Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter No. 3, April-May 2012

 

Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter No. 3To see the full Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter in pdf format, click on the image to the right.  

Class Struggle Education Workers at Bronx Hearing on Charter Co-Location

Class Struggle Education Workers at
Bronx Hearing on Charter Co-Location

This year the New York City Department of Education has published a list of 25 schools it plans to close, overwhelmingly in order to open charter schools in the same space, and 33 schools it intends to “rebrand,” giving them a new name, replacing the principal and up to half the teachers. (See our February 9 post,  “Occupy Closing Schools.”)

As part of this wrecking operation aimed at privatizing public education, the DOE is required to hold hearings of its puppet Panel on Educational Policy in the affected communities. At these hearings, students have movingly explained how these closures and “co-locations” of charters will undercut their education, parents voice their opposition, teachers explain in detailed presentations how the schools have made great strides in dealing with the challenges they face ... and then the PEP proceeds to rubber-stamp the DOE's plan, ignoring all the heart-felt pleas they have heard. 

Class Struggle Education Workers has attended several of these hearings (this year at Legacy HS in Manhattan and Bronx Regional HS) as well as the PEP meetings to explain that this is just a charade, and teachers, students, parents and workers need to mobilize our own power to defeat the privatizers. Below is a short (4 minute) video of Marjorie Stamberg of CSEW speaking at the Bronx hearing, and the tremendous response from the participants.

“Value-Added” Deal A Betrayal

 

Mulgrew, Casey Drink the Teacher Eval Kool-Aid

 “Value-Added” Deal A Betrayal

UFT/NYSUT Tops Sign on to Teacher Evaluation Scheme That Would Lead to Firing of Hundreds, If Not Thousands of Teachers

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

MARCH 7 – In a nutshell, the bogus “teacher evaluation” deal with New York governor Andrew Cuomo agreed to by Michael Mulgrew of the United Federation of Teachers (along with Richard Iannuzzi of New York State Unit­ed Teachers) is a mortal threat to the union and to the jobs of thousands of teachers. The UFT and NYSUT tops have accepted the principle that teachers can be fired based on student scores on standardized tests, a centerpiece of the corporate/­capi­talist war on public education.

This is even worse than the 2005 contract the UFT agreed to that gave up seniority transfers, giving principals the right to hire teachers and hugely expand­ing the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool. The side agreement with NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg for a minimal appeal procedure won’t alter the fact that this scheme is designed to result in firing hundreds and possibly thousands of dedicated educators. This is the cen­tral purpose of all these teacher eval schemes.

 This was never about improving education or “putting children first” as the bourgeois pols demagogically claim. In fact, it will grievously hurt students by forcing teachers to “teach to the test” out of fear of losing their jobs, and by penalizing those educators who deal with English language learners, special education and at risk students in poor neighborhoods. In addition to those fired, by holding new teachers hostage to the numbers crunchers and delaying or denying tenure, it will drive far more of them out of NYC schools, and in many cases out of teaching.

Coming barely a week after the monstrous teacher evaluation pact, the publication by all three major New York daily papers of more than 12,000 NYC teachers’ individual rankings based on student test scores has teachers – and even many administrators up in arms. Much of the ire will focus on Bloomberg and his schools chancellor Dennis Wolcott.  

But this is more than about a Republican billionaire mayor and his hatchet man at the head of the NYC Department of Education, and the teacher bashers in right-wing media. The New York Times as well as the New York Post and Daily News tabloids joined in witch-hunting teachers by publishing the DOE’s phony stats. It is a capitalist class war on teachers unions. And it comes right from the top, from liberal Democratic president Barack Obama in the White House and his education “czar,” Arne Duncan, as well as from Democrat Cuomo in the Albany state house.

By now, the 110,000-plus UFT educators are aware of how rigged the teacher evaluation scam is. They know that the published Teacher Data Reports were chock full of errors; that they were based on state tests which were phonied up to artificially show progress when the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed none; that the 2009 results were so inflated that they had to be tossed out (“recalibrated”).

Many have read articles by Diane Ravitch, a former supporter of student test-based teacher “accountability,” noting that “the current frenzy of blaming teachers for low scores smacks of a witch-hunt, the search for a scapegoat, someone to blame for a faltering economy, for the growing levels of poverty, for widening income inequality” (“No Student Left Untested,” New York Review of Books, 21 February). With an average margin of error for English teachers of 53%, and up to 85% in some cases, Ravitch quipped that flipping a coin would be more accurate.

UFT members are aware that more than 1,400 principals – a third of those in New York – signed a petition opposing the state’s test-based teacher evaluations. An initiator of the letter, Carol Burris, named NYS Educator of the Year in 2010, called AFT president Randi Weingarten’s endorsement of the agreement with Cuomo “beyond comprehension.” And many UFTers have been outraged as they read UFT vice president Leo Casey’s defense of the treacherous deal with the governor, accusing Burris of “alarmist alchemy” (“Setting the Record Straight on Teacher Evaluations,” Edwize, 22 February).

Casey claims that “the role of standardized testing in the evaluation will be minimized” under the evaluation scheme. Nonsense. The press release announcing it stated plainly: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.” So the 40% for student assessment trumps the other 60%. But only 20% is state tests, says Casey. Would he have us believe that the DOE will agree to local assessment that isn’t test-based, when it is paying big bucks developing its own tests?

In a second installment, Casey argues that with pro­visions for a “teacher improvement plan” and “independent validators,” plus an appeals process (but only for 13% of “ineffective” ratings), “the educational integrity and fairness of the teacher evaluation process are secure.” That is about as much “security” as Joel Klein’s letter saying the DOE would oppose any attempt to publish the Teacher Data Reports. Tweed then turned around and encourag­ed the papers to request the TDRs.

At the end of this piece Casey comments: “But it may well re­quire a new mayor and new lead­er­ship at the DoE, prepared to negotiate in good faith, for that teacher evaluation system to be established.” The UFT' tops’ real position is to “negotiate” with an admin­istra­­tion that won’t nego­tiate, and wait for a new mayor.  But a Democrat will be no better.

The bottom line is, this is a class assault on teachers unions and unions in general, and it can only be fought by hard class struggle. The AFT/UFT’s usual tactics of lobbying, slicing and dicing, giving in to part of management’s demands and claiming victory because it could have been worse, won’t work. There are no contradictions among the capitalist parties here. And this fundamental issue stymies the various union opposition groups as well.

James Eterno, who has courageously fought the closing of Jamaica HS, wrote on the ICE-UFT blog (16 February) dissecting the disastrous teacher evaluation “deal.” He ended: “If there is anything positive to take from today's events, it's that President Mulgrew was there with the governor announcing the deal and maybe they are developing the kind of bond we can use to influence the state to pass legislation to end mayoral control.” Yet Mulgrew and Cuomo are both supporters of mayoral control of the schools!

During the 2008 election campaign Democrat Obama and Republican McCain ostentatiously agreed on their education programs, going after teacher tenure and demon­izing “bad teachers.” Even so, the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association endorsed Obama. Most teacher activist groups were right in there with the bureaucrats, either openly or tacitly backing Democrat Obama. Class Struggle Education Workers was almost alone in opposing the candidates of both capitalist parties.

In February 2010, when the corrupt rulers of Central Falls, Rhode Island fired the entire teaching force, Obama praised them. The Obama/Duncan “Race to the Top” education program mandates charter schools, closing “failing” schools, “merit pay” and teacher evals based on student test scores. Yet the AFT and NEA have already endorsed Obama for reelection! The UFT membership should repud­iate the outrageous endorsement of teacher-basher Obama.

It will take mobilization of the UFT’s strength in militant class action, including mobilizing students, parents and the workers movement in defiance of the no-strike Taylor Law, to defeat the all-sided attacks, of which teacher evals are only a part. As we argued in a CSEW motion presented at the last delegate assembly, the racist school closings should be fought by occupying closing schools. We say: oust the bureaucrats, break with the Democrats, build a class-struggle workers party.

Occupy Closing Schools

No to Mayoral Dictatorship –
For Teacher-Student-Parent-Workers Control 

Occupy Closing Schools!

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

FEBRUARY 9 – Tonight, parents, students, teachers and supporters will fill Brooklyn Tech HS, as they have repeatedly over the past three years, to express their opposition to the NYC Department of Education (DOE) policy of closing schools. The members of the Panel on Educational Policy (PEP), which is nothing but a rubber stamp for the DOE, sit there while hundreds explain how the kids are being harmed as public education is gutted. And then the puppet panel dutifully votes to close the schools anyway. 

Over 200 students from high schools threatened with closing protested in New York’s Union Square February 1. 

(Photo: Gotham Schools)

This charade has got to stop. We can talk forever at billionaire mayor Bloomberg’s bought-and-paid-for flunkeys and it won’t make a bit of difference. It’s up to working people to shut down the PEP and get rid of mayoral dictatorship of the schools. In order to defeat their assault on public education, we can start by mobilizing to stop them from closing more schools. The courts won’t do it – the DOE just ignores a court order to spend billions to lower class sizes. Instead there are larger classes every year, as elective programs are cut in order to “teach to the test.” 

To stop the wrecking operation, we need to bring parents and working people together with teachers and students for occupying closing schools. Don’t wait until the end of the school year when no one is around. Canvass the community to build “save the school” assemblies and teach-ins. Out of this and upcoming meetings, committees should be formed to fight for teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools. We must fight to take them out of the hands of the corporate execs, lawyers, hedge fund managers and politicians who are out to destroy public education (and make a tidy profit in the process). 

The DOE has published a list of 25 schools it intends to close this year, and another 33 where it plans to replace half the teachers. It has already shut down more than 100 schools since Bloomberg took over, replacing them with small schools and charter schools that are no better, and in many cases worse, than those that were shuttered. This is a racist policy, with most of the closed schools in African American, Latino and immigrant communities. The mayor’s arbitrary rule is destroying students’ education, putting their future at risk. 

Last week over 200 students from schools slated for closing rallied in Union Square. At a hearing that evening at Legacy HS, dozens of speakers lambasted the DOE’s shutdown plans, not one supported them. Students and teachers presented a detailed statistics report showing that six-year graduation rate had sharply increased, no thanks to the DOE. Overwhelming rejection of the DOE at Samuel Gompers the week before as well. And at Evander Childs campus in the Bronx, schools chancellor Dennis Walcott walked out after students complained of the DOE’s failed education policies.

We’re up against powerful opponents. The mayor thinks he owns the schools. He treats them as just another subsidiary of Bloomberg L.P. No surprise since he bought his reelection for a cool $90 million. Like the 19^th century robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, Bloomberg’s attitude is “the public be damned!” And his policy of corporatizing and privatizing public education is shared by the entire ruling class, Democrats and Republicans alike, from Barack Obama on down. 

The only language that capitalist politicians understand is money and power. Bloomberg may have the money, but we have the power of millions of working people who are fed up over the way the Wall Street money men are running the country. After months of demonizing teachers and teachers unions, a poll released yesterday shows that less than a quarter of the public thinks that mayoral control of the schools is a success, and by four-to-one (72% to 18%) they trust the teachers union more than the mayor to protect public schools!

Now we have to transform this support into active participation. Class Struggle Education Workers is putting forward a motion for the United Federation of Teachers to undertake preparations together with labor and community groups for teachers, students, parents and workers to OCCUPY CLOSING SCHOOLS. We need to mobilize other unions as well, such as the powerful TWU Local 100. John Dewey HS, one of the schools slated for “transformation,” is sandwiched between the MTA’s huge Stillwell Ave./Coney Island complex and the Marlboro Houses complex. But to make this a reality, the initiative must also come from the affected communities themselves. Starting tonight.

Class Struggle Education Workers in Protests Against School Closings

In January and February 2011, a number of protests were held at several of the 25 schools slated for closing by the New York Department of Education, as well as a city-wide demonstration against school closings on January 27 and a rally called by the United Federation of Teachers outside the Panel on Educational Policy (PEP) meeting at Brooklyn Technical High School on February 3. The PEP is a puppet body with a large majority (8 out of 13 members) appointed by the mayor. Class Struggle Education Workers participated in these protests as well as speaking at the February 1 PEP meeting to denounce the mayoral dictatorship over the schools and the agenda of corporatization and privatization behind the DOE's wrecking operation against public education.

A short (6 minute) video showing the CSEW's intervention and the massive repudiation of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his hand-picked schools chancellor Cathleen Black (who has already become notorious for her complete lack of educational experience and her arrogance toward the parents, teachers and students) is posted below.

Pop Quiz for Cathy Black

Pop Quiz for Cathy Black:

(Turn off your Blackberry; no help from Deputy Chancellors)

1. Who was Paul Robeson?

2. After your experience on the Coca-Cola Board of Directors, can you tell us what death squads do?

3. Name two people you know personally whose children go to public school.

4. What was the Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education?

5. Recent studies show that the following raise student test scores:
1. closing schools
2. small schools
3. charter schools
4. tying teachers’ pay to students test scores
5. all of the above
6. none of the above

6. What is the graduation rate of Jamaica High School students compared to the city average?

7. Where is The Bronx?

8. How much did IBM pay Joel Klein to give them the Paul Robeson HS building?

9. I took the job as school chancellor because of
1. The need for increased birth control
2. I was faced with Sophie’s Choice
3. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it
4. All my friends on the cocktail circuit were starting charter schools, so I decided to one-up them

10.  Excluding blacks and Jews from the country club where you rode horses

             was legal under:

a.      The Dred Scott decision

b.      Numerus Clausus of German universities adopted by Harvard and Columbia in the 1920s

c.      A corollary of the “freedom of conscience” doctrine espoused by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas

d.      Who cares? My country club buddies make the law

Easy extra credit question:  How many players are there on a polo team?

We Can Stop the School Closings!

UFT, Students, Parents and Working People Have the Power

We Can Stop the School Closings!

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

As he heads toward the door, New York City’s departing schools chancellor Joel Klein (aka “The Terminator”) is still at it. After announcing at the end of October a total of 46 schools it wanted to shut down, at the beginning of December the Department of Education issued a list of 25 public schools to be closed starting next fall. The hit list includes major high schools such as Columbus and John F. Kennedy in the Bronx, Norman Thomas in Manhattan, Jamaica and Beach Channel in Queens and Paul Robeson in Brooklyn. Altogether 15 of the 19 schools Klein tried to shutter last year are back on the list, despite the court suit by the United Federation of Teachers, the NAACP and others which temporarily stayed the dead hand of the DOE.

The rich and powerful forces who are behind the “strategy” of “turning around” schools by closing them hope to wear down the opposition. Last January 26, thousands of parents, students and teachers came out to Brooklyn Tech to loudly voice their opposition to the last round of school closings. In a marathon meeting that went until 3 a.m., only one of the 300+ speakers supported Klein’s demolition plan. Then Bloomberg’s hand-picked majority on his puppet “Panel for Educational Policy” voted to close the schools anyway, without a word of explanation for why they were ignoring the clear voice of the largely black and Latino as well as white working-class and middle-class families who pay the price for the DOE’s crimes.

A couple of months later, a sympathetic judge ruled in favor of the UFT/NAACP court suit to hold off the closings because the DOE didn’t follow the state law on public notification. But that didn’t stop Klein. The very afternoon the court decision came down, the DOE sent out ninth-grade assignments excluding the affected schools. So the schools stayed open, but with tiny incoming freshman classes. And now they’re on the chopping block again. The billionaire mayor (the tenth richest man in the U.S.) and the well-heeled hedge fund moguls who bankroll the charter schools think they are the masters of the world and can do as they wish. They’re wrong. The fact is that we have the power to stop Bloomberg’s wrecking ball. But we have to use that power or lose it.

By now, the battle lines have been drawn and the arguments made. The claims by the advocates of wholesale school closings have been shown to be false. A study of schools that were closed during the five years of U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan’s tenure as CEO of the Chicago public schools showed that most students saw little or no benefit, even on the standardized tests that are now the holy grail of the educrats. “Most students who transferred out of closing schools re-enrolled in schools that were academically weak,” said the report by the Consortium on Chicago School Research. Furthermore, there was a precipitous drop in reading scores in the six months after the closings were announced (New York Times, 29 October 2009).

In New York, Mayor Mike Bloomberg claimed last year that for the 91 schools that he has already closed since taking office in 2003, graduation rates in the new schools that replaced them went up 15 percent over the citywide average. This is lying with statistics, as the DOE does regularly, with their inflated scores on state tests, the unfathomable methodology behind the school report cards, etc. The charter “replacement” schools raise test scores and graduation rates by excluding English language learners and special ed students. And of displaced students, up to half from the last two classes at closing schools are forced to transfer to GED programs or disappear from school records. They are forced out to boost Bloomberg/Klein’s “metrics.”

Bloomberg has proclaimed his goal of closing another 10 percent of NYC’s 1,450 schools in the remaining three years of his term, while opening 100 new charter schools. Arne Duncan wants to close 1,000 schools a year nationwide in the next five years. This goal is accompanied by a bribe of $3 billion in “stimulus” money to be doled out as part of the “Race to the Top” to school districts that buy into this scheme. This is not about improving education. It is part of a wrecking operation against public education, in New York City and around the United States.

Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani famously vowed to “blow up” the NYC Board of Education, and that is exactly what his successor Bloomberg has been doing. There are various factors going into how they choose which schools to close. Real estate interests who want to grab some juicy properties are an element in Manhattan. Making room for hedge fund-backed charter schools run by mayoral favorites such as school space imperialist Eva Moskowitz is another. Shutting down big high schools has been a key goal of the corporate education “reformers” for years. Instead of having campuses offering a rich range of educational opportunities, they want to pare down secondary education to basic skills training, tracking and regimenting students in small schools.

This strategy has the special attraction, from the bosses’ standpoint, of targeting schools that are bastions of teacher union militancy. In New York, the big high schools have often been opposition strongholds in the UFT (possibly a reason why the bureaucracy has done so little to defend schools like Jamaica, Norman Thomas, etc.) The capitalist education “reformers” want to destroy the unions on the road to privatizing what they can of the public schools via charters and corporatizing what’s left, turning them into profit platforms for vendors and the like.

But a key factor is that closing schools is part of a racist agenda to destroy public education. Just look at a map of where the schools on the closing lists are located and see what student populations they serve. The billionaires pushing this campaign, such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and real estate mogul Eli Broad, want to turn the black and Latino population against the unions, like the Ford Foundation did in the 1960s over community control. That’s why Bloomberg reportedly first offered the schools chancellorship to Geoffrey Canada, but the black capitalist education entrepreneur of the Harlem’s Children’s Zone turned him down.

This time, however, the cynical ploy is backfiring. Black parents have seen through the lies and realize it’s their kids’ education that is being ripped up. Voters dumped Mayor Adrian Fenty in Washington, D.C. and his broom-wielding schools chief Michelle Rhee is gone. From Harlem to Rhode Island, virtually every candidate supporting charter schools was defeated in elections this fall. In NYC black and Latino parents and education advocates have been in the forefront of the struggle against Bloomberg’s new chancellor, Cathy Black. Today there is a historic chance to unite the oppressed majority population of New York City with the unions in a labor/black struggle that can actually defeat the charterizers and school closers. 

The UFT Delegate Assembly will be voting on a resolution presented by the leadership calling to “build a grassroots movement of opposition to school closures.” While that is certainly needed, the resolution fails to demand that all school closings be stopped now (instead it has a mealy-mouthed call for a moratorium on closures where the DOE has not given the school adequate resources and support). It leaves each school on its own, instead of bringing teachers, parents and students of the threatened schools together. And while calling for the D.A. to march today to DOE headquarters at Tweed Courthouse, and for a mass demonstration at the February PEP meeting, it does not call for a citywide mobilization well before the vote that could bring out the forces that can actually stop the closings.

The rhetoric in the resolution is tougher than the usual mushy fare from the UFT bureaucracy (aka the Unity Caucus and its hangers-on). Union militants and education activists should call on the UFT to actually lead a mass labor/black and immigrant-led struggle against the racist school closings and the “educational apartheid” of the charter schools. But what’s centrally needed is to build a class opposition the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy, which has given up vital rights such as seniority transfers, and let Bloomberg/Klein introduce “merit pay” (on a school basis), teacher evaluations using student test scores, and is now caving in on teacher tenure (see below).

Class Struggle Education Workers seeks to build such an opposition, to fight the privatizing education “reform” agenda. While teachers union leaders (both AFT and NEA) and many union oppositionists and education activists backed Obama in 2008, either openly or tacitly, the CSEW warned from the outset that the Democrats’ and Republicans’ education agendas (as well as their support for imperialist war in Iraq and Afghanistan) were identical. We say the assault on public education is coming straight from the top, from the Democrats in the White House and Congress, to Democrat Cuomo in the New York statehouse (elected with the votes of the UFT-backed Working Families Party).

In waging this struggle, we rely not on the courts (which enforce the bosses’ law and order, such as the anti-strike Taylor Law) or on capitalist politicians but on the power of the working people and the oppressed, building a workers party that fights for a workers government that can revolutionize education under teacher-student-parent-worker control.

The DOE Goes After Teacher Tenure

They’re on a tear: one day, it’s closing schools, the next day it’s trying to blast teachers names across the tabloid press. On Monday (December 13), the DOE announced new tenure “guidelines.” They are bad news. Among the new provisions are:

• Principals will use a four-point “effectiveness framework,” not just “S” (satisfactory) or “U” ratings as until now. This rating will be based, among other things, on student test scores. This is the wedge for bringing in their “value added” model, which they want to use to bust union wage scales and seniority job protection.

• New “expanded” data will be considered, like whether or not you are an ATR. This is victimization – teachers do not control when if their school is closed and they become ATRs.

• Instead of a check list, principals now have to write several paragraphs justifying granting tenure. It’s a transparent attempt to make it easier to deny, or delay than to grant tenure. And for some of these principals just out of the academy, we wonder if they can even write an essay.

• Most sinister is the financial incentive for denying tenure: if a principal denies a teacher tenure, they are permitted to hire a new teacher and ignore the hiring freeze. This will also be used to intimidate teachers – stay in line, work through lunch, do cafeteria duty etc., or we’ll get somebody who will.

For years the teacher-bashers, the chancellor, the mayor, the New Teacher Project, et al., have been screaming about tenure. New chancellor Cathleen Black says tenure is a “lifetime guarantee.” This is false. What tenure does is give teachers “due process” after three years probation. In order to fire a teacher, the DOE has to provide “cause” (which can include successive annual U-ratings, charges of “insubordination” and the like).

The DOE intends to keep teachers on lengthy probation, so they are free to fire at will. In response, UFT president Mike Mulgrew rushed to say that the UFT has no role in the process of granting tenure. While complaining about DOE “pontificating,” he ends up saying he hopes that the new procedure “can help solve the system’s real problems.” A fighting union leadership would point out how the new procedures can be used to victimize teachers. Instead the UFT’s leader washes his hands of a crucial decision determining a teacher’s future.

On one issue after another, the UFT bureaucrats bow to the initial step in the offensive on teachers’ rights, then complains they were “betrayed” when the assault keeps on coming. They accept linking teacher ratings to student test scores, on an “experimental” and “confidential” basis of course, then scream when the DOE wants to publish the teachers’ individual scores in the press and use them for tenure decisions. Administrators will go after teachers by pushing them down the “effectiveness scale” increments until they are pushed out the door.

The UFT must stand up to defend teacher tenure instead of how it didn’t defend seniority transfers. Already chancellor-designate Black is saying that she wants to lay off experienced teachers so she can get “younger, newer, fresher ideas” (Daily News, 6 December). The handwriting is on the wall.

How the News Is Spun

A Manufactured Crisis

A poll by the Associated Press and Stanford University on questions of education was released on December 14. The emphasis in the media coverage was summed up in the lead paragraph of the AP story: “An overwhelming majority of Americans are frustrated that it's too difficult to get rid of bad teachers, while most also believe that teachers aren't paid enough, a new poll shows.” That’s the spin. What is the reality?

The survey showed that 78 percent of those polled thought it should be easier for school administrators to fire teachers for poor performance. This mainly reflects the deafening din of propaganda in the media and from virtually all government officials blaming “bad teachers” for the “crisis” of the education system. But when you look closer, the survey shows that “the public” has a very different idea of what the real issues are.

Questioned about what are the major problems facing U.S. schools today, “too many bad teachers” is near the bottom of the list, with a little over a third (35%) considering this a serious or extremely serious issue. This is way below the concern over lack of student discipline (59%), “getting and keeping good teachers” (55 percent), overcrowding, low test scores, low expectations or even outdated text books.

Asked who was responsible for the problems of American education, teachers came in last in the list of culprits, with only 35% saying teachers were a great deal or a lot to blame. Next to last in the list were teachers unions at 45%. Far more thought parents were to blame (68%), followed by state education officials (65%) and federal education officials (59%). Take that, Arne Duncan.

Moreover, a substantial majority (57%) thought teachers are not paid enough, and more than half (51%) thought that teachers should be able to strike, which is illegal under New York’s anti-labor Taylor Law. And barely one in four (25%) said state tests were the best way to measure students’ achievement, as opposed to more than two-thirds (69%) who thought teachers’ grades based on classroom work and homework were best.

In fact, the whole public perception of the education system is at odds with the official discourse. Thus, 55% thought their children were receiving a better education than they did, and 76.% of parents of school children thought their kids were receiving a good or excellent education. Only a quarter of the respondents thought that the “No Child Left Behind” Act had made education better.

A decade and a half ago, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle published a book titled The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (Addison-Wesley, 1995). Rather than “scapegoating educators” and pushing phony education “reforms,” they pointed to the real problems of American education, first and foremost the “savage inequalities,” as Jonathan Kozol termed them, between well endowed schools in rich, lily white suburbs and grievously underfunded schools for the black, Latino and immigrant population of impoverished inner city neighborhoods.

The “manufactured crisis” is still with us, as big business interests and capitalist politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike make teachers and teachers unions the target of their attack on public education. And just by the by, the AP/Stanford survey, which highlighted the issue of firing “bad teachers,” was “made possible by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”

You get the news you pay for.

Their Class Sizes and Ours

The remarks by Patrick Sullivan, the Manhattan representative on Bloomberg/Klein’s Panel of Education Puppets, at a December 2 rally protesting the naming of Cathleen Black as schools chief, have been widely quoted: “The worst of all this is the people who control our schools, the people who run our schools, the Mayor, the Chancellor, the Regents, they don't send their own kids to these schools. They have one idea of education for our kids and an entirely different one for their own.” This can be very concrete.

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters and NYC Public School Parents points out (Huffington Post, 13 December) that Mayor Bloomberg’s daughters were enrolled in Spence, a private school with class sizes averaging 14 students. Chancellor Joel Klein’s stepdaughter went to Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut, where there are an average of 11 students per class. And the new chancellor, Cathleen Black, sent her children to another Connecticut boarding school, Kent, which boasts of having just 12 students per class, so that children will get the individualized attention they need.

In contrast, Beach Channel HS, on the DOE’s hit list of schools to be closed, had a target of reducing class size from 27 in school year 2007-08 to 24.9 in 2010-11. This was agreed to as a condition for the DOE receiving $2 million of Contract for Excellence funds from the state, as a result of the court suit by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity against the underfunding of New York City schools. Instead, the opposite happened, and class sizes rose to 29.6, and now Beach Channel is slated for the executioner. Two weights, two measures.

The Department of Education took the CFE money, but used it for other purposes than reducing class sizes, turning it into one more slush fund. How did Bloomberg, Klein & Co. get away with it, you might ask? The answer is they got a secret letter authorizing them to ignore the targets – i.e., to violate the court order. And who sent that letter? None other than David Steiner, the same state education commissioner who just granted a waiver to Cathleen Black to be the new NYC schools chancellor despite her total lack of education experience (see Juan Gonzalez column in the Daily News, 22 September).

P.S. We asked last month (in the CSEW leaflet, “Enough of Billionaire Mayor’s Control,” November 16), “Has Cathleen Black ever been inside a public school?” before being named head of the 1.1 million student NYC school system. It’s now official: “Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, acknowledged Monday that she had never set foot in one. She and her children attended private schools” (see “Chancellor From Different World Visits Classrooms,” New York Times, 7 December). The millionaire Upper East Side socialite also used to ride horses at a Chicago country club that excluded blacks and Jews.