert who can’t communicate.”
  I keep my students on the edge of their seats with humor and excitement. I’m not ashamed of making a fool of myself if it means reaching my students effectively.
• “Not everything a student needs can be solved with an educational fix. In fact, most of the pressing issues associated with public schools have little to do with getting an education. They reflect more personal or societal issues.”
  One of the common themes of our workplace discussions center around the fact that there are factors in our children’s lives that preclude them from doing “what we want.” This is not the fault of the child, but it is the responsibility of the teacher to acknowledge this.
• “To truly educate the whole child, we need to value all aspects of education as worthwhile and mutually reinforcing.”
  One of my biggest qualms about public education today is the fact that so much is pushed to the side in favor of daily, lengthy, demanding blocks of math and literacy. These skills can all be learned across subjects, and through music and art. Yet, so sadly, that luxury is a thing of the past.
• “Everybody wants to be known. Teachers who tell their students on a regular basis that “I see you are an individual” will meet with more success.”
  A graduate school professor offered us one of his best practices relating directly to this: find something personal to say to each child every day. I am in the process of employing this strategy, and finding it to be difficult. The payoff, however, cannot be understated.
• “Every child can learn.” And, “Every child deserves teachers who believe in their potential, no matter the child’s circumstance.”
  If you’re a teacher and you don’t believe these statements, I urge you to reconsider your profession — yesterday.

What do I believe? I believe that someday, when we walk in the golden valley of educational harmony, in a world where teachers are respected, where professional opinion is valued and not ignored, then will we serve the purposes truly intended of the educator: to inspire, to innovate, to encourage, to change the world.

Shortly after the start of the new year, a group of elected officials joined the UFT to propose a package of legislative reforms designed to ensure that charter schools would be true public schools, educating all students.

At that time, Thomas Carroll, prolific charter advocate and long time champion of the far right in state politics, took to the pages of New York City tabloids to condemn our proposal. The idea that charter schools should educate all students, including those with the greatest need, was a poison pill, Carroll declared. It would force charters to adopt terrible admissions quotas. It was the work of Michael Mulgrew, our new UFT president, who is “a bare-knuckled trench-fighter” in Carroll’s book.

Interestingly enough, none of Carroll’s frequent appearances on the op-ed pages of the Daily News and the Post identified him as the founder and President of Brighter Choice Charter Schools, an Albany-based charter chain. A front page story in this morning’s Albany Times-Union, “Charter School Could Face Probation,” provides one possible explanation of this lapse.

According to a scathing report produced by SUNY’s Charter School Institute [CSI] and reported in the Times-Union,  Principal Carol Lennon of Carroll’s Brighter Choice Albany Preparatory School sought to improve the school’s test scores by denying admission to and wait-listing learning disabled students. “The extent, specificity and sources of the allegations are unprecedented,” the report concludes. “And the complainants all linked the alleged behavior to attaining higher scores on the state assessments in light of a pending (charter) renewal decision.”

CSI investigators also found that Albany Preparatory was under-reporting teacher turnover and violent incidents at the school, and recounted that teacher morale was very low.

Carroll took to the comments section here at Edwize shortly after we made our proposal to assert that “lower representation [of high needs students in charter schools -- LC] does not always equal a nefarious conspiracy to keep out special-education students.” It now appears that we were too quick to accept him at his word.

Carroll has been a particularly outspoken foe of teacher unions, claiming that educators in his charter schools had no need of teacher solidarity and voice. This is an interesting claim in light of the actions of his principal, who threatened to fire Albany Preparatory employees for being conscientious educators who reported her misdeeds.

Somehow we think that the teachers might have a different view of things.

Imagine that you have been a successful practicing pediatrician for many years and have retained your original idealism and smarts over all that time. You’re a great diagnostician with a “bedside manner” to match. You’ve sharpened your skills, deployed your intuition, kept up to speed on research and treatments, dog-eared your much-consulted Physicians’ Desk Reference, tapped the fruits of your experience, balanced empathy with detachment and volunteered pro bono to heal indigent patients who lack the means to fund the biannual new Lexus your peers expect you to drive. There have been no complaints and two generations of community residents swear by you.

Enter the inquisitors.

A pair of uninvited strangers possessing clipboards but not necessarily any scientific background, opens the door to your examination room while you’re pacifying a non-compliant infant. These visitors are there to check you out. It’s not unheard-of but rare that they introduce themselves. They take notes as you swab the babe’s cheek. At some point they leave. There’s something vaguely inconclusive and unsettling about their departure. You know you’ll hear from them again soon and you sense you’d rather not.

Days later you receive a letter containing some heavy evidence of your inadequacy:

1. The wallpaper in your examination room was not sufficiently picturesque, lacking the regulation blue/red/green balloon motif.
2. Your jar of tongue-depressors was not in its designated corner.
3. You violated Doctors College dictum by saying “Ah” when you should have said “Oh” upon discovering a rash.

This scenario is of course silly and unreal. It could never happen to doctors because they have reasonable autonomy in setting the conditions and direction of their livelihood. There’s is a profession not in name only. They are the acknowledged experts in their field and they police themselves. That’s also true of civil engineers. They design bridges and judge their structural integrity. Nobody would expert bakers to replace, much less supervise them.

Education is, alas, different, especially in this era of mal-reform. Teachers have relatively little control over their lives in the classroom, despite their impressive credentials. Despite this, most teachers have a “professional attitude” on the job, but that’s not the same as equating their job with a profession. One can have a “professional attitude” in one’s approach to stir-frying vegetables at a restaurant.

When the new breed of school managers and the think-tank pundits who love them say, “Act like a professional,” what they usually mean is that a teacher should abrogate their contractual right, such as due process, or a work rule, such as a duty-free lunch period. If they balk at being an “at-will employee,” it means they’re “unprofessional.” At least according to some (though not all) the twenty-somethings from the Leadership Infirmary.

Teachers are, on the whole, as diligent, creative, energetic and unselfish as any group of workers anywhere. But all of society would be better off if they were in overwhelming charge of the educational establishment on every level. Then the teaching profession would be born again.