Philadelphia’s Mayor’s Office of Education Responds to Demands For Transparency

from Wrench in the Gears
February 10, 2018


Last Monday, parents, teachers, and community members took to the streets outside the marble halls of Girard College to protest a closed-door event where representatives of the Mayor’s Office of Education, the Philadelphia Education Fund, and the Read by Fourth Campaign met with Chamber of Commerce affiliates about the future of business in Philadelphia’s schools. We handed out a sheet with five demands to the attendees on their way into the event and requested the Mayor’s Office of Education respond by February 9, 2018.

I share below the response we received with annotated comments. While I appreciate Mr. Hackney’s efforts to address the demands, I am left with a lack of clarity about the role private interests, corporations and non-profits, will play in shaping education policy going forward. We specifically asked the mayor to take a public stance against adaptive learning management systems for literacy and the use of Pay for Success or Social Impact Bonds to fund early childhood or K12 education and workforce development. The letter below endorses the former and says nothing about the latter, which is a serious concern. It supports the use of software in literacy but there is no mention of reduced class sizes, restoration of libraries with librarians, or reading specialists.

The letter also indicates an acceptance of closed door meetings whereby “feedback from a diverse set of stakeholders” is obtained. What stakeholders would need to meet with the mayor and his representatives in small groups outside the public eye? As we move to “local control,” that is a very important question. Will we have a version of “local control” that preferences “Big L” interests like Comcast over “little l” interests like regular parents and teachers? Who gets a seat at the table? Will community engagement drive policy development or remain an easily-dismissed charade as it was under the School Reform Commission?

For reference, these were the original demands:

Click here to read the rest of the post and view the videos. 

 

Philly Education Street Talk at the Eagles Super Bowl Celebration

from Wrench in the Gears
February 9, 2018

Given the outgoing School Reform Commission’s plans to vote to spend almost $20 million dollars next week on corporate computer-based curriculum and data management by Pearson, the celebratory Eagles Super Bowl parade seemed like a perfect time to go out and ask Philadelphians how they would use the money instead. It’s time we started listening to the voice of the people. It was a great experience that made me so appreciate the wonderful human connections that are possible in our city. If you want to build a movement, education is critical and it can happen many places, including the streets. After watching this video I encourage you to share it with others who value human teachers over data and algorithms.

Click here to view the video.

$20 million: Teachers vs. Data in Philadelphia

 

CTU/AFT's Pathetic Rationale for Caving to the Charter Industry

AFT apologist, Michael Fiorillo, continues his defense of the indefensible move in Chicago that effectively normalizes the corrupt and dehumanizing charter schools.  

My comments are interspersed:

Your reasoning is faulty, as is your understanding of politics.

Which is more likely, that "The People" will suddenly realize what charter schools truly are, rise up and eliminate them (which is my preferred outcome), or that, faced with a rising number of union contracts, a fickle Overclass looks elsewhere to loot, or tries a different vehicle for its looting?

The “Overclass” has no incentive to “look elsewhere to loot” as long as AFT has provided its seal of approval to the status quo.  Why would the charter industry fear the union, especially when the deal in Chicago provides no unified bargaining for those charter employees now rolled into the CTU?  The charter overseers can continue their exploitative, miseducative, non-professional, and abusive practices just as before, except for now they have union sponsorship. 

If the “Overclass” were at all concerned about the AFT “threat,” they would not have just announced the corporate charter takeoverof Puerto Rico’s public schools, where there are 32,000 AFT members among the island’s 45,000 teachers.  Do you think they give a dam how many AFT members there are in Puerto Rico, especially when Weingarten offers up such tepid remarks in response the the takeover?  Doubtless, she has already cut a deal to make sure the newly-exploited teachers on the island can retain the union membership.

As to the possibility of people realizing what “charter schools really are,” the AFT has to own the fact that it has done nothing to help educate the public.  In fact, AFT’s complicity with the charter industry extends to the actual creation of AFT’s own charter schools.  

Why would underprivileged parents think that charters are a bad idea, when AFT and NPE, forever spouting about social justice, support the continuation of thousands of these hell schools, with no end in sight.

Indeed, both AFT and NPE heartily endorsed the latest ESEA version known as ESSA, which offers expanded incentives for the accelerated opening of thousands of new “no excuses” charter schools.

Dr. Fiorillo continues:

I have my problems with what the CTU is doing, but things are so desperate that I don't see an alternative to bringing these teachers into the union, and using that as the potential - emphasis on "potential" - vehicle for culling charter schools, and integrating the worthy ones into the public system as legitimate schools.

What precisely is your plan to minimize the number and effects of charter schools, and who do you propose to implement it, if charter teacher remain unorganized? Short of an answer to that, it's all just posing.

This fanciful notion of leveraging charter teacher union membership as a way to alter the paternalistic organization of the “Broken Windows” No Excuses model of charter reform schools would be laughable if it did not have such tragic implications for both the teachers and children, who suffer daily in these dehumanizing sweat shop schools.  

With CTU/AFT’s recognition of the charter industry’s unprofessional corrections officers posing as teachers, the unionists have normalized the cultural sterilization practices of charter schools, while at the same time spewing meaningless rhetoric about social justice commitments.

I must say the ridiculousness of AFT’s argument does not surprise me, for, after all, there is no sensible rationale for what AFT is doing that does not admit to the fact that the unions are in bed with the Wall Street Dems of charter industry.  And that they will never admit.  

Meanwhile, they are stuck exactly where AFT/NEA/NPE support for the Clintons took them.  The Clintons, by the way, have never felt the need for silly cover stories to disguise their long-established endorsement of charter schools.  Under Bill Clinton, you may remember, the number of charter schools went from zero to 2,000.

As for AFT’s misleadership, Randi Weingarten remains, Trump-like, stuck in her own Twitter-verse, where she endlessly provides commentary on every subject other than AFT’s enabling of the charter industry.  Her lame remarks about the wholesale privatization of schools in Puerto Rico are emblematic of her do-nothing approach when faced with the all-out war on public schools everywhere.

As for what I would do, Dr. Fiorillo, other than taking the union route of capitulating to the charter industry, here’s a few things for the unimaginative “unionists” to consider, none of which are presently being practiced by teachers' unions that are sitting atop billions of unused dollars:

1. Organize every local union chapter in the nation to resist charter schools.  Make it a part of every every negotiations session a demand that no public money be spent for any school, either brick-and-mortar or online, that is privately managed, by either a non-profit or for-profit enterprise that is not subject to same oversight and regulations as the public schools.
2. Hold ongoing parent information sessions within the communities to educate parents on the dangers of charter schools to their children.
3. Provide ongoing public service announcements to appeal to charter school employees to gain professional credentials that would enable them to work in public schools.
4. Let charter school employees understand the benefits of union membership, and make it clear that those benefits are not available to charter school employees who are constrained by the abusive practices of charter sweat shop management.
5. Create a national movement calling for an immediate moratorium on the creation of new charter schools.
6. Engage with the media to create venues for debating the charter school question and to share information regarding the public school advantage.
7. Help to recruit and support political candidates, from local to national, who understand the anti-democratic threat that the charter school industry embodies. 
8. Provide funding for ongoing research into the economic and social effects of charter schools on employees, students, parents, and public education systems.
9. Make it clear that charter schools, which are staffed predominantly by women who are mismanaged by paternalistic and ignorant males posing as principals, represent an ongoing offense to women employees everywhere.
10. Inform teachers about the existential threat of charter schools to the profession of teaching and to the well-being of children and democratic communities.
11. Organize parents and teachers to show up at school board meetings at the state and local levels to make their demands known about ending the charter industry’s war on public schools.

AFT Apologists Defend the Indefensible

A couple of comments from readers about my take on CTU's betrayal of teachers are worth noting.  The first from edblisa:

Lois has a point. No, it's not ideal that the CTU is offering worker protection to unqualified teachers, but these are young people that were told a lie to get them to join into the TFA scheme. These are people who needed a job so that they could support themselves and family. They are people who have tried to do right by children even if they didn't go about it the right way. They still need some protection from abuse. There has got to be some kind of compromise to help these people.

The young privileged millennial resume builders who enlist in TFA for their two years of service to the corporate elimination of the teaching profession and bolster the staff of dehumanizing charter schools could have been, yes, duped when they signed up. However, if one joins the Nazi Party thinking it is an innocent patriotic enterprise, one does not continue as a Nazi when when one finds out what one has done out of naivete or stupidity.  Just following orders is not an excuse, just as needing a job to pay back school loans is not an excuse, just like resume building for law school is not an excuse.

There can be no protection for those engaged in morally reprehensible acts, which are socially unjust to the core, even if Weingarten would like to sign up charter "teachers" counteract the cratering of AFT membership that is resulting from real teachers who are appalled at AFT's self-serving compromises.

The other comment is from Michael Fiorillo:

I loathe charter schools and look forward to the day when the last one has a stake driven through its heart. However, workers deserve the right to unionize, period. And if enough charter schools unionize, they will then cease to be the teacher union-busting panacea the Overclass wishes them to be. At that point, should it arrive, there might be hope to integrate some of them into the public school system.

First, Michael assumes that workers, regardless of the the job, deserve to unionize.  And I suppose they do.  That fact, however, does not require AFT of NEA to offer affiliation to teachers working in sweat shop charters that are abusing children and exploiting female workers on a daily basis through draconian discipline systems and cultural sterilization practices and authoritarian management schemes. If charter workers were real teachers, rather than alt-cert know nothings, they could exercise the option to work in humane schools, either private or public.  Since they are not teachers, however, real schools don't want them.  Sorry about that.

Hoping to "integrate" some the charter reform schools into the public system will require the public systems to accept the unacceptable and to embrace the morally reprehensible.  School boards, I hope, will resist such an atrocity, even if AFT and NEA and NPE have no such reservations. 

My Interview with Sean Stone on Watching the Hawks-Part 2

by Doug Martin

Here is segment 2 of my RT TV interview with Sean Stone on “Watching the Hawks,” where we discuss DeVos, Walton, Trump, teaching social justice and history in the classroom, and Indiana school privatization.  It starts around 19:11 in the video. 

Chicago Teachers' Union Normalizes Dehumanizing Charter Schools

". . .we recognize that many families have come to depend on charter schools and that many charter school teachers are dedicated professionals who serve their students well. . . .We do not, therefore, call for the immediate closure of all charter schools. . ." Diane Ravitch's NPE Position Statement on Charter Schools, 2017

In a deep bow to the corporate ed reformers who control the DNC's education agenda, as well as NEA and AFT,  Diane Ravitch's NPE last year set out a policy statement on charter schools that would leave in place thousands of charter schools for years to come. 

The NPE statement is clear with regards to the continued support for 7,000+ dehumanizing and unregulated charters, which are bleeding out state and local education budgets wherever they operate.  In an impressive show of non-leadership, the NPE statement refuses to demand or advocate a moratorium on new charters, preferring instead to suggest support for "legislation" that calls for a moratorium on new charters.

NPE's acquiescence to and support for the continuation of the charter industry's paternalistic Broken Windows model of schooling is now being played out in Chicago, where the Chicago Teachers' Union this week voted to merge with the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff. 

What will this mean for public education, teachers, and CTU?

Most importantly for AFT and CTU, it will mean more money in dues from charter industry "teachers," since the discounted dues that charter employees were paying to ChiACTS will be raised to what real teachers pay AFT/CTU in Chicago.  Never mind that charter industry "teachers" will continue to be exploited, overworked, underpaid, and without the benefit of the collective bargaining process that establishes pay, benefits, working conditions, and student advocacy initiatives for the rest of Chicago teachers.

The merger means, too, that CTU's omnipresent lip service to "social justice" is just more empty rhetoric.  CTU, in fact, will become accessory to the ongoing teacher and child dehumanization practices and cultural sterilization programs that are central to "no excuses" ed reform charter school paternalism.

By normalizing the operations of Chicago's charter industry patriarchy-on-steroids, CTU and AFT become entirely complicit in demeaning practices against a female dominated workforce that, historically, have been anathema to union values.  CTU's and AFT's kowtowing to the charter industry's billionaire patrons represents a truly sad outcome for teachers and children that will have ongoing implications for other union affiliates stupid and greedy enough to follow this very bad precedent.

It is hard to imagine a more destructive action to unionism than to the one taken in Chicago.  By normalizing these deprofessionalized hell schools run by ignorant young non-educators, CTU and AFT have ceded the last remaining moral high ground.  We may regard any further pronouncements by CTU/AFT about saving public education as the purest of bullshit.