Tilden Teachers Bid To Revamp School

Call Turnaround Possible
Tilden Teachers Bid To Revamp School

By MEREDITH KOLODNER
(The Chief, June 29, 2007)

Teachers at Tilden High School who are fighting the planned phase-out of their school may be allowed to convert to a charter school or form a new one, but they will be swimming against the tide of small schools.

'CHILDREN IN NEED:' English Teacher Deidre DeLoatch said Teachers remaining at Tilden High School would put their new model in place, regardless of the phase-out. 'We still have children who are in need,' said Ms. DeLoatch. 'We have to put our plan in place, whether we have 1,000 kids or 500.'

Two new small schools will be occupying the third floor of Tilden's massive East Flatbush building beginning in September, but the Teachers and Principal have been lobbying Department of Education officials for a new version of Tilden that they believe best meets the students' needs. The detailed proposal does not fit the current vogue of small schools, but the Teachers say they are putting their plan into practice as of September for their remaining three grades, and hope the results will be ample proof of their model's merit.

'Create a Community'

"The idea is to create a community," said Nancy Miller, an art Teacher at Tilden. "It is a medium-sized, student-centered school with the excitement and traditions of a large school, and the personal focus and academic attention of a small school."

The Chief-Leader/Eric Weiss DIFFERENT PHILOSOPHY: Rusty Bracher, a 35-year veteran Teacher, argued that some of the Department of Education's prescriptions for school reform were off the mark and that the Tilden High School Teachers' new design would better serve the needs of children in the community. 'Paying them $25 for passing a test is not inspiring the passion for learning and values that are important,' he said, referring to Mayor Bloomberg's plan to pay children who pass state-mandated standardized exams.

The new Tilden model would include about 1,000 students, while "small schools" usually top off at 400-500.

The Teachers and Principal Diane Verano say that the Tilden community, which is 92 percent black, with a large Caribbean population and about 10 percent not proficient in English, needs a holistic approach to learning. They are setting up four academies that could each accommodate about 250 students. The academies will be buttressed by after-school classes for students who are not succeeding during the day, extensive counseling and peer mediation services and bilingual classes in Creole. But the school is running out of time. Next year it will not admit a ninth grade class, and each year the school will shrink until this year's ninth graders graduate. The two new schools can admit up to 108 students into their first ninth grade classes and will grow every year. But at full capacity, the two schools combined will not come close to Tilden's total student body, which was better than 2,300 last September. The change has prompted Teachers to question where the future ninth graders in the neighborhood will go, since the last three years' incoming classes had more than 800 students.

Teachers were hoping that they might be able to go the way of Columbus High School, which was slated to be phased out but was "phased down" instead, based on a model put together by its educators.

DOE: Won't 'Phase Down'

"Tilden is phasing out," said DOE spokeswoman Melody Meyer. "There is no possibility that it will phase down, but we have been talking to staff about a new school proposal that would be in the Tilden building, and we will consider their plan."

DOE officials point to "20 years of failure," low test scores and a graduation rate of 43 percent last year as their reason for phase-out. But Teachers say the new Principal, who is well-respected and has been making changes, is only in her second year and has not been given a chance to turn the school around. Ms. Verano declined to comment, and some educators said she has seemed determined not to antagonize DOE officials.

The Teachers also point to less-than-ideal working conditions to help explain the school's problems. "What kind of message do you send to kids when you don't give them books?" asked Jessica Simonian, who has been teaching social studies for seven years. She said that she had about 35 to 40 books for her 150 global history students this year.

The school also didn't use an automated parental notification system until Ms. Verano showed up, which automatically calls parents when their children are absent. "Some parents might not do anything about it," Ms. Simonian said, "but some are outraged. Even 10 more kids is 10 more kids."

Four years ago, a summer flood destroyed all of the school's musical instruments. "They could have applied for emergency funding," said Rusty Bracher, the school's only music Teacher for the past decade, "but they just let it go." Instead, the band room has been turned into a lounge for security and police officers. The Teachers say the size of their proposed school is important and will give students the breadth of experience and the resources they need to be successful. "Kids will come to school for activities and electives who won't come to school for other reasons," said Art Teacher and United Federation of Teachers chapter chair Joe Cook.

The students would take their core academic courses in the morning and then take their electives in the afternoon. The academies would function like majors or concentrations in college, allowing students to focus on law and public policy, math and technology, the arts or health and physical education.

Give Students a Say

The Teachers say they want to emphasize student choice. "So much of the time it's like school is just something that happens to the kids," said John Lawhead, who teaches English Language Learners. He believes the new schools coming into the building were imposed by the DOE without regard to the community. "It's destroying a community instead of saying what's been working and what hasn't been," he commented. "Now there's less accountability, because you can't judge the new schools for another four years."

Teachers point to the thriving athletic program, after-school or "P.M." classes where students who are behind can make up credits - which have a passing rate of 80 percent - and their bilingual program as examples of successful components that should be retained.

The bilingual Creole language program at Tilden is one of a handful in the city and has been utilized by many of the 23 percent of students who are recent immigrants. Teachers say the smaller schools will not be able to accommodate them adequately. About 75 students from Haiti have joined Tilden since the school year started.

By law, a school that has 20 or more students with the same home language in one or two contiguous grades is entitled to a bilingual program. That number can be more difficult to reach in smaller schools, but DOE officials stress that both new schools are getting $40,000 English Language Learner grants that pay for staff at schools that enroll at least 18 students not proficient in English. They have until September to enroll that number.

'We're Not Anti-DOE'

Teachers have been told by educators familiar with the two small schools that current enrollment is about 30 to 40 at each. DOE officials could not confirm or deny that number. Messages left for the Principals of It Takes a Village Academy and the Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School on school answering machines were not returned.

Not all Teachers are hostile to the new schools, and some praise the new Principals. They stress that they are not looking for a confrontation. "We're not anti-DOE; we're just pro-Tilden," said Eric Eidenberg, the athletic director who has been at Tilden for 15 years.

But there is clearly a difference in philosophy between the new Tilden model and some of the initiatives that trickle down from Tweed. "Enthusiasm has to pervade the culture, and kids who are doing well in this environment have to be celebrated," said Mr. Bracher, who has been teaching music for 35 years. "Paying them $25 for passing a test is not inspiring the passion for learning and values that are important." Mayor Bloomberg recently announced a plan to pay children who pass state-mandated standardized exams.

One of the elements Tilden has already begun to implement is a Social Emotional Learning plan, which is in place in a handful of other city schools. "We have students who might have a low emotional quotient; that's a low E.Q. and a high I.Q.," said English Teacher Deidre DeLoatch, "but they won't succeed because they can't pay attention in class, because their anger or inability to resolve conflict distracts them and gets in their way." She added that coping and emotional skills were being taught in classes such as Health and English, which blended well with the curriculum.

'Children in Need'

Under Tilden's new model, each Teacher would also be an advisor to about 20 students and would stay with those students, meeting twice a week, through graduation.

Teachers are excited about a larger senior class graduating on June 26 than in recent years. But the end of the school year has also had its grim side. An Assistant Principal and 46 Teachers were excessed June 15, including all but three physical education instructors and a 42-year veteran Teacher who commutes to Tilden by bus, ferry and subway from Staten Island. Nonetheless, the Teachers say they are not discouraged and will pursue their plan. They met with the UFT head of charter schools last week and will continue meeting and strategizing over the summer.

"Even though the school is being phased out, we still have children who are in need," said Ms. DeLoatch. "We have to put our plan in place."

Distorting Data: Diane Ravitch on the DOE Spin

Excerpt from post by Diane Ravitch in dialogue with Deborah Meier at Bridging Differences (Education Week)

So the small schools graduation rate is impressive, right? Wrong. Dee Alpert, who publishes SpecialEducationMuckraker.com is a relentless devourer of data from the city and state education departments, and she sent out a bulletin describing her inability to decipher the real graduation rates at the "new small schools." She says:

1. NYCDOE gives no list of the 'new, small schools' included in its calculations for the spinrelease, so...
2. They give percentages, not raw numbers, for their graduation rates: you can't even try to work backwards to see what was included.
3. Most importantly, they gave no numbers for 'still enrolled,' nor for 'discharged.' ...NYCDOE is notorious for mis-reporting dropouts as having enrolled elsewhere, i.e., discharged from a NYCDOE school's rolls.
4. The numbers for graduates who earned local v. Regents diplomas is also critical, and missing. In prior years, local hs diplomas predominated. According to the NYS Court of Appeals' CFE [Campaign for Fiscal Equity] decision, a local diploma resulting from passing RCT [low-level competency examinations] put a kid-depending on the subject—at between the 6th and 9th grade level. This isn't exactly college prep.

Dee Alpert concludes: "It's all obviously part of the Bloomberg presidential campaign spin." And she strongly recommends "an editorial moratorium on reporting NYCDOE spin numbers unless the complete data set accompanies the press release."

I hope not to befuddle our national readership with too much news and talk about New York City, but there is an important point here. Alpert's analysis reveals how easily education data are distorted for political purposes. We have seen this done before, but seldom so blatantly or so cleverly. It is likely the case that every school superintendent wants to release test scores and graduation rates that show what a success he or she has been. But what we have seen over the past five years is a determined political campaign—not just Bloomberg for President, although that may yet happen—but rather a political campaign to "prove" that mayoral control without any checks or balances is the absolute best way to manage a school system. The Department is incapable of impartial research. Its press releases are filled with the kind of P.R. spin that we have come to associate with politicians running for office, not with research departments where someone has his or her professional reputation on the line.

Whenever there is a new release of test score data from the state, I invariably get calls from reporters, asking what I think of the latest numbers. I have learned over the past few years never to answer their questions until I have had a chance to see the complete data set with my own eyes. I know that the Department has massaged the data and sought out every glimmer of good news while creating a narrative that distracts the reporters' attention from anything unfavorable.

The full interchange below:

Historical amnesia

Dear Diane,

I was talking with a young man yesterday who is working at a new NYC high schools for students who have dropped out or are about to. He's very enthusiastic about the work and the school. He thinks Bloomberg and Company invented such schools, and that his is the first.

Historical amnesia is, alas, widespread. In a piece on Bloomberg’s ambitions for the Presidency and another on the High School of International Business and Finance, NY Times reporter Sara Rimer suggests that Bloomberg/Klein are the first to worry about how to educate the kids at the bottom, the first to develop small schools, the first to be enamored of test score accountability, the first to eliminate “social promotion” and so on. How does she explain that half of NYC's kids were starting high school at least one year over-age in the late 80's. Shouldn’t a fact-checker catch such historical untruths? My young friend’s ignorance is forgivable, the NY Times reporter’s is less so.

Small, personalized schools for kids who are floundering, or for kids in general, is not a new idea. It was thriving 30 years go. Steve Phillips, now teaching at Brooklyn College, ran a district that served thousands of NYC’s most needy kids in small, personalized and relatively successful schools. He operated a "system" of schools for twenty years that was threatened by each new Chancellor, and disappeared finally under Bloomberg/Klein. With it NYC’s school history was rewritten. Phillips' "domain" eventually included many small schools that weren't designed just for dropouts—like CPESS, Vanguard, Landmark, International etc. By the time his work was dismantled, Phillips had created a system that was larger than Boston’s. How sad that this new recruit to NYC’s schools thinks his school has no history to draw upon.

Amnesia is dangerous, and that's why I agree with you, Diane, on the importance of history. But "teaching" history and getting in the habit of wondering aloud about its uses and abuses do not always go together: The reason you had “no problem” deciding what to include in your California curriculum proposal was that you included everything. (Leaving, as Sizer used to point out, the hard question of what to leave out to classroom teachers.) Getting into the habit of asking questions such as "has this ever been tried before?" "what happened?" "is there a pattern here?" “based on what evidence?” and “does it matter?” is what takes time and patience to work into the classroom’s life where decades and centuries whiz by so fast. Thoughtful questioning starts in kindergarten and is built on every year thereafter if—mind you, “if” that’s what we want young people to carry away from 13 years of schooling.

It’s not unconnected with what we’d both like to see in the reporters who cover the education beat, who probably aced school history courses but are missing the know-how and perhaps the guts to speak truth to power. I’d love to see a real debate based on Lynnell Hancock’s wonderful Nation piece (subscription required). It deserves some heated words in response as we separate mythology from history and dicover that uncertainty has its place in history—and science—too.

The “new” dogma that teachers (and kids!) will work harder or smarter if they are paid for high test scores also enters the debate as though it has no history, no research on its risks, etc. I'm sometimes chided by proponents of “merit” pay for assuming that good teachers will be motivated by such crass incentives to do things they know are not educationally sound. We can't have it both ways. Either it's a waste of money or an effort to undermine professional norms by punishing anyone who doesn’t fall in line. It’s a simple-minded form of current economic orthodoxy gone wild. Meanwhile our critics blather on about character education—as we systematically undermine what is at the root of character: some courage.

Schools that lack the courage to teach in ways that honor what they believe is most important about the “liberal arts”, and agree to dumb it down to fit into a multiple-choice format are a danger to liberal society. But a Mayor and Chancellor who have done their best to encourage such cowardice are at least equally at fault.

Deb

p.s. The reason I love Mike Rose’s work is that he, like Gerald Graff, is prepared to liberate “the liberal arts” from its narrowed “academic” definition.

Posted by Deborah Meier on June 29, 2007 10:25 AM | Permalink

Distorting data

Dear Deb,

Now that our mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is readying himself as a potential candidate for the Presidency, it is clear that education will be one of his signature issues. Sadly, he knows no more about education today than he did when he became mayor in 2001, based on his latest plan to pay poor kids to get higher test scores. That strategy seems to me to be an abject admission of cluelessness: When you don't know anything about teaching or curriculum, then just pay for results.

I understand your frustration about the historical amnesia that you encountered. It seems to be the policy of our New York City Department of Education to wipe out all historical memory and at that they have been quite successful. Apparently, this administration wants the world to believe that whatever it is doing is historic, unprecedented, and of course dazzlingly successful. Part of their strategy is to launch one initiative after another, to persuade the public that they are on the move, when in fact they are merely lurching from one confused plan to another.

Last Friday, the Department released dazzling statistics about the graduation rates of its new small schools. The Department has created about 200 of them, of which 47 have a graduating class this year. The rate for these 47 schools is 73 percent, compared to a citywide rate of.... This is where it gets complicated. The city says it has a graduation rate of 60 percent. The state says the city's graduation rate is 50%. Education Week's latest Diplomas Count report says the city's graduation rate is 45 percent.

So the small schools graduation rate is impressive, right? Wrong. Dee Alpert, who publishes SpecialEducationMuckraker.com is a relentless devourer of data from the city and state education departments, and she sent out a bulletin describing her inability to decipher the real graduation rates at the "new small schools." She says:

1. NYCDOE gives no list of the 'new, small schools' included in its calculations for the spinrelease, so...
2. They give percentages, not raw numbers, for their graduation rates: you can't even try to work backwards to see what was included.
3. Most importantly, they gave no numbers for 'still enrolled,' nor for 'discharged.' ...NYCDOE is notorious for mis-reporting dropouts as having enrolled elsewhere, i.e., discharged from a NYCDOE school's rolls.
4. The numbers for graduates who earned local v. Regents diplomas is also critical, and missing. In prior years, local hs diplomas predominated. According to the NYS Court of Appeals' CFE [Campaign for Fiscal Equity] decision, a local diploma resulting from passing RCT [low-level competency examinations] put a kid-depending on the subject—at between the 6th and 9th grade level. This isn't exactly college prep.

Dee Alpert concludes: "It's all obviously part of the Bloomberg presidential campaign spin." And she strongly recommends "an editorial moratorium on reporting NYCDOE spin numbers unless the complete data set accompanies the press release."

I hope not to befuddle our national readership with too much news and talk about New York City, but there is an important point here. Alpert's analysis reveals how easily education data are distorted for political purposes. We have seen this done before, but seldom so blatantly or so cleverly. It is likely the case that every school superintendent wants to release test scores and graduation rates that show what a success he or she has been. But what we have seen over the past five years is a determined political campaign—not just Bloomberg for President, although that may yet happen—but rather a political campaign to "prove" that mayoral control without any checks or balances is the absolute best way to manage a school system. The Department is incapable of impartial research. Its press releases are filled with the kind of P.R. spin that we have come to associate with politicians running for office, not with research departments where someone has his or her professional reputation on the line.

Whenever there is a new release of test score data from the state, I invariably get calls from reporters, asking what I think of the latest numbers. I have learned over the past few years never to answer their questions until I have had a chance to see the complete data set with my own eyes. I know that the Department has massaged the data and sought out every glimmer of good news while creating a narrative that distracts the reporters' attention from anything unfavorable.

Forgive me, Deborah, but all this media manipulation persuades me that we need national tests (with no stakes), so that states and cities and districts can't play games with the numbers. Failing that, I think that every state should have an independent agency to administer tests and report their results, and that these agencies should be run by professional psychometricians who can neither take credit nor blame when the scores rise or fall. In New York State, when the math scores went down last year, the State Education Department said that the test was harder; when the math scores went up this year, the State Education Department was congratulating itself and the Regents (our state board) for its wise policies. How about an agency that dispenses the facts without fear or favor or self-praise?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch on July 2, 2007 11:56 AM |

Why does a billionaire think Steve Barr is worth $10.5 million?

LA Weekly

The Secret of His Success

Why does a billionaire think Steve Barr is worth $10.5 million?

By JUDITH LEWIS

Wednesday, December 6, 2006 - 5:00 pm

http://www.laweekly.com/mambots/content/mosthumb/thumbs/07_03_03news.jpg

Steve Barr doesn’t know if the teachers union chief is a ''pig fucker.'' (Photos by Timothy Norris)

It is Friday afternoon, the day after billionaire Eli Broad’s foundation announced it would invest $10.5 million in Steve Barr’s grand experiment to remake public education in Los Angeles, and Barr, in blue Dodger cap and denim shirt, sits on the porch of his sylvan Silver Lake home to “take the rest of the day off.” He says this several times, as if to remind himself, and has the props to prove it: On a table in the shade of a towering redwood, an aromatic cigar burns to a stub in the ashtray, and an unfinished Corona turns warm in the sun.

Still, his blinking laptop periodically announces new mail, and his cell phone beeps alerts. A Christmas party for his group of charter schools begins in just a few hours, and a journalist whom Barr has agreed to meet wants answers to the question on so many minds: What has Barr done to deserve $10.5 million of Broad’s money, none of which will go to Los Angeles Unified School District?

Barr answers without the slightest phony impulse toward humility: “On graduation rates, on test scores, on teacher pay — on just about anything you associate with school reform — we have kicked the district’s butt. There’s nobody in America who has taken the same kind of kids in the same kinds of areas and the same dollars and narrowed the achievement gap like we have.

“Eli Broad doesn’t write a check if we are marginally better,” Barr concludes. “People don’t write editorials about us because we’re not successful.” In fact, he says, “The only reason anybody has to listen to my big mouth is because of our success. And if our success wanes, all the defenders of the status quo will celebrate.”



It’s been six years since the 47-year-old Barr launched his personal variant on the charter-school formula, Green Dot Public Schools, then lured 500 kids (and their supportive parents) away from nearby — and academically disastrous — Lennox High School in Boyle Heights. To the consternation of L.A. Unified officials, Barr created Animo Leadership Charter High School with the aim of showing what he could do with $1,200 less per student than L.A. Unified and most big-city districts in California spend. His goal was to accomplish what California schools have failed to achieve for nearly 30 years: turn functionally illiterate and grossly undereducated urban freshmen into literate, math-competent, college-ready graduates who can compete with the graduates of rich-kid Harvard-Westlake.

The “Animo” used in the title of his schools means everything from “spirit” to “desire” in Spanish. It also means “ ‘get off your ass’ in Spanish surfer speak,” says Barr. “So some of our kids now say they go to, for example, Get Off Your Ass Inglewood School.”

So far, early returns from his 10 schools show a graduation rate double that of LAUSD’s sad results. While the data is too new to be earth-shatteringly conclusive, he is nevertheless giving the keepers of public education’s keys cause to question the city’s own, staggering, 40 percent dropout rate among freshmen and sophomores.

His sometimes fast-and-loose rhetoric — and his claims that he will produce test scores in tough neighborhoods that rival the scores in middle-class Culver City and Santa Monica schools — has won him some prominent detractors. Chief among them is A.J. Duffy, president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, who dismisses Barr as “a good salesman,” and complains that Green Dot charter schools drain state money from public schools.

Duffy has claimed that Barr selectively handpicks only four students out of every 10 in the neighborhoods where he opens a new school. That rankles Barr more than any other attack upon him, because, he says, he and the “20 bureaucrats who oversee 10 schools” work to ensure that the student body accurately reflects the student population in each neighborhood.

http://www.laweekly.com/mambots/content/mosthumb/thumbs/07_03_03news2.jpg
Barr greets Rosalyn Hardy and her husband.

“I don’t know what other charter schools do,” Barr says. “But when we did our first school in Boyle Heights, we went after every eighth-grade family that fed into Roosevelt High. I went to Father Greg [Boyle] and I said, ‘I’m going to have 140 slots for the founding of this school, for the freshman class of this school, and I’m going to give you 50 slots.’ ”

Boyle, according to Barr, doesn’t pick the top kids, but instead sends him the children with learning problems or obstacles: “They’re not the Phi Beta Kappas. They’re not the kids in the AP [Advanced Placement] program . . . The idea is you don’t want to be skimming off the cream; you want to have the same exact kids with the same exact issues as the [public] schools that you’re trying to reform. We really spent a lot of time on that. And for Duffy to not know our model and comment —”

So is Duffy’s fear off base that Barr might be creaming the top of the student population, selecting only the most capable? “It’s bullshit,” says Barr. “It’s like me saying, ‘Duffy’s a pig fucker.’ Have I seen him fuck a pig? Do I have photos? No. So I can’t say it. He should check these things out before he says them.”

Duffy stands by his words: “We know they have the ability to [skim the cream]. We just don’t have any way of verifying what they do.”

For all the colorful cussing, Barr’s triumph of personality is not that he makes people around him feel threatened — Duffy and other status quo types excluded. Rather, he makes people think he’s just like them.

Rosalyn Hardy, whose teenage sons, Brandon and Nicholas, attend Animo Inglewood and are gearing up for college, sees Barr as a father concerned that when his own 15-month-old daughter, Zofia, reaches high school, he’ll have to send her either to an expensive private school or to mediocre and troubled Marshall High School. Barr, asked one recent day to pose for a photo with Hardy at Green Dot’s holiday party at the Petersen Automotive Museum, does one better, opening his arms wide to hug the mother of two.

Teachers like Renee Klein, who joined Animo Venice after 25 years at Dorsey High School (“I never lost a student,” she says, “because they knew that I loved them”), see Barr as the lone bureaucrat who respects what “high-quality, professional” teachers know.

“When I heard about Steve Barr,” says Klein, “I thought, ‘This guy is like me.’ Everything he was saying was already in my head.”

Students know Barr as a once-horrible student raised by a single mother in a trailer home, but lucky enough to live in a neighborhood that fed into an excellent Silicon Valley public high school in the days when California’s schools ranked with the best in the country.

“We used to laugh at kids who went to private schools,” says Barr. A basketball player who knew how to work the system, Barr thrived in school. His younger brother did not thrive. “He was a pudgy kid, thick glasses,” Barr recalls. “He tried to join band, they gave him a tuba, and he just couldn’t fit in. He dropped out, got into drugs and crime, went into the Navy, where he barely learned to read.

“He’s one of the kids that [new LAUSD superintendent] Admiral [David] Brewer brags about having educated” during their military stints, Barr says.

Barr eventually became an influential political and community organizer, founding Rock the Vote and working on presidential campaigns. But his brother spiraled downward. In 1992, while in New Hampshire working on the Bill Clinton presidential campaign, Barr learned his little brother had died of a drug overdose. A year later, his mother died. Barr went into a “midlife, you know, what-the-fuck-happened” crisis.

“Part of my mending was to try to figure out what happened,” he says. “How does one kid from the same mother have so much and the other have so little? This was my way to honor him, to try and do what I could to fix the public schools.”

He took the name “Green Dot” from a Silicon Valley project he worked on, in which companies volunteered to wire local public schools for the Internet, tracking the completed projects with green dots on a map. “The idea was to turn a whole city into one big green dot,” he says.

Meanwhile, he stole his education model from well-regarded private schools: Raise teacher salaries, reduce class size and reshape the teachers’ union by replacing outmoded ideas like “tenure” with “just cause” — meaning teachers, currently nearly impossible to fire in public schools, can be fired if they don’t perform.

A lot of cash is flowing in to support his ideas, from foundations financed by Bill and Melinda Gates as well as Eli Broad. Broad’s $10.5 million gift this month will fund start-up costs of 10 new schools — a vote of confidence from the city’s reigning civic-minded billionaire. In time, Barr says, he hopes L.A. Unified School District and other struggling districts will imitate Green Dot, not merely sit by as Barr’s schools spread across a map of the city, creating one massive green swath. “That’s the idea,” he says.

Still, even with his new millions, he admits he faces considerable resistance, particularly from Duffy and others trying to protect the status quo.

Says Barr, in his classic no-nonsense style: “Where are these shitty teachers going to go? Where are these lifetime benefits going to go? What will happen to all of these groups protecting their interests and their jobs and their construction contracts? The political puzzle of this is really fascinating. But I have no doubt that within five years, you’re going to see our impact. And it’s going to be huge.”

LA Times Green Dot plans a school in New York

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dot28jun28,0,6313216.story?coll=la-home-local

From the Los Angeles Times

Green Dot plans a school in New York

The teachers union is to run the campus with the charter group, a setup rejected by United Teachers Los Angeles.

By Joel Rubin
Times Staff Writer

June 28, 2007

Green Dot Public Schools, the upstart charter operation that has aggravated Los Angeles school administrators and union officials alike with its early successes and expansionist plans, has entered into what it hopes will be a less strident relationship in New York City.

Green Dot founder Steve Barr and Randi Weingarten, president of the powerful New York City teachers union, have reached an unusual agreement to open a jointly run charter high school.

The two are scheduled to announce the collaboration in a news conference at the union's Manhattan offices today.

The United Federation of Teachers' willingness to enter into an alliance with Green Dot seems certain to put pressure on United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents the roughly 35,000 teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Although in recent months UTLA President A. J. Duffy has softened his caustic and dismissive attacks on Green Dot — and charters in general — he has repeatedly rejected the idea of a partnership with Green Dot.

Weingarten, in a telephone interview Wednesday, said she hoped the deal between the nation's largest teacher union and Green Dot would encourage Duffy to move in a similar direction.

"If you really actually believe in kids and believe in their success, those of us in education, we really shouldn't be in the sandbox fighting with each other. We should be … trying to figure out how to work together," Weingarten said.

Barr and Weingarten said the unusual collaboration should set an example, not only in Los Angeles, but elsewhere as well. Throughout the United States, charter schools are largely nonunion and, as such, have drawn the sharp ire of union leaders. Green Dot teachers, however, offer an exception, because they belong to a union, though not one representing educators in Los Angeles or New York.

Several weeks ago, Weingarten visited Green Dot schools in Los Angeles and met with Barr. The trip helped her decide to push ahead with the partnership, she said. Weingarten praised Green Dot's model, so far implemented only in the Los Angeles area, as one that has posted promising results while also giving teachers a considerable voice in making decisions on instruction and resources.

"When you go and see Green Dot schools, you see schools that really work for kids … in places where kids have not always been given the best chances in life," she said. "Teachers are treated as the professionals they ought to be, and they step up to act as those professionals as well."

Under the terms of the proposal, which requires approval by New York state education officials, Barr, Weingarten and several New York education and civic figures would sit on a board of directors that oversees the school. The South Bronx campus is expected to open in fall 2008 and will primarily serve Latino students from low-income families.

Weingarten and Barr said they expected the school to operate much like the 10 high schools Green Dot runs in the Los Angeles area.

Those schools are rooted in a set of basic tenets, including enrollment no greater than 500 students and a college-preparatory curriculum.

Although New York state regulations require that they wait until the charter is approved to work out details, Weingarten and Barr said they expect that the New York teachers will work under a labor agreement similar to the one Green Dot has with its teachers in Los Angeles.

Unlike the lengthy, proscriptive contract UTLA has negotiated with L.A. Unified that spells out a teacher's workday down to the minute and offers extensive job protections, Green Dot's contract is more straightforward. While giving teachers considerable authority and higher starting salaries, it calls for a "professional workday" and allows teachers to be fired for "just cause."

Conflict between UTLA and Green Dot has long been a barrier to serious discussions of partnership. Earlier in his first term as union president, faced with an explosion of charters in Los Angeles that ultimately drew hundreds of teachers away from district schools, Duffy hammered on the independent schools, questioning whether they produced better results and criticizing their labor practices.

As the largest — and most aggressive — charter group, Green Dot was a frequent target. Earlier this year, Duffy charged that the group "takes bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, idealistic people and works them to death."

On Wednesday, he dismissed the notion that an agreement between the New York teachers union and Green Dot had relevance to Los Angeles, saying that "the landscapes are very different." He emphasized that his criticism of charters has been driven, in part, by the frantic growth of charter schools here. New York City has considerably fewer of them.

Weingarten "is doing what she thinks is best for public education in New York City," Duffy said.

But the partnership announcement comes at a particularly delicate time for him. As he prepares to mount a reelection bid, Duffy is under pressure to assuage rising discontent among teachers chafing at the slow pace of district improvements at middle and high schools.

Last month, that frustration spilled over when a core of tenured teachers at Locke High School voiced support for Green Dot's plan to take over the South Los Angeles campus and convert it into several small charters. Since then, teachers from more than a dozen other L.A. Unified schools have contacted Green Dot to discuss similar actions, Barr has said.

Duffy readily concedes that, against this backdrop, he has struck a decidedly less confrontational tone on charters, now saying he would be willing to negotiate with Green Dot if two-thirds of the teachers at a school called on him to do so.

"I am listening and responding to the needs of my members," he said.

joel.rubin@latimes.com

UFT & Green Dot Start Charter

---

June 28, 2007

Union to Help Charter Firm Start School in the Bronx

By JENNIFER MEDINA

Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school operator from Los Angeles, is seeking to expand into New York with the cooperation of the teachers’ union.

Under the proposal, Green Dot, which is heavily financed by the billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, would open a high school in the South Bronx. The school, which must be approved by the state, would become one of only a handful of charter schools in the city to use a union contract.

The cooperation of the union, the United Federation of Teachers, is unusual. It has been lukewarm toward charter schools, many of which actively oppose unions. The schools are publicly financed but are largely free from the control of local school districts.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers’ union, said yesterday that she approached Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot, to open the school because he favors working with unions.

“We have never been against increasing charters, but we were against the anti-union animus in some charter schools,” Ms. Weingarten said. The union already runs two charter schools in Brooklyn.

The plan calls for all teachers to be part of the union, but their contract would be simpler than the citywide contract. The union and Green Dot have already reached agreement on the general terms and structure of their contract.

Rather than dictating the number of hours and minutes teachers must spend at the schools, it would just call for a “professional workday,” they said. The contract could also eliminate tenure, but would set guidelines for when a teacher can be dismissed. Many charter schools can dismiss teachers at will.

Mr. Barr, who has sparred in recent months with school officials in Los Angeles over his aggressive plans for expansion of schools, said that he had turned down offers before to expand beyond California and that he had responded only because it was the union that had approached him.

“If it were the mayor or the chancellor, I probably would have said no,” he said in an interview yesterday. “But to say that we are doing reform with the largest union is something very different. We can prove the unions and reformers work together.”

Patrons’ Sway Leads to Friction in Charter School

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/education/28charter.html?_r=1&ref=education&oref=slogin

June 28, 2007

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

The Beginning With Children Charter School, housed in a former factory in Brooklyn, landed on the state’s list of high-performing schools this year, thanks to rising English and math test scores among black and Hispanic students.

But its founders and wealthy patrons, Joseph H. and Carol F. Reich, who have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the school, think it could be better. “It’s above average,” said Mr. Reich, 72, “but considering the effort and the capability and the resources, we don’t feel we’re getting the best we can.”

So last month, the couple — threatening to cut ties, including financial support — forced most of the school’s trustees to resign in a push for wide management changes, and better student achievement.

The move caused an uproar among parents and teachers who said they would be left with no formal say at the school. “My voice is going to be lost,” said Shakema Daise, the mother of a first grader.

The clash has exposed fault lines of wealth and class that are perhaps inevitable as philanthropists, in New York and nationwide, increasingly invest in public education, providing new schools to children in poor neighborhoods while making communities dependent on their generosity.

And for those lucky to have such benefactors, the situation raises core questions: Who ultimately controls charter schools, which are financed by taxpayers but often rely heavily on charitable donations? Do the schools, which operate outside the control of the local school district, answer to parents, or to their wealthy founders?

At Beginning With Children, many parents and teachers say that the Reichs’ main interest is to burnish their reputation as advocates for charter schools, and that the school’s original purpose, of catering to each child’s individual needs, is now secondary to drilling for exams in an effort to elevate scores and the Reichs’ credibility.

The Reichs support not just Beginning With Children, and a second school they founded in Brooklyn, but charter schools generally. They gave $10 million to help create the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, a nonprofit group dedicated to opening 50 more of the schools.

“Joe and Carol Reich started the school for whatever reasons initially,” said Gail Sims Bliss, a teacher and former trustee who resigned reluctantly. “But it has grown into their participation in the charter movement with a capital M.” She added, “They cannot allow the school to compromise their status and their progress in this particular movement.”

In an interview, Mr. and Mrs. Reich said they were committed to their original promise of providing children with an education that would lead to success in college and in life. “We promised to build them a model education program that would lay the groundwork for their future,” said Mr. Reich, a retired investment banker. “This didn’t come from nowhere. We were really worried that the school wasn’t delivering.”

The Reichs are not alone in directing their charity to schools. The Walton, Broad and Gates foundations, all founded by billionaires, support charter schools nationwide.

Andre Agassi, the retired tennis great, opened a charter school named after him in Las Vegas. The former N.B.A. star, Kevin Johnson, started two charter schools in Sacramento. The billionaire corporate raider, Carl C. Icahn, has a charter school named for him in the Bronx. And Courtney Sales Ross, the multimillionaire widow of a Time Warner executive, has the Ross Global Academy Charter School, housed in the basement of the city’s Education Department headquarters.

Nor are the Reichs the only ones facing difficulties. The Ross Global Academy is on its fourth principal in less than a year.

Frederick M. Hess, an expert on philanthropy in education, said there would be more disputes like the one in Brooklyn as high-profile donors invest their reputations in schools and face “the enormous kind of name-brand question.”

“When those schools disappoint them, when there are disputes or divergence regarding institutional mission,” asked Mr. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, “how are they going to negotiate this relationship?” He added, “What we are seeing is really just the front end of what is going to be a fascinating dynamic.”

In educational philanthropy, the Reichs were pioneers. They fought for years to get the city’s Board of Education to let them open the Beginning With Children school in 1992 in an impoverished section of Williamsburg, before charter schools became a national trend and at a time when private donors were generally reluctant to write checks to public school systems. The school converted to charter status in 2001.

They fought through bureaucratic tangles to get the system to accept a virtually free building, a former Pfizer pharmaceutical factory, which the school now occupies for $1 a year.

The school has done well, though far from stellar. This year, 69 percent of students in Grades 3 to 8 scored at or above grade level on the state English exam, compared with the 56 percent citywide average. And 77 percent of students scored at or above grade level on the math exam, compared with 65 percent citywide. The state reauthorized the school’s charter last year, giving it a full five-year renewal.

But the Reichs are not satisfied and said the school’s trustees were an obstacle. Charter schools get taxpayer funding, but are run independently from local school districts under terms set out in their state-approved charters.

The 14-member Beginning With Children board included appointees from the Reichs’ foundation, which helps finance the school; parents; teachers; the principal; and community representatives. The board chairman, John Day, is a former Pfizer executive.

The Reichs said the problem was that the board was “constituency-based” and that they wanted members with practical skills like fund-raising or public relations instead. To get the changes, they threatened in a strongly worded letter to cut off their support unless all but three of the board members resigned. Among those told to quit were five parent and faculty representatives.

At a board meeting last month, parents lashed out at the Reichs, angrily describing their relationship as that of master and servant or landlord and tenant.

One parent said the threat to cut ties was “a gun pointed at the head of every child in this facility.” In recent years, the school has faced annual budget gaps of up to $635,000 that were filled by the Reichs’ foundation, and parents said they feared that the school would close without the Reichs’ help.

Mrs. Reich, 71, said of the letter: “It was not a blunt threat. It was a choice. You can go the way you are going or you can restructure yourselves.”

Many parents and teachers said they agreed that the board did not function well. But they also said there were disagreements with the Reichs over issues like how much to focus on standardized testing. And they accused the Reichs of meddling in areas like teacher hiring and the choice of a reading program.

“The emphasis on testing means the school is moving away from its original mission,” said Karl Klingbeil, a parent. “They just got tired of listening to us talk about curriculum and pedagogy.”

The Reichs said they did not want to squabble over such points, noting that the principal runs the school and that they themselves are not voting trustees. They said they had proposed creating a faculty senate and parent council to give input to the new trustees.

The city school system has stood at the sidelines. Garth Harries, who oversees charter schools for the Education Department, said they were intended to operate with wide autonomy. “We’re confident in this case, with Joe and Carol,” he said, “You are dealing with folks who have the interests of the school and the kids in mind.”

The three remaining board members at Beginning With Children have enlisted a consultant to help identify new trustees, and the Reichs said they were moving aggressively to set things right. “This was our school, it’s our dream, it’s our vision,” Mr. Reich said. “We are going to fight to make this school the best school it can be for this community.”

Sean Ahern on Diane Ravitch, Shanker and the UFT

See attached articles below from the Nation regarding the New York Sun - a mouthpiece for neo-con wealthy zionists and the Israel lobby, hosting Diane Ravitch no less, a stalwart of the old educational bureacracy now posing as an advocate for teachers! Her embrace by UFT Inc and the New York Sun shows the sort of convergence that has been at the root of the Shankerite legacy that has plagued NYC schools and politics for over 40 years, giving aide and comfort to the oligarchy as it confounds the people with smoke.

Scratch the surface of this sort of 'advocacy" and I think you will see it is more parent and student bashing than teacher advocacy.

Ravitch never met a teacher who wasn't totally dedicated? Obviously she never attended a New York City public school nor has she ever worked in one as a teacher - yet she is the national expert on education! If you like your pity party heavily laden with maudlin syrupy nonsense then lap it up. Sort of pathetic when so called educators rally round and cheer someone who is tickling them under the chin. Displace real advocacy with phony advocacy.

Ravitch fashions herself a defender of the old guard educrats against the new corporatist ones. Seems like both NYU and the Sun have been left out of the feeding frenzy by Tweed. Why is TC getting all the goodies? What is there to cheer about between a rock and a hard place?

Pitting teachers against parents and students is an old fashioned white supremacist ploy employed by Shanker during the 1968 strike; during his collaboration with the fiscal crisis austerity regime in the 70's; and during the early 80's as he rose to be a national spokesperson in opposition to affirmative action in the Bakke case. In each case phony advocacy was offered in place of real advocacy. White racial privileges were defended. Justice and solidarity were repudiated.

At all costs what must be prevented from the Oligarchy's standpoint is close collaboration between teachers and parents in a politcally self conscious and independent way. How?
Keep the educators pitted against the parents and students and ensure social control through divide and conquer. As a strategy, kowtowing to such a false idol as white racial privilege has not and never will be a deliverance for teachers . 'Divide and conquer' has allowed UFT Inc to harvest dues from a captive bargaining unit and fatten at the public trough along with the educrats in academia and in business for themselves. Our own so called union has been the witting agent of such a self defeating proposition and opposition after oppositon has been unable to create an explicitly pro equality alternative.

Those of us outside the perks and privileges of the UFT machine have been played, left with increasing education costs , years of low pay and lousy working condtions. Yes it is frustrating but what is most sad is to see teachers, white teachers in particular, cheer parent and student bashing as a perverse form of teacher advocacy. It is growing, fueled in part by the whitening of the pedagogical staff that has gone on under Mayoral control unchallenged and unreported in the white media, the NY Teacher or in opposition literature. Stand up and speak out against this or at least have enough sense not to cheer at your own funeral!

Guess who was Shanker's principal defender and apologist among the Ed school academics after the '68 debacle? Ms Ravitch herself. Almost 40 years later here she is still tooting the same party line of the shankerites, as if teachers could ever advance their own fortunes through parent/teacher bashing.

Ravitch's career rise paralleled that of the Shankerites at the expense of parents, teachers and students, leaving what was left of a progressive political tradition in this city in tatters. Back then they were neo liberals and neo conservatives of today in vitro. Viewing their trajectory over the ensuing years should be sufficient cause to repudiate such leadership root and branch. Instead of cheering for these dinosaurs, we should be ushering them off the stage, showing them the door as we find our own voices and build solidarity!

Sean Ahern

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070618/alterman the liberal media by Eric Alterman
Potemkin Paper?
[from the June 18, 2007 issue]

The conservative New York Sun announces on its front page each morning that it reaches "150,000 of New York City's Most Influential Readers Every Day." I read in Scott Sherman's sympathetic April 30 profile in this magazine that the Sun says it is selling 13,211 hard copies a day and giving away more than 85,000.
But if my experience is any guide, these numbers are about as reliable as a Bush budget briefing. I have twice received free Sun subscription offers, initially when the Sun began publication, in the spring of 2002, and more recently this past winter. Both times I signed up. In 2002 I got bupkes, though I called about it more than once. Between January 1 and Memorial Day, I not only hassled the circulation people myself; so did my intern, Mike, many times over five months. Over and over, the Sun's staffers insisted that I was getting the paper and just didn't know it. Eventually about eight copies showed up one morning addressed to different apartments in my building. That lasted a day. (Ironically, one more showed up Tuesday morning, May 29, as this column was due.)
I have similar reservations about the paper's purported sales figures, however meager. I did no sleuthing myself, but not only is this a business rampant with fraud, it's also characterized by more shady-but-legal tricks of the trade than a border-based bordello. According to William Breen, for instance, who says he worked for a New York City wholesaler (and wrote a 2004 letter to Jim Romenesko's blog, MediaNews), city news dealers paid just a penny per copy. That means it makes no economic sense to return the leftovers. The result, Breen claimed, was "their circ figures look great. Virtually every copy they print is 'sold.'"
The Sun is supported by many famously savvy and unsentimental investors, including Richard Gilder, Roger Hertog, Michael Steinhardt, Bruce Kovner and Thomas Tisch (though its most prominent one, Conrad Black, is now on trial for myriad varieties of fraud). I'm sure one of them would be smart enough to explain why it's so hard to actually obtain one of their newspapers, but during the Sun's high-profile 2002 launch, none was able to offer a convincing commercial rationale for creating a conservative highbrow newspaper in a liberal city that already had two highbrow papers and at least two conservative ones (depending on how you measure these things).
When its guiding spirit, Seth Lipsky, tried to explain the paper's raison d'être to Sherman, he found himself not only ignoring Rupert Murdoch's New York Post--which may be understandable, given its addiction to sleaze--but also the Wall Street Journal, which, while published in New York City, with an enormous New York-based staff and readership, Lipsky says is something other than a New York newspaper. Lipsky was also compelled to place the prowar Daily News, whose extremely involved owner-editor, Mortimer Zuckerman, is one of America's most prominent supporters of the Israeli government and voted for George W. Bush in 2004, on the left side of the spectrum.
Given such contortions, it should surprise no one that so much of the Sun appears to exist only in its owners' and editors' neoconservative imaginations. Indeed, its investors--together with Lipsky, a refugee from Bob Bartley's Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the founder of the English-language version of the Jewish Forward--appear to have little interest in publishing a newspaper in the traditional sense. Back in 2002, Daily News editor in chief Ed Kosner called the Sun "an intellectual vanity publication" with "a very small niche, the niche of weekly and monthly journals." But Dissent could run for a hundred years on what these machers are paying for the Sun. Why go to the enormous trouble and expense of publishing a multimillion-dollar daily newspaper that (apparently) reaches next to no one, at a moment when investors are eagerly shedding their newspaper holdings and privately owned papers are just as eagerly shedding staffers? The answer, obviously, has nothing to do with profits or even readers; advertisers are not stupid enough to put their faith (and money) into imaginary circulation figures. But journalists are. And there's the rub.
Lipsky quotes his mentor Bartley that it requires "seventy-five editorials to get a law passed." It's not clear whether those editorials require actual readers who care what they say. In the case of the Sun, which mimics Murdoch's technique of blending editorials and news coverage in the same story, the intent is less to pass legislation than create tsuris for people and places of which it disapproves. Sherman aptly described the paper's primary function as that of "a journalistic SWAT team against individuals and institutions seen as hostile to Israel." During its first five years, these have included the Ford Foundation, which it accused of aiding Palestinian terrorism; Columbia University, accused of creating an atmosphere unfriendly to Jews; Kofi Annan's office at the UN, accused of rampant corruption; and Harvard University's Kennedy School, publisher of the famous Walt-Mearsheimer paper, likened to a David Duke neo-Nazi screed. It matters little that few sensible people would concur with the Sun's wild charges. (This is, after all, a paper whose editorial board thinks Dick Cheney should run for President in 2008.) What matters is the political value to the neoconservative agenda of creating the appearance of smoke, regardless of whether it's connected to fire.
But I don't want to harp on the Jewish-media-moguls-supporting-Israel angle, which hews a little too close to traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes for my taste. While it may explain the Sun's rise, it obscures the more salient fact that countless conservative propaganda factories are supported in America by literally billions in ideological investment. Their success in swaying gullible reporters in the MSM and elsewhere accounts, in significant measure, for the widespread misperception that the public has moved rightward in recent decades. (The past four decades of public opinion polling show exactly the opposite: The public has moved leftward as the political system has moved rightward.) The beauty of this operation is that all this can be accomplished--as the Sun demonstrates--without the participation of any actual readers.

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070430/sherman Sun-rise in New York
by SCOTT SHERMAN
[from the April 30, 2007 issue]
One of the more damaging articles concerning the United Nations Oil for Food scandal appeared in a New York newspaper on November 26, 2004, under the byline of Claudia Rosett. In that article Rosett revealed that Kojo Annan, the son of the UN Secretary General, had remained on the payroll of the Swiss firm Cotecna, which had a UN contract in Iraq, for years after he had supposedly ended his relationship with the company. The piece had an instant ripple effect: Three days later William Safire devoted his New York Times column to Rosett's revelations and demanded that Kofi Annan resign from his post. Senator Norm Coleman, whose subcommittee was then investigating the Oil for Food program, joined the chorus two days later in the Wall Street Journal with a piece titled "Kofi Annan Must Go," a piece that also cited Rosett's reporting.
Rosett's article did not appear in the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal or the Daily News--all of which are routinely scathing about the UN--but in the New York Sun, a pugnacious conservative daily that sprang up in lower Manhattan a few months after the attacks of September 11.
When the Sun was born in 2002, media soothsayers predicted that it would never find a permanent place in New York's brutally competitive newspaper market and that the hearse would arrive within two years. But the Sun is still here, and on April 16 it will mark its fifth anniversary. Although it is funded by a coterie of wealthy individuals, published on a shoestring and edited by a tenacious journalist, Seth Lipsky, the paper is not a financial success: Last year Lipsky told journalism students at Columbia that the Sun lost $1 million a month. But those losses amount to pocket change for the proprietors, whose investment and ongoing commitment have yielded something else: a broadsheet that injects conservative ideology into the country's most influential philanthropic, intellectual and media hub; a paper whose day-to-day coverage of New York City emphasizes lower taxes, school vouchers and free-market solutions to urban problems; a paper whose elegant culture pages hold their own against the Times in quality and sophistication; a paper that breaks news and crusades on a single issue; a paper that functions as a journalistic SWAT team against individuals and institutions seen as hostile to Israel and Jews; and a paper that unapologetically displays the scalps of its victims.
Ten years ago I published a Nation cover story titled "Why America Needs a Labor Daily," in which I attempted to revive an idea that A.J. Liebling had floated in the late 1940s: that the American labor movement should create a daily newspaper to counteract the probusiness--and antiunion--bias of the mainstream press. A month later, Seth Lipsky, whom I had never met, invited me to his office at the Forward newspaper, situated in the Workmen's Circle Building on East 33rd Street in Manhattan. I found myself gazing at a bald, diminutive man who looked as though he had just stepped out of a Charles Dickens novel, a man whom Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker has described as "Pickwickian."
Lipsky is an intriguing figure in New York journalism. As a high school student he kept the masthead of the New York Times tucked away in his wallet. After graduating from Harvard he went to Vietnam as a combat reporter. In 1971 he launched a nineteen-year career at the Wall Street Journal, during which time he served on the editorial page under the late Robert Bartley and assimilated much of Bartley's ferocious intellectual and rhetorical manner. In 1990 Lipsky was hired by the Forward, once the bible for the Yiddish-speaking masses of Manhattan's Lower East Side, to produce a weekly edition of the paper in English. A neoconservative admirer of Ronald Reagan, Lipsky immediately ran into political difficulties: Early on he received a letter from the late Arthur Hertzberg, who declared that the editors of the old Yiddish Forward "did not create and maintain a newspaper of socialists and social democrats for their inheritance to become now, in English, an echo of the Wall Street Journal." Lipsky, whose heroes include Ze'ev Jabotinsky (the militant Zionist who admired Mussolini), Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, certainly did push the Forward rightward--a 1994 editorial called for the bombing of North Korea's nuclear facilities--but he also won praise for his editorial finesse. "No matter how conservative Lipsky may be on certain subjects, especially foreign affairs," David Remnick wrote thirteen years ago in The New Yorker, "his stewardship of the paper has been open and daring."
But Lipsky had higher ambitions than to publish a weekly edition of the Forward. He summoned me to his office a decade ago to encourage me to start a labor daily but also to boast of his own grand plan: to transform the Forward into a daily, one with a pro-union orientation in line with both the Forward's history and my blueprint in The Nation. His scheme seemed grandiose: A top newspaper analyst, John Morton, had told me that a new daily would cost $300 million, and I doubted that Lipsky, sitting in his modest office in the Workmen's Circle Building, could raise even a fraction of that sum.
I underestimated Lipsky. Three years later he left the Forward, and in 2002 he delivered on his promise to create a new daily (though not, alas, one that stands with organized labor). Today the Sun has four principal investors--men who, Lipsky notes, "are among the most successful financial investors in history." It's a group that includes Michael Steinhardt, Lipsky's former partner at the Forward; Thomas Tisch, a board member of the Manhattan Institute; Bruce Kovner, chair of the American Enterprise Institute and a man ranked by Forbes as the eighty-fifth richest American; and Roger Hertog, chairman emeritus of the Manhattan Institute. In an interview Hertog half-seriously quipped that, owing to the Sun's steady financial losses, his involvement in the paper is an example of "delusional behavior." But he proudly views the Sun as an idea factory for the elite and says he'll continue to support it into the foreseeable future. (Steinhardt made the same vow, saying, "It's money well spent.") "If you just did a random survey of opinion leaders in New York, whether they be cultural or political or business types," Hertog says, "I think you would find that a very large number read the paper." Sun watchers concur that Lipsky has captured a limited but influential audience. Says Fred Siegel of Cooper Union, "In New York and Washington it gets read by politicians and intellectuals, and by people in the think-tank world."
Afew weeks ago I asked Lipsky why he launched a conservative daily in 2002, when New York already had two of them--the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. "If one drew a quadrant of New York newspapers," he replied, "there was a center-left broadsheet, the Times. There was a center-left tabloid, the News, and a center-right tabloid, the Post. But there was not, until the Sun, a center-right broadsheet." (He views the Journal as a national paper with a limited interest in New York City. But it's hard to agree with his assessment that Mortimer Zuckerman's Daily News, which has fervently supported the Iraq War, is a center-left publication.) Before Lipsky could launch his center-right broadsheet he needed someone to manage the newsroom, so he brought with him from the Forward a fiery young protégé, Ira Stoll, a Harvard Crimson veteran best known for his website devoted to the daily excoriation of the Times, smartertimes.com. Today Stoll is a busy man: When he is not supervising his fifteen full-time reporters or collaborating with Lipsky on the unsigned editorials (one of which recently urged Dick Cheney to run for President), he is endeavoring to complete a biography of Samuel Adams for the Free Press.
The editorial formula fashioned by Lipsky and Stoll is a peculiar mix of canned political ideology and spry reportage and criticism. Consider a recent issue, March 20, beginning with the front page. The main story concerns the latest developments in a major police shooting in New York, followed by a piece about New York City's public schools ("Schools Seeing Fast Rise in Bureaucrats"), a dispatch from the state capital ("Spitzer Nears Hospital Deal That Could Isolate Union"), an overview of the rift at the NAACP and a feature about a businessman's obsession with a 1906 Danish painting. The opinion pages, which usually feature William F. Buckley Jr., Cal Thomas and the scabrous Mark Steyn, contain two unsigned editorials--one calling for school vouchers, the other demanding an end to rent stabilization and rent control--alongside op-ed pieces lashing Human Rights Watch and French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin ("Oh So Civilized, Monsieur"). In the culture section readers are treated to an assessment of Ira Glass's Showtime debut of This American Life, a review of a concert at Carnegie Hall by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, a survey of dance photography, an essay about Hesiod and a review by renowned critic Gary Giddins of the DVD release of the film Muriel. All in all, a fabulous read for culture and a tendentious (though not uninteresting) one for politics.
It's only a slight stretch to say that Israel is to the Sun what gossip is to the New York Post or jockdom is to Sports Illustrated. A portrait of the historian Lucy Dawidowicz once hung in the Chambers Street office of the Sun, and her best-known book provided the Sun with the theme of its first editorial in 2002: "The War Against the Jews." For Lipsky and Stoll, it's a war that exists in perpetuity, and some of the Sun's most relentless crusading has been undertaken against New York institutions the editors view as hostile to Israel, Zionism and Jews. In late 2003 the Sun published a series of articles and editorials about the Ford Foundation, assailing it for funding Palestinian NGOs accused of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic behavior at the UN World Conference Against Racism, in Durban in 2001. The articles, which strongly implied that the foundation's top executives were anti-Semitic, jolted members of Congress into action, and Ford was eventually forced to alter its grant-making procedures in a way that disillusioned many of its admirers [see Sherman, "Target Ford," June 6, 2006].
In October 2004 the Sun published the first of twenty articles and editorials alleging that Jewish students at Columbia University were experiencing systematic harassment by anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic professors. Some of the stories ran under the tag line "Crisis at Columbia," and a typical headline declared, "Anti-Defamation League Director: University Fails to Protect Jewish Students." A number of Columbia's most distinguished (and longest-serving) Jewish faculty members dismissed the Sun's allegations as preposterous, but the Sun's drumbeat soon attracted the attention of the Daily News, New York magazine and the Times [see Sherman, "The Mideast Comes to Columbia," April 4, 2005]. What Lipsky calls "an enormous story" was born, and he is unapologetic about his paper's unrelenting coverage of Columbia: "Bob Bartley used to say it takes seventy-five editorials to get a law passed."
Occasionally the Sun uses tactics that would please the ghost of Walter Winchell. In March 2006 Lipsky walked by Ira Stoll's desk and heard him laughing. And with that laugh a Sun crusade was born. Stoll had been reading a Harvard University working paper by professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, of Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, titled "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy." The barrage began with a piece by reporter Eli Lake, who contacted David Duke and then produced a page-one story announcing that the Walt-Mearsheimer paper was "winning praise from white supremacist David Duke." (That story was headlined "David Duke Claims to be Vindicated by a Harvard Dean.") A few days later another Sun story insisted, with no evidence, that the two professors had "culled sections of the paper from neo-Nazi and other anti-Israel hate Web sites." (Walt and Mearsheimer dismissed the accusation as "absurd"; the link with David Duke, they said, is "guilt by association.")
In its zeal to demolish Walt and Mearsheimer the Sun also chased their colleagues--including Marvin Kalb, who, like Walt, holds a post at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. A Sun editorial noted that Kalb had recently petitioned the Newspaper Association of America on a historical matter pertaining to Jewish journalists trapped in Hitler's Germany, and went on, "Now--at a moment when Israelis and Jews everywhere are under attack in a global war against America and Israel launched by Islamofascists--the cat has got his tongue." The next day the Sun printed a front-page story, "Kalb Upbraids Harvard Dean Over Israel," in which Kalb proclaimed that the Walt-Mearsheimer paper "clearly does not meet the academic standards of a Kennedy School research paper." Kalb declined to be interviewed by The Nation. (The same editorial warned Harvard to get its house in order and added, "The Ford Foundation recently had its own learning experience.")
When I asked Lipsky to delineate the Sun's editorial priorities, he included in his list "the United Nations--its scandals, the anti-Israel maneuvering." The UN is indeed one of the Sun's most passionate and enduring obsessions. Lipsky employs a full-time UN correspondent, Benny Avni, who is a sharp thorn in the side of the UN hierarchy and who produced no fewer than 237 pieces in 2006. Edward Mortimer, director of communications under Kofi Annan, was continually exasperated by Avni's reporting: "I felt that he was systematically putting the most negative, conspiratorial interpretation on practically everything that happened at the UN." Few topics at the UN are off limits to Avni: In 2005 he somewhat gleefully reported that Mark Malloch Brown, then Annan's chief of staff, was renting a house from George Soros in Westchester. It was a purely commercial transaction, and Avni alleged no wrongdoing. But the Sun was keen to link Malloch Brown to Soros, who has a prominent place in the Sun's pantheon of villains.
Today Malloch Brown, who has left the UN, considers the story to be "totally unfair. It just fell way below minimum journalistic standards of research or ethics." In his estimation, the Sun is "a pimple on the backside of American journalism." But he accepts that the paper's obsession with the UN translates into influence. Regarding Rosett's reporting on Kojo Annan, he admits the Sun "does punch way above its circulation number, on occasion." He goes on to say, "Clearly amongst its minuscule circulation were a significant number of diplomats. And so it did at times act as some kind of rebel house paper inside the UN. It fed the gossip mills and what was said in the cafeterias."
As a business venture the Sun is not exactly flourishing. On its front page the paper proclaims: "150,000 of New York City's Most Influential Readers Every Day." But according to its latest audit, the Sun is selling 13,211 hard copies a day and giving away more than 85,000. (By contrast, the Daily News sells about 700,000 copies a day.) In an attempt to lasso subscribers in certain New York ZIP codes, the Sun recently offered free subscriptions for a full year, an unusual way for a newspaper to build circulation.
People who know Lipsky say that in 2006 he was very anxious about the Sun's future. Today that anxiety appears to have dissipated: He is enthusiastic about his paper's website and insists that "the print edition of the Sun is growing sharply, albeit from a small base. I'm highly optimistic." He likes to recite a famous saying from poker: "lose early, win late." The paper's survival depends almost entirely on Lipsky's ability to manage his wealthy investors, a task in which this journalist-entrepreneur has excelled and for which he is well suited. "The Sun could continue as long as Lipsky's investors are interested in continuing it," says Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker. "I'd expect to see it survive for several more years. And they'll get a boost if the Democrats win the next presidential election."

Union targets charter schools

BY NAUSH BOGHOSSIAN, Staff Writer
LA Daily News

Article Last Updated:06/10/2007 09:44:34 PM PDT

Implicitly admitting its antagonism to the charter school movement has failed, United Teachers Los Angeles now wants to unionize their faculties and push for more independence in the classroom.

UTLA President A.J. Duffy says the union has created a committee to study how it can organize charter schools created by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

"We have come to the realization that we need to look at organizing teachers at charter schools," Duffy said. "It's not just organizing charter school personnel, which we have an internal committee looking at. It's pushing the reforms that we've been pushing for two years including local control of schools."

With 103 charter schools in operation at the LAUSD - a number expected to grow to more than 150 in two years - UTLA has watched many of its teachers leave traditional public schools. Many of those who remain have demanded the same classroom freedom offered by the charters.

And in what may be a critical first step, charter powerhouse Steve Barr, head of Green Dot Public Schools, is in talks with UTLA as he works to convert the troubled Locke High School into a charter.

Barr's teachers are members of the California Teachers Association, the umbrella organization of UTLA, and are among the few unionized teachers at LAUSD charters.

"We're having very public conversations with teachers represented by UTLA across the city and also with UTLA. I hope it leads to something but we've been talking for years," Barr said. "I don't believe you can go into a 100 percent unionized industry and change it with nonunion labor."

Hostile to union

But Barr said the charter movement is, for the most part, hostile toward the union. He added that charters are missing a chance to form a productive relationship.

"As relationships start to come together between the unions and unionized charters, the people that will be left out of the equation are non-unionized charters," Barr said. "The charter movement is more stubborn about these kinds of relationships than the unions are."

Charter schools are probably one of the biggest political land mines around which Duffy has to maneuver. Duffy has blasted the independent schools for years, and is now seen by many rank-and-file members as flip-flopping on the issue.

The union president said his position is clear: If a school chooses to turn charter and they want UTLA as the bargaining agent, then he must negotiate.

But the issue goes beyond bringing in more dues, Duffy said - it's about making real reform happen.

Barr hopes the new school board, along with the mayor, will apply a sense of urgency to embrace charters and the best practices they offer.

"It's all aligning because there's got to be some radical restructuring in that district, which is going to be painful and bloody," Barr said.

"With a new school board, a parent revolt and a teacher revolt happening, I'm very optimistic, and I think when A.J. Duffy and his team realize that we have it all in common, it's going to be very powerful."

But recent events show that it may not be enough to work with a few leaders who share the ideas for change.

Recently, Brewer was working feverishly behind-the-scenes with Barr to develop a model that would transform the challenged Locke High School in South Los Angeles.

Duffy was part of those meetings and was on board, but when Barr said could not wait until Duffy got his 48,000 members on board, it forced the UTLA president to back out.

But the outcome at Locke will likely become the blueprint for future relationships with the union, Barr believes.

"I think there's a perfect storm brewing," he said, citing shared goals like more money to classrooms, more teacher pay, smaller classrooms and having more say on budget and curriculum.

Inevitable trend

"I think it's inevitable with this (union) leadership that this trend is now happening faster than people anticipated. I think these guys understand those trends and I hope they get in front of it."

David Abel, an education advocate, believes Barr's move to eschew the union's backing to get something done is the only way to change the direction of a school district as large as the LAUSD.

"Barr is on the right track. Clearly we have a broken, almost crippled school district and he doesn't have time to reflect," said Abel, chairman of New Schools Better Neighborhoods, a civic advocacy organization.

Caprice Young, head of the California Charter Schools Association, said now that their schools have proven academic records and high satisfaction among teachers, the union cannot ignore them anymore.

And the district's traditional public schools are raising the pressure by contacting charter operators like Green Dot for guidance to convert - most recently Taft High School in Woodland Hills and Santee in Los Angeles.

In fact, Young said she would put up the association's resources to help train UTLA to create their own high-quality schools.

"The leadership of the union is going to have to listen to its own membership and they're saying we have to start charters," Young said. "They're seeing their peers leaving LAUSD to go to charters and they're loving it."

naush.boghossian@dailynews.com

(818) 713-3722

test score dementia

If people really want to be confused, check out these charts that Klein was handing out proudly at the D2 CEC meeting – purporting to show major improvements in the recent test scores.

I can’t make heads or tails out of them; my husband who has a PhD in physics said they appear to be mislabeled and are so ineptly created that it would be difficult to do a worse job.

If this is how our schools are going be graded now we are all in a lot of trouble.

Leonie Haimson
Class Size Matters

What It Means to Teach

http://www.monthlyreview.org/

What It Means to Teach
by Amy Demarest & Ellen David Friedman

Daniel Moulthrop, Ninive Clements Calegari, and Dave Eggers, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers (New York: The New Press, 2006), 355 pages, hardcover, $25.95.

Although some idealize and others demean the work of teachers, few people outside the field fully understand what it really means to teach. Misconceptions about teaching influence the ways that Americans think about the profession. One of the manifestations of this enduring disconnect between the American public and the professionals who teach is the low salaries teachers receive. This is the main issue that Moulthrop, Calegari, and Eggers tackle in this thorough and valuable ethnographic study of the lives of teachers, their daily struggle to make ends meet, and what it means to teach.

The authors challenge the perception that teachers have it pretty easy and instead paint a compelling tale of the inspiration and desperation that teachers experience in their professional lives. They examine what keeps teachers in a profession where they feel undervalued, and what makes them leave. They include the voices of educational experts, policy makers, and other players involved in all aspects of the educational system.

The main premise of this book is that teachers need and deserve a decent salary, and that schools will improve when they're able to attract, support, and retain "the best and the brightest" by paying higher salaries. Well-established research is offered that attests to the relationship between teacher quality and student performance and the extent to which a teacher is the primary factor within the educational setting affecting a child's success in school.

In their introduction, the authors present three lines of reasoning that undermine the social commitment to decent salaries for teachers. These are: The view that teachers are well paid in relation to the time spent working; that teaching entails a life of sacrifice and service ("much like clergy, so high pay should not be an expectation"); and that teachers should be paid more but aren't, due only to lack of available funds.

The structure of the book reflects the authors' allegiance to the voices and experiences of the two hundred teachers interviewed, voices that directly challenge the public's strongly held biases. While significant research studies are presented alongside the stories, it is the voices of the teachers themselves that remain central and carry this book's message.

The authors begin with the powerful story of Jonathan Dearman, a brilliant and talented African-American teacher who -- two and a half years into the start of an outstanding teaching career -- reluctantly left the profession to sell real estate when he realized he could triple his salary by selling houses and still have time for his family and himself. Dearman's story -- a tragedy really -- serves as an allegory for the rest of the book and underlines the poignancy of missed opportunity for human fulfillment, both for Dearman and his students. As with others portrayed in the book, Dearman loved teaching but was forced out by the low pay, lost family time, and the constant stress of feeling unsuccessful, despite working seventy to eighty hours per week.

In the beginning of the book the authors outline seven prominent myths and assumptions that thwart the promise of public education. The balance of the book offers rich testimony and effective use of supporting data that provide a robust counterpoint to these myths.

At the top of the list of myths -- very familiar to anyone who's taught -- is that teachers get a great hourly wage in relation to the hours worked. This argument echoes in countless school board meetings and living rooms around the country and is central to the point of this book. The hourly wages argued about are the contact hours that teachers spend with students when they are "at work." This, of course, doesn't account for hours spent correcting, planning, gathering resources, talking with parents, and taking part in extra-curricular activities, meetings, and other professional development. The authors present a compelling tale of the myriad of tasks and the many hours that teachers spend keeping their classrooms functioning. Studies indicate that teachers spend an average of ten additional hours per week that are not recognized as part of their work time, while many spend a great deal more than that.

The belief that "teachers have summers off" is another popular refrain that the authors refute. They indicate that 42 percent of teachers teach summer school or have another job and all teachers are required to take part in professional development for which they don't get paid -- and for which they must often pay. Summer is also the time when many teachers do the bulk of their planning for the next school year. Due to the nature of their jobs, the time for the deep and inspired thinking that is needed to design a year of learning experiences is not possible during the school year.

Third, the authors address the myth that there is no correlation between highly paid teachers and high student achievement. While the direct correlation between pay and student performance may be disputed, commonly accepted research supports that good teachers are the single most important factor within the educational setting in a child's success in school.

The fourth popular argument is that unions are the problem because they push for tenure (protecting "incompetent" teachers), they enforce strict adherence to hours and working conditions as stipulated in a contract, and they maintain a "lockstep" salary schedule based on years of service and educational attainment (as opposed to some unspecified measure of "performance") in setting wages. Unfortunately -- and in our view, incorrectly -- the authors do not refute this myth. Instead, they highlight several instances where a given union has embraced an alternative compensation "reform" scheme. In doing so they seem to reinforce the prevailing myth that unions' adherence to principles of salary equity is a bar to performance excellence.

A fifth myth is that it is more important that working conditions be improved than salaries. The reality is that working conditions are a significant concern, but not at the expense of salaries: both are critical. Teachers are often unable to leave their room to use the bathroom, use a telephone, sit down for lunch, or get to a working photocopier. Although not clearly stated by the authors, these basic workers' rights are necessary for teachers -- not because of the noble work that they do but because all workers deserve a humane working environment and salaries commensurate with their work and responsibilities.

The sixth assumption is that teaching is mainly a second-income job filled by women supplementing family income; clearly an idea left over from the postwar era when families could survive on one income -- family wage income supposedly provided by the male "head of the household" -- and teaching was an almost exclusively female profession. Nevertheless, the antiquated idea that most teachers are comfortably part of a two-income household and can therefore be paid less remains a surprisingly commonly held opinion.

The seventh and last assumption is that the salaries of teachers are commensurate with other professions doing similar work. The authors, drawing parallels to other high-stress jobs such as emergency room workers and air-traffic controllers, accurately present the high demands of teaching. However, they don't go far enough to illustrate that prevailing wages for other professionals of comparable education are uniformly higher than teaching wages.

Why are teachers' wages and working conditions important to society? The authors ask readers to consider the reality voiced by one community member that "teachers' working conditions are also the students learning conditions" and move beyond the myths that often distort the dialogue. They address the pervasive short-sightedness of people that can only talk about "at work" hours and that ignore the craft involved in educating young minds, and they counter the common misconceptions of those who so idealize teaching that pay is not acknowledged as a vital labor issue affecting the well-being, morale, and retention of high-quality teachers.

The consequences of the public's attitudes and the resulting effects on salary and working conditions are substantial. Many who enter the profession don't stay and thousands leave after only a few years of teaching. This high turnover and resulting low morale has a debilitating effect on those who stay. The school loses not only the talent of the teachers who have left but also the momentum on school change initiatives and ongoing professional development. Training and integrating new staff also drains the energy of the remaining veteran teachers.

Beyond just the empirical evidence of low wages, the fact is that teaching has largely retained a working-class status, despite its professional standards and demands: Compensation is restrained -- new teachers, burdened with college debt, often do not even make a "livable wage" by numerous state standards and must frequently hold down second jobs to avoid sinking into the abyss of poverty. Even the "career level" incomes of teachers are often lower than the entry-level salaries of other professions (they are perhaps half of the starting pay for corporate lawyers). Status and autonomy are low; teachers work within a highly traditional hierarchy in relation both to bargaining and the power structure of schools (principals, superintendents, school boards, and state and national governments). The very fact that teachers are maligned for their "easy" work schedule reflects an attitude that they are hourly workers, and that only their time "on the clock" should be compensated.

We wished the authors had provided a deeper historical analysis of why teaching has remained a uniquely working-class profession. Such an analysis might have started with the question: Why are teachers one of the few professional groups that retain a largely working-class identity? Given the fact that teaching has often served as the entry-level profession for immigrants, that it is largely female, and that it is the only "wholly owned profession" in the United States (where all holders of the professional license work in public settings), it seems that a particular form of racism, sexism, and paternalism have combined over the decades to create an institutional barrier for teachers as a group. The many myths cited by the authors serve to hold this barrier in place, but do not reveal its true socioeconomic nature.

The most effective aspect of the book is the authors' allegiance to the stories and interviews that bring the art of teaching to vivid life, such as this quote: "There is no job like teaching . . . in which one person is responsible for not only the safety of, but the inspiration for, up to thirty-six individuals at once."

Throughout the book, the authors acknowledge the human act of teaching. It is this approach that is particularly refreshing. When they refer to the "thirty-six individuals" in a classroom they place the discussion of education as a humanistic, shared enterprise. They don't talk about "student-load" or "teacher-student ratio," as if education was an efficiency problem in a factory. They acknowledge the myriad of ways that a teacher is continually "on" and engaged with people in a room with thirty other human beings who need to know what and how to do their tasks. Tasks are devised and organized to generate learning of all kinds such as learning to read, analyze text, carry on a dialogue, listen, divide, etc. It is not so much about keeping thirty human beings occupied as keeping thirty human brains in a growth mode.

The authors rely on educational experts to affirm the data gathered in the interviews. Well-known leaders in the field such as Stanford University's Linda Darling-Hammond outline the complexity of the teacher's role and what qualifications are needed. She notes that a teacher must understand a student's thinking and group dynamics, and know how to handle a crisis as well as teach a kid to read. Technical skills and knowledge of one's subject are the focus of current No Child Left Behind (NCLB) highly qualified teacher requirements, but the artistry, moral fortitude, and vision required are seldom recognized. It should be added that increasingly these days, with the decline of many institutional supports in the wider society, teachers must also provide basic social services to students -- lining children up to get glasses or to go to the dentist, counseling, helping them obtain the food they need, etc.

The powerful testimonies of teachers in this book cannot help but move readers. We see teachers demeaned, demoralized, and deprived. We see teachers driven by economic necessity to give up on their passionate commitment to kids. We sense the authors' own passion for a reordering of social priorities that would allow higher salaries for teachers, and thereby create stronger schools. But in their series of case studies where "everybody -- teachers, union leaders, administrators and school board members agreed that salaries must be higher . . . worked together on a local level to find a solution," the authors give a somewhat inadequate response to the serious structural problems they alluded to earlier and to the critical role teachers will play in this transformation.

They offer three case studies -- in Denver, Helena, and the San Fernando Valley -- as innovative responses to the salary crisis. To the credit of all these experimenting districts and the book's authors, these are serious attempts to rectify compensation problems and are, therefore, well-chosen illustrations. However, in our opinion, the authors overreach on several grounds. First, they attempt to elevate some fairly conventional contractual practices as though they were quite innovative. For example, Helena's provision of early retirement incentives to highly paid senior teachers is a rather common practice. They describe certain salary enhancements as tied to "performance" (a linkage the authors clearly support), when they are in fact tied to additional work. This, too, is a well-known principle in traditional teacher contracts. They describe purportedly unique self- and peer-evaluation processes that -- for example in our home state of Vermont -- are actually embedded in the statutory teacher licensure requirements.

In each of these examples, we discern the authors' efforts to distinguish "reform" solutions from traditional "union" approaches, as if to criticize -- in much the way a right-wing critic might -- the stultifying effects of union salary negotiations. They fail to recognize the constantly evolving nature of teacher contracts, and tend to align with anti-union critics on weak grounds. Another weakness of these case studies is that they rely on unique funding sources (private philanthropy or extraordinary tax levies) that are not universally available.

The authors do cite the importance of teacher collaboration and democratic practice as instrumental in transforming the culture and organization (including teachers' salaries) of schools. These efforts are noted in the case studies, but not presented as a central part of the solution. There is, unfortunately, a strong tradition of school reform done to and for teachers. In our opinion, any discussion of improving schools must include teachers and students as active participants. Professional learning communities, the inclusion of student voice, increased community dialogue, and the innovative restructuring of leadership are pockets of hope in today's bleak educational landscape. Although isolated, it is this progressive movement that carries the promise for school democratization.

Both within the authors' own terms, and those we refer to above, the issue is quite simply one of supporting teachers to do their job and paying them adequately to do so. The tragic irony of the U.S. educational system is that the answer is hidden in plain view. Teachers are constrained by low salaries, and the implications of this are artfully attested to in this book. But they are also constrained by schedules, expectations, and demands issued in hierarchal patterns of decision-making. The realities and attitudes of the larger society hinder teachers and students from reaching their full potential and engaging in the critical decisions that need to be made in order to change schools. The question of teacher salary needs to be seen in this larger context.

Despite these criticisms, the importance of this book at the current historical moment should not be underestimated. The harsh imperative of privatization puts U.S. public education under dire threat, with vouchers, charter schools, spending caps, and the punitive impact of NCLB high-stakes testing only the most obvious weapons. A defense of public education must of necessity include a defense of the public profession of teaching and an expanded public understanding of what it means to teach