Thursday, December 10, 2009

The Real Chicago Way: A Privatization Scheme That's A Loser For Taxpayers

The Real Chicago Way

A Privatization Scheme That's A Loser For Taxpayers

By Thomas Frank

Wall Street Journal

December 8, 2009

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703558004574584232074750544.html

When the entertainers of the right aren't declaring

their disgust with President Obama for groveling before

foreign potentates, they're pretending to fear him as a

left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call "the

Chicago way." As imagined by the right, the men in the

West Wing are like a demonic cross between the antiwar

demonstrators who gathered in Grant Park in 1968 and

the Chicago cops who cracked their hippie skulls.

Tremble, men of commerce, before this infernal

combination.

Myths like this are fun to invent. The problem, as

ever, is reality.

Consider one of the actual news stories to emerge from

Chicago of late: The city's decision to privatize its

parking meters. Thanks to a deal finalized in 2008,

Chicago's parking meters will be operated for the next

75 years by a group of investors put together by Morgan

Stanley, including the sovereign wealth fund of Abu

Dhabi. DaleyJmp Chicago Mayor Richard Daley DaleyJmp

As it happens, Chicago is the nation's leader in

municipal privatization efforts. That's right: The city

that conservatives portray as the citadel of the power-

grabbing, government-growing left has been selling

itself off in pieces for years. It signed a 99-year

lease for the Chicago Skyway, a toll road in the city's

South Side, back in 2005. It did the same for its big

downtown parking garages in 2006. Last year, it

approved a deal to privatize Midway Airport;

fortunately, the arrangements fell through.

The city's longtime mayor, Richard M. Daley, is such a

keen enthusiast of privatization that he has promoted

it as the budget solution for every government in the

land. "If they start leasing public assets—every city,

every county, every state and the federal

government—you would not have to raise any taxes

whatsoever," Mr. Daley told the Chicago Sun-Times in

January. "You would have more infrastructure money that

way than any other way in the nation."

Selling public property is the true Chicago way. Had

Mr. Obama not been elected president, the nation's

business journals would be falling over one another to

praise his city for its daring, market-friendly

innovations.

And if they chose, they would also find just as much to

criticize in Mayor Daley's real-life privatization

spree as they do in the brutality that they imagine

President Obama shows his opponents.

The details of the parking meter deal, for example,

were negotiated by the Daley administration with almost

no public scrutiny. When it came time to approve the

billion-dollar arrangement, the city council got

exactly two days. It was a farce. According to a report

issued by Chicago's inspector general, "No financial

analysis was provided of the value of the parking-meter

system to the City if it retained the system, since no

such analysis had been done. . . . There was no public

comment; no testimony from critics or experts; no

presentation of recent studies" on privatization

elsewhere.

It was not until months later that Chicagoans

discovered what a lousy deal it was. The inspector

general's report estimates that the private investors

paid a little more than half the amount that the system

would have generated had the city held onto the meters

itself.

One alderman, described at length in the Chicago Reader

last May, figures that the parking system might be

worth four times what the investors paid. "The

taxpayers had been hosed," the Reader concluded.

Meanwhile, the cost of parking increased dramatically,

as the new parking-meter proprietor sought to maximize

its return. Meters broke down from the unaccustomed

load of quarters. Tickets were handed out with abandon.

Chicagoans were furious.

What they eventually learned is that they had handed

over a component of self-governance to a private

company that is, by definition, unconcerned with the

public interest. Chicago police will still hand out

parking tickets; the state of Illinois will still

suspend drivers' licenses; but for the next 75 years

all of it will be done to ensure that citizens render

proper tribute to Wall Street.

And now comes the inevitable denouement. Last week, the

Chicago City Council voted to plug a hole in its 2010

budget using funds remaining from the billion-dollar

parking-meter haul, despite earlier plans to invest the

money for the long term. Almost all of it will be gone

by the end of next year.

It may not fit the myth, but that's the real Chicago

way. Sell off public property without public scrutiny.

Prohibit public input on an essential public service.

Rationalize the whole thing, as Mr. Daley's

administration has done, by insisting that government

can't run such things as well as the private sector

can.

And then, when the money runs out, privatize something

else: The water supply, maybe. The sewer system. An

airport or two.

Why not privatize a U.S. Senate seat, too? Just imagine

what Abu Dhabi would pay for that.

Write to thomas@wsj.com.

Monday, December 07, 2009

NY Times on Hedge Funds and Charters

December 6, 2009

Scholarly Investments

By NANCY HASS

THEIR company names were conspicuously absent from their nametags, but that is how these hedge fund managers and analysts — members of a field known for secrecy — preferred it. They filled the party space at the W Hotel on Lexington Avenue in late October, mostly men in their 30s. Balancing drinks on easels adorned with students’ colorful drawings, they juggled PDA’s and business cards, before sitting down to poker tables to raise money for New York City charter schools.

Working the room, the evening’s hosts, John Petry and Joel Greenblatt, who are partners in the hedge fund Gotham Capital, had an agenda: to identify new candidates to join their Success Charter Network, a cause they embrace with all the fervor of social reformers.

“He’s already in,” Mr. Petry said as he passed John Sabat, who manages a hedge fund for one of the industry’s big stars. (Like Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels, no one in the group would name him aloud.)

“I wasn’t hard to turn,” said Mr. Sabat, 36, whom Mr. Petry drafted last year to be a member of the board of Harlem Success Academy 4, on East 120th Street, the latest in its network of school in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Boards agree to donate or raise $1.3 million to subsidize their school for the first three years. “You can’t talk to Petry without taking about charters,” Mr. Sabat added. “You get the religion fast.”

Mr. Petry, 38, and Mr. Greenblatt, 52, may spend their days poring over spreadsheets and overseeing trades, but their obsession — one shared with many other hedge funders — is creating charter schools, the tax-funded, independently run schools that they see as an entrepreneurial answer to the nation’s education woes. Charters have attracted benefactors from many fields. But it is impossible to ignore that in New York, hedge funds are at the movement’s epicenter.

“These guys get it,” said Eva S. Moskowitz, a former New York City Council member, whom Mr. Petry and Mr. Greenblatt hired in 2006 to run the Success Charter Network, for which they provide the financial muscle, including compensation for Ms. Moskowitz of $371,000 her first year. “They aren’t afraid of competition or upsetting the system. They thrive on that.”

Hedge fund managers may be better known for eight-figure incomes with which they scoop up the choicest Manhattan penthouses and Greenwich, Conn., waterfront estates. But they also dominate the boards of many of the city’s charters schools and support organizations. They include Whitney Tilson, who runs T2 Partners; David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital; Tony Davis of Anchorage Advisors; and Ravenel Boykin Curry IV of Eagle Capital Management.

The Tiger Foundation, started by the hedge fund billionaire Julian Robertson, provides a large chunk of financing for several dozen charters across the city. Mr. Robertson’s son, Spencer, founded his own school last year, PAVE Academy in the Brooklyn, while his daughter-in-law, Sarah Robertson, is chairwoman of the Girls Preparatory Charter School on the Lower East Side.

The Robin Hood Foundation, the high-profile Wall Street charity founded by Paul Tudor Jones II, a legendary hedge fund manager, considers charter schools “right there at the top of our list of priorities,” said Marianne Macrae, a spokeswoman.

Ms. Macrae said that the foundation has given more than $150 million to schools and management organizations, especially in New York, over the last decade.

“If you’re at a hedge fund, this is definitely the hot cause,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a nonprofit group that lobbies for charters and is financed by hedge fund heavies. “These are the kind of guys who a decade ago would have been spending their time angling to get on the junior board of the Met, the ballet.”

That hedge fund multimillionaires have embraced the charter movement may seem odd: their own children are unlikely ever to see the inside of a neighborhood school, and there are more traditional routes to social prominence through philanthropy, like support of hospitals and cultural institutions. But to those who know the sociology of Wall Street, it makes sense. Charter schools appeal to the maverick instincts of many who run hedge funds.

Younger on average than top executives at financial giants like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, hedge fund managers are often numbers-driven refugees of those banks, who chuck the suit and tie and work with a small staff, studying spreadsheets for investment opportunities.

“At heart we are still the kids who in eighth grade were in the backyard doing science experiments while the cool kids were at football practice,” said Mr. Curry, 43. “We’re the kind of people who could never survive in the slick political environment of an investment bank.”

The claim of Mr. Curry to nerdiness is undercut by the fact he is married to Celerie Kemble, a Palm Beach-raised decorator and socialite, and is partners in a planned Caribbean resort with Moby, Richard Meier and Charlie Rose.

Still, Mr. Curry has been “knee deep in educational issues” since his 20s, he said. He co-founded two Girls Prep schools and is head of the board of the newer one, in the Bronx. The schools are “exactly the kind of investment people in our industry spend our days trying to stumble on,” Mr. Curry said, “with incredible cash flow, even if in this case we don’t ourselves get any of it.”

The reference is to the fact that New York State contributes 75 to 90 percent of the amount per student that public schools receive. State law mandates that each charter have its own board, and the need to recruit trustees, including many from Wall Street, has turned “a group of unlikely people into an army of foot soldiers for the movement,” said Joel I. Klein, the city’s schools chancellor, who along with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is a strong charter-school advocate.

The mayor has asked the State Legislature to nearly double the number of charters allowed in the city, to 200, over the next four years. Although the New York charity world trembled last year as financial firms bled — the Robin Hood Foundation’s annual gala raised a disappointing $56.6 million in 2008, 21 percent less than the previous year — Wall Street, and its expected bonuses, are back in a big way. (Robin Hood raised more than $72 million at its auction this spring.)

Across the country, charters are a focus of debate, often bitter, over their hiring of nonunion teachers, experimental curricula and potential siphoning off of motivated students. In New York, space issues have exacerbated the conflict. The city allows some charters to share space with under-used public schools; the new desks, computers and small teacher-student ratios paid for by private donors draw envious stares. There have been protests in some neighborhoods.

“I think it’s all good and well that these people are finally stepping up to support education,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, referring to wealthy hedge funders. “But I would wish they would do it in a more foundational way, a way that would help all the children instead of just a small group.”

Charter schools often have a longer school year, Saturday classes, uniforms and a passion for measuring results. Most of them are in the city’s poorest neighborhoods and admit children by lottery. Approximately 30,000, or 2.5 percent of the city’s public school students, attend charters, although in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn the figure is closer to 20 percent.

The schools present the kind of opportunity that “electrifies” hedge fund managers, said Mr. Tilson, 43, who is on the board of the Knowledge Is Power Program, which manages charter schools around the country. A founding member of Teach for America in the late 1980s (before earning an M.B.A.), Mr. Tilson also blogs about charters at edreform.blogspot.com. “It’s the most important cause in the nation, obviously, and with the state providing so much of the money, outside contributions are insanely well leveraged,” he said.

Charter schools’ reliance on metrics and tests to measure progress is another attraction for hedge funders. Mr. Petry, who cultivates a schlumpy aura that is more headmaster than Master of the Universe — he carries an eight-year-old Blackberry the size of a Stephen King paperback stuffed in a nylon backpack and favors fleece pullovers — said he reads spreadsheets of education statistics as much as those for new investments he’s chasing. “I can’t understand how anyone could look at the raw numbers and not see what’s at stake,” he said during an interview in a restaurant near the Upper West Side apartment where he lives with his wife, a former teacher, and three young children.

Whether charters do a better job of educating children, even with the extra help from private donors, is much debated. A study released in September by researchers headed by Caroline M. Hoxby, an economist at Stanford who is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, concluded that on average New York City charters outperform local schools. But another study by a different group of Stanford researchers last summer suggested that nationally the numbers are muddier.

The idea that eventually their schools might be “scalable,” that is, provide a model that could be rolled out in many communities, also excites the hedge fund crowd. “The underlying drive is to build something that can spread, can be recreated in different cities; otherwise it’s not as meaningful to us,” Mr. Petry said.

He said the most important thing he learned tutoring illiterate adults after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania was that “helping the world one person at a time just isn’t for me.”

In addition to raising money, charter school boards, which also include educators and community activists, evaluate test scores and curriculum approaches, oversee budgets and develop teacher hiring protocol, said James Merriman, chief executive officer of the New York City Center for Charter Schools, a nonprofit group that offers planning and grants to those thinking of starting a school.

“It takes a lot more time and energy that being on the junior committee of an art museum,” he said.

The workload didn’t scare off Robert Reffkin, 30, a vice president in the private equity department of Goldman Sachs who is chairman of the board of the Success Charter Network’s newest school, scheduled to open in the Bronx this summer pending state approval. It took only a week for Mr. Reffkin, who jokes that in charter circles working for an investment bank makes him a rebel, to recruit a half-dozen of his friends from banks and hedge funds, all between 25 to 32, to join his board. All have pledged $50,000 a year for three years.

Mr. Reffkin, who was raised poor by a single mother in Oakland, Calif., and says he aspires to run for city office one day, considers charter schools “the civil rights struggle of my generation.”

Persuading pals to join his school’s 13-member board was “much, much easier than it would have been convincing them to give half as much to, say, a mainstream cultural institution,” he said. In October, his board rounded up 400 contributors for a $125-a-head fund-raiser for the school at the nightclub 1 Oak, with music by DJ Cassidy and D-Nice, an event intended to recruit other young financiers to the cause.

“In the past, we’ve had one or two big hedge fund guys footing most of the bill for each school,” Mr. Reffkin said. “But now enough of my peers in this industry who may not have the money to carry the whole thing understand what’s at stake and what the return can be.”

Email no.9

Hi, good evening.

There's so much going on now, and practically all of it is negative. But, I'll plough on anyway.

Best regards,

===========================================================================

SCHOOL CLOSINGS

They're closing more schools, which means more and more educators will become ATRs and the senior ones have little hope of finding a real position again. You can get a feeling for all the damage this creates by going to the blogs, particularly:

Ednotes — Will Maxwell and Jamaica HS Announced Closings Lead to New UFT Policy?

A flyer is being circulated to join the protest this coming Wednesday against the closing of Maxwell Vocational HS in Brooklyn. It's one of those things that everyone should try to attend:

Come join us to expose the injustice of school closures!

W.H. Maxwell H.S. CTE, a vocational school since 1951, should have had a B rating had it not been for the Mayor’s unfair changing of the cutoff scale. Expose the plans to make space for the mayor’s charter school takeovers.

Maxwell FACTS:

· 4 year weighed graduation rate : 72.5 %

· In 2006, our physics students won 1^st prize in the city’s science fair sponsored by Con Edison.

· In 2008, 21.66% of the seniors successfully tested for and received the HSTW Award for Educational Achievement – which also requires college preparatory classes in English, Math , and Science.

· Two current students are the President of the New York State Health Occupations Students Association (HOSA) and Vice Senior President.

· Our HOSA contingent made it to the National Competition last year.

· We have graduates who attend Cornell, NYU, SUNY, CUNY

· Our graduates have become Opticians, Physicians, Nurses, Medical Assistants, Engineers, Cosmetologists, Graphic Artists, Advertisers, etc…check out our Facebook page by searching “ Maxwell Grads – we really need your support”

Come voice your demand that Bloomberg and the Billionaire’s Club listen to the neighborhoods they claim to want to help!

There will be two rallies at W.H. Maxwell HS (CTE) - 145 Pennsylvania Ave, East New York,11207. C train to Liberty Avenue station:

Wed: Dec. 9^th parents/community forum– 6pm

Tues: Jan. 12^th CEC / SLC / DOE forum– 6 pm

Open mike sign up starts 5:30, ends 15 minutes after speakers start.

For Further info, contact Seung Ok: Positivelypessimist@gmail.com.

===========================================================================

KLEIN & THE DOE FINALLY GET SUED

On Norm's Notes is the Village Voice story on the lawsuit of several Rubber Room teachers, as well as David Pakter's comments about this case. A very interesting read.

================================================================================

THE BROKEN REGENTS SYSTEM

This is an excerpt from a Nov. 25 post on the parents' blog

Yet Another Nail in the NYS Regents Exam Coffin

On November 19, the Office of the NY State Comptroller released a report of its findings from an audit of local district scoring of high school Regents exams. The results, while not surprising to those closest to high school education in NY State, was nevertheless stunning in its confirmation of just how badly skewed the entire Regents examination system has become. . . .

Combine this pattern of fraudulently inflated grading with the persistent dumbing down of Regents exams and the concomitant lowering of the raw score needed for a passing scaled score grade, and the end result is an examination system that is utterly meaningless as a measure of knowledge or understanding. Even worse, as the Comptroller’s report makes clear, SED has failed completely to follow up on any of these issues, even having in hand another report from 2003/2004 detailing almost exactly the same problems.

What has become clear in the past five or six years (noticeably since the advent of NCLB), is that the NY State Regents examination system, once a moderately respectable measure of academic achievement, is now broken almost beyond repair. As long as the numbers are up, everyone rests easy; nobody seems to care that they are meaningless, as witnessed by the high levels of remediation required of first-year college student products of our state education system. As usual, the losers in this breakdown are the students and their sadly unaware parents.

It seems clear as well that the time has come for a major investigation and overhaul of SED and the Regents system. Governor Paterson and others in Albany, when will you wake up and start doing what’s right for the children in your state?

=================================================================

A WIN FOR A U-RATED TEACHERS IN STATE SUPREME COURT

On the ICE blog, DOE HANDED STUNNING DEFEAT IN “U” RATING APPEAL is a story of how a judge "rebuked the DOE for affirming a "U" rating given by an elementary school principal to a 20 year veteran when few of the procedural safeguards were followed." It's nice to see someone at some level in government asking DoE administrators to follow procedures. Nevertheless, it would have been nicer if this were an arbitration decision, so it could be applied across the school system. On a case-by-case lawsuit, I'm not sure anything applies, unless of course you hire your own lawyer and he builds your case by precedent. (JK: if you're reading this, your input would be helpful on this.)

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Sunday, December 06, 2009

UFT Email Cancelling Chapter Leader Meeting for Maxwell Demo

There are some precious words from UFT Special Rep Tony Sclafani

Ladies and Gentlemen: Our Chapters’ Leaders on Wed. is cancelled. See Tony’s message below for the reason. Hope to see you at Maxwell.

Best

Charlie (Friedman)

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Sclafani
Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 4:54 PM
To: Charles Friedman
Subject: FW: TONY'S BROOKLYN HIGH SCHOOLS - MESSAGE FROM THE DISTRICT REPRESENTATIVE - NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2009

Colleagues,
.
Also, please note – Wednesday’s Chapter Leader Meeting is cancelled. That’s right. You have to feed yourself on Wednesday, December 9th. Now- the question you are asking is WHY?

The answer has a more serious note to it and I need your help and attention on this one.

As you may know, the staff at Maxwell High School was notified this week that their school was closing. The three of us, Charley, Charlie and I are taking this very seriously, especially Charley Turner since this is his school We are concerned about many things and some of these will affect you and your schools.

First, statistically, Maxwell has been on a steady road to improvement over the past three years. We can prove that.

Second, the grading system that determined this is flawed, as everyone in education agrees.

Third, where will the overflow go? Jefferson Campus? Madison? Wingate Campus? Transit Tech? School for the Classics? Lane Campus? Wherever these students go, it will have an effect on these schools since there is no one being admitted into Maxwell.

Fourth, I believe that this closing is for one reason and one reason only – SPACE. Where else do we put those new Charter Schools? Or better yet, where do we create empty space to justify new Charters somewhere down the road?

Fifth, who’s next on the chopping block? Flawed data, fake reasons, a determined philosophy to close large comprehensive high schools at any cost – all these excuses can be used against anyone of you , even some of the smaller schools.

Let’s invest money and resources into our existing schools and make them better. It can be done.

So ----- instead of a Chapter Leader Meeting, there will be a rally outside Maxwell on Wednesday, December 9th at 4:30 p.m. Please make every effort to attend. Bring as many staff as you can. Let’s make a presence on Pennsylvania Ave. Wednesday that will attract everyone’s attention. Those of you geographically located in Community School District 19 – Jefferson Campus and Classics – please, please, please get your members to be thereon Wednesday.

This is a battle for all of us. This is a global issue that needs our response. Get your heads out of the sand. Take the excuse that “this doesn’t affect me” and turn it around to this is an issue that affects my brothers and sisters at Maxwell as well as my colleagues in the surrounding schools, so it DOES affect me. And remember, your neighborhood an school community can be next.

Thanks for understanding. See you Wednesday afternoon at Maxwell, Pennsylvania Ave. and Liberty Ave.

Take the “C” to Liberty Ave. Take the “3” to Pennsylvania Ave. Take the “J” or “Z” to Alabama Avenue. Take the B12. Take anyway you can get there.

This is a real test of our solidarity. Pass it with flying colors, folks.

Thanks for your understanding.

Fraternally,

Tony

Tony Sclafani

UFT Special Representative

718-852-4900

718-852-9891 (fax)

Saturday, December 05, 2009

Rubber Room Teachers Sue Klein and NYCDOE

Breaking Education News - For Immediate Release

Manhattan Attorney, Dr. Joy Hochstadt, Esq.
Files Class Action Lawsuit in Federal Court to
Close the NYC Dept of Education "Rubber Rooms"

The Village Voice

New York News Blog

Teachers Bring Suit Against Klein Over Rubber Rooms

By Roy Edroso in Featured, Legal, Schools

Tuesday, Dec. 1 2009 @ 10:19AM

Several schoolteachers are suing Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, claiming their confinement to "rubber rooms" -- holding facilities for teachers removed from duty, usually on disciplinary charges -- violates their rights.

They claim the Chancellor has no authority to charge or hold them, and that conditions in the rooms are unpleasant and dangerous.

Among the plaintiffs is David Pakter, who has portrayed himself as a whistleblower against the poor administration of city schools, and claims that because of his attempts to bring them to the city's attention, "Joel Klein, Esq.'s lapdogs, lackeys, sycophants and stooges, leaped out from under their countless dark and clammy rocks and went after me like a bat out of Hell" for bringing plants to his school, showing students the Robert Rodriguez film El Mariachi, and other trivialities.

A former Teacher of the Year, Pakter has been in and out of rubber rooms for years.

Another plaintiff, Josefina Cruz, was one of no less than nine teachers sent to rubber rooms by Graphics Communications Arts HS principal Jerod Resnick.

Teachers have brought suit against the city on similar grounds before, and occasionally the press pays outraged attention, but the rubbers rooms persist; Mayor Bloomberg is against them, too, but on the grounds that the teachers thus charged and confined should not be paid.

___________________________________________________________________________

Village Voice

Comment:

From David Pakter _____________________________

For Those Interested In The Truth

About New York City's Rubber Rooms....

__________________________________________

I am that New York City Educator mentioned in Roy Edroso's VILLAGE VOICE story who is charged with “bringing a plant to school” but that is not the real reason I was banished to one of New York City’s infamous Rubber Room gulags.

These Big Apple "Guantanamos" which represent abominations that exist no where else in NY State, are being used more and more in New York City to retaliate against Whistle-blowers or teachers in general who expose corruption and/or mismanagement in the 23 Billion dollar New York City Dept/Board of Education.

Under the Dictatorial reign of Mayor Bloomberg and the Faux Chancellor Joel Klein, Esq., (a former Federal Prosecutor, who had to have strings pulled in Albany to get appointed via a "Special Waiver", since Klein lacked any of the normally required credentials for the position of Chancellor), the NYC Board of Education has increased its power and ability to intimidate its critics, exponentially.

Although many people in the News media have written stories dealing with the Rubber Rooms, the clear bias towards the teachers sitting in the City's legions of Rubber Rooms is always evident to any impartial reader.

There is always that lingering insinuation and/or subtle, or not so subtle suggestion that while a few teachers may not belong in the Rubber Rooms, by and large, allegedly and supposedly, the vast majority of the hundreds and hundreds of teachers sent there, often for years, probably did "something" to deserve this Fate.

In my case the reasons offered for my removal are so ludicrous, bordering on the preposterous, that one must actually attend one of my State Teacher Trial Hearings to believe that the charges even exist.

Let me say here that I fully and openly confess to the "charge" I brought some plants to my school to decorate the lobby. But that is not the real reason I was removed from my position.

Should anyone wish to know the real reason/s I was removed from my position, it is only necessary to visit the following website/s :

http://www.uft.org/news/teacher/top/axed/

http://nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2008/12/david-pakter-nyc-teacher-and.html

http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2008/07/nyc-chancellor-joel-klein-esqs-dirty.html

http://underassault.blogspot.com/2009/11/raw-experience-into-words.html

http://www.endteacherabuse.org/Pakter.html

There in the first website above, one will see a photograph of me being Decorated by the former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in New York’s City Hall, as a “Teacher of the Year” for “Exceptional Achievement in Education”. I had designed, built from the ground up, and personally funded, the first premiere Medical Illustration Program in the United States for gifted Minority students.

The goal of the program was to serve as a launching pad to propel those students from socio-economically deprived backgrounds into Ivy League Universities and into careers including Medicine, as Physicians and research Scientists.

The success of this unique program was such, that it attracted the attention of Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist, Clara Hemphill.

But once I became a Whistle-blower the New York City Dept/Board of Education went after me with a vengeance not witnessed in decades and has led to multiple Federal Lawsuits against those responsible for the blistering amounts of Whistle-blower Retaliation that has been directed at me for the past 5 years.

To see just a small example of what New York’s students are being deprived of please visit my personal website:

http://www.OldMasterPortraits.com

I would welcome being contacted by Mr. Roy Edroso, who ranks among the few reporters who does not buy into all the smoke and mirror propaganda constantly put out by Chancellor Klein's personal public relations machine stooges.

Any member of the news media who is interested in getting the real story behind the skewed and embarrassingly slanted slurs and smears directed at the countless teacher/victims of the NYC Board of Education under Bloomberg and Klein, can with very little effort, explore and research the reality of what New York’s “Rubber Room” system is really all about and learn how these Rubber Room “reassignment centers” are used to bludgeon, retaliate against and crush any teacher who has the temerity to Whistle-blow and/or otherwise report corruption and/or wrongdoing of any kind, within the 23 billion dollar New York Dept/Board of Education.

My upcoming State 3020-a, Teacher Trial Hearing dates are Thursday and Friday, December 10 and 11 and will take place on the 6th floor at 49 Chambers Street in lower Manhattan at 10 AM.

The building is situated directly across the street from the huge marbled and Palatial size, Tweed Courthouse, which is now the headquarters and seat of power from which a non- Education credentialed individual named Joel Klein, rules his vast 23 Billion dollar Public schools Empire - with an iron fist it should be noted.

That immense edifice to the vast unbridled corruption and theft of Public resources, perpetrated by the notorious "Boss Tweed", in the last Century, before he was finally hauled off to jail, is perhaps a fitting and perfect business address for today's present NYC Board of Education.

Klein and his willing lackeys and confederates are guilty of many ill conceived acts and decisions that have done incalculable harm to the dedicated Teachers, Parents and Public School children of our beloved City. But the tide is slowly turning and New Yorkers are starting to fight back.

And Bravo and bravo encore for that because our Children are not for sale, not even to a Billionaire and his "Legend in his own Mind", Faux Chancellor.

Attend a former "Teacher of the Year" turned Whistle-blower's Trial December 10 and 11. See how your hard earned Tax Dollars are spent to crush dissent in a free Society.
_______________________________________________________________

Please request the Hearing Room of the Hon. Douglas J. Bantle, Esq. and mention the names of the two attorneys involved: Board of Education Prosecuting attorney Philip Oliveri, Esq. and NYSUT Defense Counsel, Christopher M. Callagy, Esq.

David Pakter, New York City

Friday, December 04, 2009

Bracey's last stand

From Susan Ohanian

http://susanohanian.org/show_nclb_atrocities.php?id=3776

By Todd Alan Price and Thomas J. Mertz

With President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan applying their persuasive skills to selling the equivalent of lottery tickets for so-called Race to the Top dollars, Wisconsin is in the midst of a self-created education crisis. A hastily thrown-together state budget shortchanges the schools. An outgoing governor-turned-lobbyist, Jim Doyle, seems bent on mortgaging Wisconsin's proud liberal democratic education tradition in order to purchase a seat in that fixed game. A once-progressive mayor sees fit to strip the powers away from the school board, effectively disenfranchising neighborhoods, communities and citizens in one of the poorest cities in the nation. All of this in an apparent bid for a chance at a rumored one-time federal payment of $80 million.

All in all, there has never been a time when the educational truth telling of the late, great Jerry Bracey was more needed. So with sadness and joy we welcome the release of the final Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education.

The Bracey Report was a series of scathing, dry and witty summaries of the lengths to which government, corporations and non-profits would go to stretch findings and interpretations in the arena of education "data." Bracey was quick to point out the how powerful, smug institutions deviated from the truth and where their reforms would ultimately take us.

In the prescient The War on Public Education, written in 2001 before even the latest collateral damage inflicted on the schools by No Child Left Behind, Bracey wrote, "The privatization of management services and small instructional programs might serve as the camel's nose in the tent to be followed shortly by the whole camel."

Completed after Jerry’s death by Susan Ohanian and Pat Hinchey, this year's report maintains the high standards of previous reports and departs from the past by focusing on examining three assumptions linked to popular reforms:

1. High-quality schools can eliminate the achievement gap between whites and minorities.

2. Mayoral control of public schools is an improvement over the more common elected board governance systems.

3. Higher standards will improve the performance of public schools.

All three are of relevance to the Race to the Top-inspired initiatives in Wisconsin.

After an extensive review of local, national and international evidence on mayoral takeovers in Chicago and New York, Bracey wrote that a close look quickly shows these efforts to be fraudulent: "'Reforms' that are supposed to help children do better are primarily used to make the adults who control the schools look good. Performance on tests that are subject to manipulation show improvement. Performance on tests that are free of manipulation show no improvement and no closing of ethnic achievement gaps."

As Bracey notes in this report and detailed many times elsewhere, the tests at the center of many of these reforms are of very limited use in assessing teaching, learning or school quality, yet by the "reformers'" own favorite measures, mayoral control fails. What then is the appeal? Jerry’s answer is the opposite of the increased democratic accountability claimed by mayoral control advocates. It is freedom from the meddling of the public and the messy democratic process: "In reading the literature about the mayoral systems, one repeatedly encounters words like bully, authoritarian, autocratic, arbitrary, intrusive, despotic, dictatorial, disenfranchisement, rubber stamp, exclusion (of parents) even 'Brezhnev-era Soviet Union.'"

Granted, these words appear in articles critical of the system, but the articles appearing in the New York media, especially the New York Times, appear to be highly skeptical of the information received from the mayor, chancellor and their public relations offices. (Even as the number of teachers has declined, the New York City schools public relations office has quadrupled in since since 2003.)

Summing up the case for mayoral control, Bracey brings these two strands together, labeling the concept as implemented in Chicago and New York as "simultaneously undemocratic and ineffectual." Bracey wrote, "Benjamin Barber once referred to public schools as 'workshops of our democracy.' It does not seem that they are furthering democratic goals in New York and Chicago—nor improving achievement."

A draft of Doyle's plan for mayoral control is being circulated for sponsors. This draft would reduce the elected board to mere figureheads and totally eliminate all public comment opportunities on the MPS budget. Rumor has it that at least some of the sponsors would like to extend this model to other districts, including Beloit, Janesville and Madison.

The memo by state Senator Lena Taylor which accompanies an outline of the legislation is classic fodder for the Bracey treatment. Broad generalities are followed by implied causality. Research is taken out of context with no apparent understanding of the basis and limits of that research. It ends with a quote from Kenneth K. Wong and Francis X. Shen's The Education Mayor linking "strong" mayoral control to standardized test score gains in the range of 1/5 to 1/3 of a standard deviation.

The quote is accurate, but what is missing is the acknowledgement by Wong and Shen themselves that gains of this magnitude would still leave poor and minority children in Milwaukee well behind most of the students in the rest of the state. Taylor also ignores Wong and Shen's nuanced presentation of the multiple factors that shape the success or failure of all schools and detailed treatment those surrounding the implementation of mayoral control. Had she read chapters two and nine she might have heeded the authors' advice to consider timing and partnerships when proposing mayoral control. Had she read the whole book she would have known that the range of options Wong and Shen outlined includes nothing that resembles what is being proposed for Wisconsin. Taylor might have realized that that one statistic taken out of context has little or no relevance to the legislation she is sponsoring.

Another anti-democratic proposal has already been introduced. Assembly Bill 534 would give the state Superintendent of Public Instruction plenary power to define a district as "in need of improvement" and then take control of almost all aspects of that district’s governance. This proposal has received little attention but could be an even larger blow to democratic local control of education in Wisconsin than the Milwaukee takeover. This too comes without a research basis.

On the other topics of the report, the achievement gap and national standards, Bracey marshals evidence to demonstrate that schools alone cannot overcome the daily impact of poverty on students and that the relative "strength" of standards bears no relation to achievement as measured on international tests.

In closing, Bracey returns to an earlier comparison between the educational policies this administration is pushing and the practices of the school President Obama's daughters attend:

"In my opinion, the Obama/Duncan approach would only exacerbate the problems created by our industrial model—-national academic standards and a national test, merit pay for higher test scores, a longer school day, a longer school week, a longer school year and charter schools handed off to entrepreneurs. More math, more science. This is an industrial command-and-control model on steroids."

Wisconsin has already moved toward linking teacher pay to test scores, joined the standards bandwagon, embraced the idea that better data analysis will mean better schools and Doyle has broached a longer school day and year. As Bracey reminds us, none of these make much sense and none of these will help Wisconsin's schools better.

Yet, Democratic legislators line up to sign off on these while continuing to offer excuses on the one reform they campaigned on: Comprehensive School Funding Reform.

Todd Price is a professor of education in the National College of Education at National-Louis University in Chicago, a partner in On the Earth Productions, and a former candidate for Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Thomas J. Mertz is an instructor at Edgewood College who blogs at the website Advocating on Madison Public Schools.

2009-11-15
http://fightingbob.com/article.cfm?articleID=1082

Fiorillo Lays Out Tom Carroll

A comment by ICE's Michael Fiorillo at Gotham Schools a few weeks ago is worth giving more prominence to:

Mr. Carroll,

To address your last post:

You claim that the charter school you chair is the highest-rated elementary school in
Albany. If so - and we will leave the debate about the meaning of these ratings to another
time - then in the interest of the transparency you hold so dear, please

- tell us the percentage of special needs students you serve compared to the
percentage served by local zoned public schools.

- tell us the percentage of ELLs served in your school compared to the percentage
served by local zoned public schools.

- whether a child’s acceptance and continued enrollment is dependent on parent’s signing a
contract of any kind.

-the student attrition rate.

-the teacher attrition rate.

As for charters being public schools, it is simply not so. They are publicly-funded, privately managed corporations. The public has no input over the composition of the board or the policies it promulgates. You say it is non-profit, and while that is true (for the moment) it ignores the gravitational force of the profit motive that drives the business model you and your fellow free market- now, that’s a misnomer if there ever was one - fundamentalists celebrate.

You use deceptively loaded language to refer to my criticism. It was you, not me, who used the word “rail” in regard to my description of your op-ed pieces. In fact, I used the far more neutral term “editorialize.” Please don’t put words in my mouth. Your asking us to point out specific attacks against teachers is disingenuous: your frequent writings about seniority, tenure and merit pay are objectively anti-teacher, no matter whether they’re couched in the fake-objective prose of policy analysis.

As for the platforms from which you speak, I can’t quite believe you even try to use them as a defense. The Huffington Post, despite it limousine liberal trappings, is a frequent venue for ed deform propaganda. The New York Times has been a consistent enabler of Bloomberg’s policies here in the city, and the Washington Post is a nationwide loudspeaker for school privatization. This is - or in a less corrupt and intellectually dishonest world, should be - a particular conflict of interest scandal , since they own Kaplan, a direct beneficiary of corporate ed deform.

Then there’s Randi Weingarten. Sad to say, she has her peace with the privatizers, as long as the union gets its cut and she can be feted as a labor statesperson. She actually seems to think that the union can continue to exist if public schools are destroyed. She has signed a tenure and seniority-free contract with Green Dot, and she is pushing the recently signed New Haven teacher’s contract - which will accelerate public school closings and their replacement by charters - as a national model.

You accuse me of being intolerant - there’s that loaded language again - when I merely noted the background of people on your Board, two of whom have close connections to explicitly pro-privatization groups. You are free to recruit anyone you like for your Board, but please don’t play the victim when their backgrounds are pointed out. And by the way, facts are not intolerant; they merely stand in mute contrast to deception and self-deception.

Once again you refuse to deal with the transparency issues raised by the proliferation of no-bid contracts under Bloomberg and Klein, saying you know nothing about them and will leave it to the DOE to comment. But you also say you don’t know anything about the contract negotiations, yet you are clamoring for the parties - but in reality just the union, so you can attack them in your “objective” way in Rupert’s and Morty’s rags - to reveal their positions. You don’t seem to grasp, or refuse to acknowledge, the hypocrisy of that.

And, finally, we don’t agree that the current bargaining positions should be made public. Your faux-objective claim of wanting ‘transparency” in the name of taxpayers is belied by your interests, actions and ideology.

Norm's Notes