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Past Issues Feb-March 2006 Letters
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Lynch contract superior to UPC horrors Lynch contract superior to UPC horrors Anyone who wants to go to the Internet and read back issues of the union’s newspaper can only find them back to September 2004! This is despite the fact that the union has been in existence continually since 1936! This kind of dishonesty belongs in some of the totalitarian regimes of the last century, not in a time when any child in just about any public school can locate information via the World Wide Web. If this type of thing weren’t so serious, it would have the whole city laughing. Let’s get some facts straight. As a result of the four-year contract negotiated by Debbie Lynch in 2003, teachers have had their salaries increase by 12 percent (for teachers at maximum) to 35 percent to 40 percent (for teachers receiving step increases). As even the Board of Education’s documents (such as their annual financial reports) attest, this is the highest in at least 20 years — and for some groups the highest in history. Like the documents on the union website, the actual contract history has been more complicated. The actual record of the UPC for the decade before the Lynch administration shows as much fiction as any recent non-fiction “memoirs”: Raises that never took place. The “raises” published in Appendix A of the old — UPC era — union contracts often never happened. (A “raise” was negotiated to end the threat of a strike, then it was taken back by the Board without a fight from the union). Class size maximums that were never enforceable (or never enforced). Similarly, the class size “protections” published in Article 28 of the “contracts” between 1995 and 1999 did not really exist. In 1995, the UPC had allowed class size (Article 28) to become “Board Policy” — rather than contractually enforceable reality! All of the talk about class size this school year has been the same kind of bunk were hear so often elsewhere. Health care costs. The increase in health care premiums has gone up $10 to $25 a year for most CTU members — depending on the options that individuals chose. But the surrender of benefits began under the UPC more than a decade ago and was never stopped during the last time they held power. Meanwhile, in addition to the largest pay raises in at least two decades, the Lynch administration also brought many other improvements for the members. Life insurance. Our life insurance has more than doubled — to $25,000 at no cost to our members. The option of buying additional insurance at a very reasonable cost that equals between one and three years of individual salary is also available to all bargaining unit members. Dental and eye care are now available in all policies for family members. These and other health care options help lessen the cost of other increases that have been brought on because of double-digit increases in all medical costs across the country. (That has to be emphasized if honesty matters). Added sick days for veteran union members. Teachers who are at maximum step receive one or two additional sick days that are banked and continue to increase in value with our percent annual pay increases. We are able retire with a five percent increase in our pension thanks to the PEP option added to our contract. A sane length to the school year. And who can forget some of the stranger examples of UPC dishonesty that the Lynch administration began to take care of — such as the UPC claim that by working an extra week we were getting a “raise”? In Debbie Lynch’s first negotiated contract, the school year was reduced by five days with no cut in pay (and to be honest, a minuscule increase in the length of each school day). This has resulted in a longer vacation for all members and more reasonable summer vacations — for the first time in memory — for Chicago children (especially high school children who have to work). Those CTU members who need or wish to work can now earn an additional week salary over the summer and can compete with suburban teachers for jobs outside of education. But anyone who survived the 1990s either as a teacher or student in Chicago schools can still remember “beginning” school in August and ending at the end of June. That was a UPC deal, too. Preparation time. We have an additional elementary prep added to our week every morning and a fourth prep at most elementary schools are guaranteed. Now that the numbers are in, we see that 5,000 teachers who were FTB’s are now assigned and on tenure track and are in a stronger position than two years ago. When the CTU paper headlines “Debbie Lynch…” the next time, maybe it will be about the positives that the members have received from the only contract negotiated by the Lynch administration. At the least, in an era when Truth is supposed to be coming back into fashion, the union members should be able to get and analyze the facts of the past 20 or 30 years, rather than be lied to by people who had sold them out. But let’s continue to look at how the union is presenting its version of reality, this time from the point of view of teacher assistants, school clerks, and other ESPs. Does anyone expect to see the UPC admit that the seniority rights of our support staff (ESPs) are stronger today than at any time since the UPC leadership gave up “career service” protections in 1995? Yes. The UPC gave them away in a political deal in 1995. Will there be any official mention of any of the improvements in salary and retirement options for ESPs that the Lynch contract has brought? I don’t anticipate a push for 5+5 early retirement legislation because that contract demand is not going to be pushed by Marilyn Stewart and her “team.” Nothing that President Lynch and her team accomplished will be acknowledged by the present administration (not even its existence as a part of union history, if a visit to the union website is to be believed). All the negatives presented can remove by the positives that the membership gained in the last contract.
If Marilyn Stewart and company would enforce the contract — instead of dishonestly attacking it — all of the 35,000 members active duty and retired members of the Chicago Teachers Union would be better served. Substance for college classes Even though I do not work in the Chicago Public Schools, the information you provide is quite insightful and pertinent to other labor struggles in districts across the nation. The forces of privatization, made most clear (and spin-free for once) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, are closing in on our schools. I work in higher education and many professors are under the delusion that they are insulated from these same forces. But as we are beginning to see with the NSA illegal domestic spying and NCLB requirements that colleges of education must teach phonics methods in their reading courses, higher education is part of the overall targeting efforts. Where else are students going to hear criticism of the government from people in authority, i.e., scholars? This is why higher education has to be an ally of the K-12 “rank and file” and has to stop fooling itself.
Please accept my contribution towards continuing your important work. I know it isn’t much, but think of it as ten subscriptions without having to print out papers! I can’t tell you how many times I have used articles from your paper in my social foundations classes, both with veteran and beginning teachers. You would be amazed at how many veteran teachers are unaware of the corporate nature of NCLB. The piece you published about the tutoring and unaccountable nature of NCLB funds was so eye-opening that my students kept talking about it for days! If anything, at least they see that government policy isn’t “neutral” or “natural.” Testing steals
summer from children The lengthy story is about a parent “backlash” in Florida to earlier and earlier school start dates and legislation pushed by those parents (Save Our Summers gathered 8,000 online Florida signatures) for a start date closer to Labor Day. Similar actions against school calendar tinkering can be found in thousands of communities across the nation. The week before the Washington Post story, parent opposition in Williamson County, a suburb of Nashville, forced the school board to back off a proposal for a year-round school calendar, which would have opened school doors in mid-summer. Parents there dug deep into their pocket to oppose the calendar change, even renting a kiosk in a major shopping mall where they spent the weekend distributing information to as many people as they could about the detriments of school calendar change for education quality, family life, taxpayers, businesses and the school budget. As the Washington Post story notes, “Legislators in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Pennsylvania are weighing bills this year that would peg school start dates to Labor Day. North Carolina, Texas, Minnesota and Wisconsin passed similar measures in recent years.” School officials across the nation are finally being forced to admit, as they have in Florida, that the impetus for the school calendar creep is high-stakes testing required by the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) national school accountability law. Ironically, the proposed Florida law pegging the school start date to Labor Day was drafted by a Democrat and has the support of Republican Governor Jeb Bush, brother of the same President George W. Bush who crafted NCLB. The Republican governor’s support for the measure is not surprising when you realize a later start date cuts even more instructional days before the test date. This could adversely impact test scores and thus reaffirm the Republican portrait of public schools and its teachers as “failures” that need to be replaced by a system of private schools and school vouchers. As the Washington Post story notes, school officials have been placed in the untenable position by the testing industry of having to move up achievement testing from late spring to early winter — usually February or March — in order to be assured of getting back scores before the next fiscal year, when financial rewards and punishments are handed out based on test scores. A testing program that truly measured what was going on in a school (or school district) would test the children in May, not in February or March. Has anyone even asked whether the claims by testing companies that test data from mid-year testing programs are even meaningful in measuring children, teachers, schools and school districts? With so much secrecy about the tests’ content, scoring and other things, how can parents really know? Parents may not understand all the political subtleties of the school accountability movement and high-stakes testing. Nor do many parents understand the pressure high-stakes testing places on school administrators and teachers, whose very jobs, careers and livelihoods hinge on the outcome of a mere five to rive-and-a-half months of instruction these tests measure. Parents also may not understand the money motives of the Business Roundtable [which represents the CEOs of major Fortune 500 corporations, including test publishers] in their support of high-stakes tests and related school calendar tinkering. But parents clearly understand the disruptions to summertime family life and family values caused by calendar creep. And in recent years, some schools have incrementally moved school start dates to mid July! The line drawn in the sand by parents in Florida and elsewhere may very well signal the beginning of the end of high-stakes testing. It is just a matter of time before the parents realize who the real enemies of summer are and the arrows will really start flying at the testing industry and the network of politicians they fund. Chicago teachers help New Orleans While we were in New Orleans, a Quality Inn hotel attempted to evict Katrina survivors. We were able to get the eviction postponed, through political and legal efforts. About 100 people, called on short notice (picture attached) protested in front of the hotel and spoke with residents, many of whom had no place to go but the streets. The hotel wanted to kick people out because it is beginning to be Mardi Gras season. Driving through the French Quarter, you would never know about the devastation that lay a short distance away. Tourists in the Quarter partied as if the hurricane had never happened. Meanwhile, in the lower 9th ward, an area where 14,000 mostly poor African-American people had lived, the whole area was uninhabitable. I have pictures which I will share with anyone who contacts me. Block after block of rubble, stench from the conflagration of wastes, no electricity, gas, or water, and no FEMA trailers for people to use while rebuilding their homes. One look at the levee shows why. The concrete part of the levee alongside this neighborhood (and other poor neighborhoods) is less than two feet wide and made of non-reinforced cement. It was no match for the huge surges of water that easily broke through it. In contrast, the levee protecting the French Quarter is a steel-reinforced, half-block wide street with hotels and shopping centers atop it. During a community meeting in the lower 9th ward, residents spoke passionately about the lack of responsiveness of all levels of government. The Army Corp of Engineers had begun bulldozing in the area, making no attempt to contact owners of the houses they planned to demolish. Again, protest connected to legal action stopped the bulldozing in the lower 9th, temporarily. About 100 people surrounded the bulldozers and threatened to make a “citizens arrest” based on a Temporary Restraining Order granted earlier. In New Orleans, lives have been devastated by a capitalist system that cares more about profits and oil wars than people’s needs. At least 100,000 people were left in New Orleans to die, and had the hurricane hit directly, they surely would have. As it was, the breaking of the “sand-castle” levees by the water Katrina stirred up killed thousands instead. Fascism is not too strong a word to describe the utter disregard the system is showing for the lives of our New Orleans brothers and sisters. One of the most striking aspects of our visit was the huge number of volunteers-from college students to retired people, from all over the country/continent. Between these volunteers and the thousands of black and white working class New Orleanians angry at the government, there are many opportunities to organize and help out. I would like you to seriously consider getting involved in this struggle by going to New Orleans, helping to support work in Chicago (or in your city), or in other ways helping to spread the word and contribute to this important anti-racist fight. Delay on CTU referendum January 12, 2006 As I left the January meeting of the Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates, I spoke to an opposition insider about the status of the referendum to move from in-school voting to a mailed ballot sent to the home of all members and supervised by an outside independent agency. The petitions for a referendum were given to the union leadership in May 2005. The petition were finally certified as “valid” by the union officers at the November 2005 meeting after a long, unnecessary delay. The delay came even though no specific objections were brought forward to justify a name-by-name scrutiny, which is the rule in general elections. You wait for objectors to come forward by a specified date and time and certify the petitions if there are no objectors. My informant said that the opposition is seeking the intervention of the American Federation of Teachers to expedite the holding of the referendum with more than all deliberate speed. It is now January 2006. I had to talk further why I thought this a poor option to pursue, but let me outline it in this letter. In certifying the 2004 election of UPC officers, the AFT did strongly “suggest’ that CTU go to a mailed ballot. However, they have no power to compel a mailed ballot, as they pointed out that in-school voting was mandated in our current constitution and by-laws. Since there was insufficient evidence of fraud or ballot stuffing in their investigation, they OK’d the election of the UPC officers. That is not to say that there could be many opportunities for screw-ups in in-school voting, but only that it is hard to prove. You simply do not have enough poll watchers to supervise the election in more than 600 voting places. The voting only goes on for an hour or so, and teachers must hurry from supervising the voting to their classrooms. In Illinois elections, by contrast, the polls are open 13 hours with four or five judges on duty the whole day. So even if one side or the other thinks some funny business went on, it is difficult to prove. Knowing this, and not wanting to be bothered again with an internal fight, the AFT “suggested” to “to in peace, but sin no more…” So now we have a petition for a referendum that the people who were put in power — the current UPC officers and staff — by the AFT are ignoring. And the AFT apparently isn’t doing anything about it. It is therefore the duty of the House of Delegates to immediately set a date for holding the referendum. They need not wait for a date to come from the Executive Board and then to vote on it or a substitute. The CTU must set a date to hold the referendum. They cannot stonewall or table it forever while waiting for a second referendum to send some mailed ballots to the schools. The opposition referendum has first priority; none other. Now if the CTIU through either the House of Executive Board keeps delaying the referenda, the opposition has a good case in court. A referendum must be held on filing of valid petitions. This is the way we went to a school-by-school report on ratification and officers’ voting. Do not delay this referendum to 60 days before the next officers’ election, when there will be a cry of politics. The time is now. Someone in the opposition need only get to the floor to fix a date. If it is referred to a committee, there must be an objection. The chair must then have the ruling sustained in the House. If the date is defeated, then the opposition has a good case in court for setting the date by the court. The by-laws and constitution have been held by the courts to be a contract with the members and therefore enforceable in court. A court case might be costly, but a judge would have good reason to set a date, or he could tell the House to set a date and then come back with a status report. If a date is set, there is settlement. But in preparing their case, the opposition might be advised to ask testimony from the AFT in Washington as to why they “suggested” a mailed ballot, which given CTU autonomy in internal affairs was all they could do in the absence of provable vote fraud. I personally never made that charge, though others of my former opposition colleagues did. It would be relevant to a court case to learn ho many other urban locals comparable in size to CTU use a mailed ballot. If the CTU refuses to give the information, the American Arbitration Association would have that information and I would not consider it confidential. The worse, silly opposition to mailed balloting is that it would “reveal what teachers are not living at their last known address and who might live outside Chicago in violation of the residency requirements…” This is actually what UPC has been saying to make their case for something other than a mailed ballot sent to all members’ homes. Look up my letter in the January Substance where I suggest that this is a specious argument and only holds true if CTU “rats out” its own members by delivering undeliverable mail to the Board of Education. Certainly I do not think the American Arbitration Association would surrender such material if they were conducting the election. The CPS has other means to learn this information if they want to know it, and other city agencies (especially police and fire) have experience in locating employees who are violating the residency rules, as is widely known in Chicago. Do our union’s officers think they should be playing stool pigeons or Pinkerton detectives at the Merchandise Mart? Let the House do its work. Set a date to hold the referendum in 60 days and thus stay out of court. It is not necessary for either the AFT to rescue us or for the courts to rescue us.
I see no outbreak of disunity in what I propose. I do see an outbreak of internal democracy if it is implemented. Is CTU immune from democracy which it sometimes acts as if it is a threat to their bureaucratic health and welfare. In fact, democracy is nourishment to the rank and file. Stick to
Chicago news And Oakland and small schools don’t have a single thing to do with Chicago. Just give me the crap on how bad the union is and keep after them because they will ruin education here in this town.
Now that Arne Duncan has come out with dire budget warnings about the doom to befall the Chicago schools, why not go after him for all the $100,000 employees who were hired — not to serve the students, but to harass the teachers? No wonder he is short money. The CPS headquarters at 125 S. Clark St. and the — how many are there now anyway — “area offices” have way too many perks that don’t have a thing to do with education or with running a complicated school system! DIBELS mess in the suburbs ‘Business model’ doesn’t apply to public schools Now, admittedly, we in the general public are “invested” in the success of children, and we are “invested” in how they will be raised and the decisions they will make. After all, they will inherit the planet after we’re finished. So the future is quite literally in their hands. But being “invested” in schools and children is a far cry from being an investor in schools and children. Consider the insights by Wall Street analyst Jerry Herman. Writing in The Wall Street Transcript, Herman says, “NCLB is a big opportunity because it layers in an expanded source of funding. The dollars devoted to Title I now approach $12.5 billion and are up about 35 percent since NCLB was signed into law. The dollar flow is significant, and perhaps more important, it now appears that the decision makers - principals and superintendents - have an improving understanding of requirements under the law and how to access funding.” Herman concludes, “From an investment perspective, we are more intrigued with the K-12 sector than we’ve been in many years.” Herman’s colleague, Robert Craig, agrees. Also writing in The Wall Street Transcript, Craig says, ““We continue to see estimates of over 10,000 failing schools, and that encompasses an awful lot of kids. These kids and their families have choices in terms of supplemental education services like tutoring or school alternatives if their school continues to fail. Certain areas like testing in assessment, teacher development and supplemental education services are attractive, and each has significant growth potential.” Craig concludes, “Overall, we think that the K-12 business is starting to improve, and we are actively looking for ways to capitalize on it and invest in that segment.” The decisions that businesses make are business decisions. When making such decisions, business interests ask things such as, “How can we do this for the least amount of money possible?” versus “How can we do this well?” The decisions that get made are made because they are cheaper and can satisfy a lot of customers and therefore make the business more money. And because large corporations are publicly-traded and are owned by shareholders, they absolutely must show increasing revenues and profits to satisfy shareholders. That’s OK with me. But what’s not OK with me is that the businesses that run schools have their shareholders’ interests ahead of my children’s interests. These companies can say that they are committed to running great schools and they can say they are committed to students and parents. But the interests of students and parents are completely different than the interests of shareholders. When faced with a decision that involves having to choose between students and shareholders, businesses must choose shareholders because shareholders are what keep businesses in business. If a business alienates its shareholders and chooses to serve students ahead of shareholders, that business will go out of business very quickly. Ironically — perversely, even — private, for-profit educational businesses must stay in business in order to do business. And in order to stay in business, they have to do the business that shareholders demand of them. There are lots of words we could use to describe schools. The one that’s used most frequently these days is the word “efficient.” This word is used to describe a number of charter schools that appear to produce better learning for less money. Conversely, the word “inefficient” is used to describe traditional public schools, particularly urban schools. The implicit assumption is that inefficient schools need to be made efficient, and that if they are made more efficient, then all will be well. While it is altogether appropriate to discuss businesses in terms of efficiency, it is less appropriate to do so when discussing schools. After all, what are public schools supposed to be efficient at? And what does efficiency have to do with it? What does efficiency have to do with learning? If you learned efficiently, what would this look like? If you learned more for less money, what would this look like? If you could learn more by cutting expenses, what would this look like? Good teachers worry less about whether they can replicate a particular process and more about producing a valid learning solution for each child. This is primarily due to the fact that each child learns differently and that each child requires a unique approach that is specific to his or her needs. We accept that no two people are exactly alike, but we quickly forget that no two children are exactly alike. Because no two children are exactly the same, no two children learn in exactly the same way. Children are not widgets, so they shouldn’t be taught in such a way that suggests they are. In other words, teaching is an inherently inefficient process. If your goal is to make teaching and learning efficient, you’ll create mass-produced, one-size-fits-all solutions. In other words, you won’t be teaching at all anymore. And students won’t be learning. You may have achieved efficiency, but you will have done so at the expense of teaching and learning. I used to work in the for-profit software development business. As a software developer, I learned that someone may have an extraordinarily good idea for improving a product. And lots and lots of people may have requested this improvement. So you talk to your engineers and programmers. You say, “OK, how long will it take you guys to do this?” So they do their analysis and come back with an answer. They tell you that not only will it take x amount of time, but it will also mean that a,b, and c functions will need to change as a result. So you talk to your interaction designers and graphic artists and ask them to figure out a way to accommodate these updated functions through a mock-up of what the tool will look like and how it will work. They come back with an estimate of how much time this will take to do. You then hand all these data off to your folks in accounting and ask them to figure out how much it will cost to make this great new change. The accounting folks do their number crunching and report back to the CIO, the CFO, and the CEO. They come back with the bottom line: “We can’t do this. It will cost too much.” As it turned out, the tools I designed for this commercial developer were never built because we could not afford to build them. They were great tools and would have greatly benefitted teachers and students. But there was no way to quickly and easily recoup the cost of developing them, and there was no way to ongoingly “monetize” them. So I experienced first-hand that good ideas are not necessarily the ideas that get developed. I learned first-hand that the software development business, like any other business, is about realizing efficiencies, reducing inefficiencies, maximizing profit and productivity, and looking to leverage the buying power of economies of scale. Schools are not trying to reduce inefficiencies, cut costs, and maximize profits. They are trying to educate children. Peter Campbell Unions’
‘foreign policy’ needs scrutiny Stossel wrong on Oakland charter school In less than a month, the same charter school was featured in an attack on public schools by Stossel. The Chronicle story began in the usual way for such stories: “Here’s a charter school, run in a converted church building in Oakland’s Laurel neighborhood, which has been transformed from one of the city’s worst performers into the highest-scoring middle school in Oakland.” If I remember correctly, wasn’t that the same “once upon a time” beginning that Substance first exposed when the right wing began hyping alternative attacks on public schools more than 20 years ago (see “The Marva Collins Hoax”)? According to the most recent hype out of Oakland, the American Indian charter has proved you can outperform your community by cracking down and being tough. Really? A bit of a reality check on this latest No Excuses school, which is located near my neighborhood. My contention is that the high scores for all of the subgroups at that school is the result of a “pushy parents” selection mechanism. Give me motivated early adolescents, whose parents are on top of them daily and I can do wonders with them. My conclusion is that, despite the bluster of the very obnoxious principal, your average set of Oakland middle school teachers would have done just as well with these kids, maybe better, especially within the small school environment in the fairly quiet Laurel neighborhood, removed from the dilapidated and prison-like conditions of the regular schools. This is a charter school, so parents CHOOSE to place their kids there to escape the lousy conditions in their neighborhood Oakland middle schools. A quick look at their state testing data http:// star.cde. ca.gov /star2005/ Viewreport.asp suggests: Parent Education: a higher than average parent education level than 3 local middle schools (Brewer, Simmons, Bret Harte). The American Indian Charter has only 130 students, and lists ALL of its parents’ ed levels, while the neighborhood schools “decline to state” approximately 50 percent of the parents’ education levels. In secondary schools, it’s the students, not their parents, who usually fill out this item, and they are notorious for inflating the levels out of embarrassment to admit that their parents have little education. The typical pattern is that almost all of these “decline to states” are for “not a high school grad” If so, then these schools average almost two-thirds of parents with no HS diplomas compared to the charter school’s 18% Further, I suspect that, true to form, the percentages entered for “college grad” and “some college” would be much higher than the parents’ actual education levels. In these categories, the charter school runs about double the percentages for the local schools. “Asians” - almost all of this charter school’s Asian students are Chinese (38 of 42), and the remaining 4 students are Vietnamese. This matches the demographics of the immediate neighborhood, which is a relatively middle class area with a large percentage of Chinese and Vietnamese families who own extremely high priced houses. By comparison, the local middle schools have at most one half of their “Asians” being Chinese (at Simmons, only 8 students), with most of the other Asian students coming from very low income SEAsian cultural groups. English proficiency: None of this charter school’s students, NONE, has ever had problems with English fluency. Regardless of ethnicity, none of the students have ever been “limited English proficient,” and only 28% even reported having a non-English language spoken at home (Initial-FEPs). Those 28% entered kindergarten speaking fluent English, which usually means that there was fluent English spoken to them at home. By comparison, the local schools range from one-third to two-thirds of the students having had English proficiency problems in their lives, and a significant number of the tested students in these schools were still not English proficient (47% in Simmons) This is huge. It goes way beyond the English proficiency of the students being tested. It’s a marker for the capacity of the parents to help with schoolwork since kindergarten and to negotiate the system and advocate for their kids in very dysfunctional Oakland elementary schools during the 7 years prior to enrollment in middle school. “Hispanics”: 28 of the school’s 130 students are self-declared “Hispanics,” yet none of them have ever been “limited English.” This is in stark contrast to the bulk of Oakland’s Latino public school students, whose parents are first generation immigrants who don’t speak English and are overwhelmingly very low-income people with limited education. My knowledge of the local Latino populations tells me that these charter school Latino parents are either second generation English-fluent bilinguals or English-fluent upwardly mobile immigrants, if any Spanish is spoken in these homes. This would mean that the parents, not the teachers, are the key factor in high scores, when doing a comparison study across schools. There is probably more significant data that explains the school’s high scores, but one would have to spend time at the school to discover that. However, given my experience in looking at schools with a good b.s. detector, the data I’ve found tells me a lot about how this charter school “succeeds.” New Orleans evictions? — Mardi Gras boycott I’ve just spoken with an attorney in New Orleans and thought you and your readers would be interested in this: Incredibly, today (January 9) hotels began evicting people who lost their homes to Katrina to make room for Mardi Gras tourists! The Quality Inn Maisson St. Charles was the first to put people out on the street. Concerned residents came out into the streets to try to plan action to stop the evictions. Meanwhile, lawyers for the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund went to court this morning to seek a temporary restraining order to stop the evictions. As of 4:00 P.M. today, they had succeeded! No hotel will be permitted to evict hurricane victims to make way for tourists, and those already on the street will get their rooms back. This victory is on top of another one in federal court yesterday which put a stay on bulldozing of homes in the Lower 9th Ward without permission of the owners until a court hearing on January 19th. A direct action was necessary on Thursday, when the bulldozers began moving and PHRF and others conducted a citizens’ arrest to stop them. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of New Orleaneans are still far from home. Many residents of the 9th Ward are unable to attend to their former homes because they have been flung far from them by FEMA and don’t have the resources to get back, deal with government and insurance companies and/or landlords, etc. Some 8500 evacuees are in the Chicago area. They have temporary housing, most have no jobs, their lives and families have been totally disrupted. We are organizing to try to find and contact these survivors to determine what their needs are and connect them with the people trying to enable them to move back to their homes. This effort will involve contacting churches and other organizations to find people, sitting down with evacuees to get their stories and determine their needs, and help them to negotiate their new lives in Chicago until they can go home (or decide to stay here permanently). Also, we will be organizing support for the efforts going on in the Gulf Coast, such as fundraising, providing volunteers, and getting out the word about the ongoing struggle. If you’d like to help with any of these efforts, or have other ideas, please let us know. I know this letter will go out to most of your readers after some of the events discussed here, but these struggles will continue and anyone can get involved at any point. Those who want further information can contact me by e-mail or at 847-475-2960 Please feel free to pass this information on to others whom you feel may be interested in helping! Democratic Party leaders need to break with NCLB Stephen Krashen Dear Representative Waxman, I have just read Rep. Pelosi’s statement on the fourth anniversary of No Child Left Behind in which she states that the problem with NCLB is that it is underfunded. But more funding will not fix NCLB. NCLB demands a tremendous amount of testing, which robs students of valuable learning time. Author Alfie Kohn has noted that the pressures of tests have converted schools in the US into test preparation centers. Also, the kind of testing done discourages creative thinking: Test preparation consists largely of mindless drills and exercises. All educators agree that assessment is necessary: NCLB, however, requires excessive and inappropriate testing. For sensible alternatives, please see www.fairtest.org. NCLB also requires a heavy phonics-based approach to reading, and does not allow students to do recreational reading in school. This approach is based on the conclusions of a federal investigation into reading, the National Reading Panel. These results have been seriously criticized by many scholars. Prof. Elaine Garan, for example, has shown that heavy phonics instruction helps children read lists of words in isolation, but does not have a significant impact on tests of reading comprehension given after grade 1. My own research shows that in-school recreational reading has a very consistent and positive impact on literacy development, both in first and second language development. The current president of the International Reading Association, Richard Allington, has gathered many of these criticisms into a book, appropriately titled Big Brother and National Reading Curriculum: How Ideology Trumped Evidence. Widely published scholar Gerald Coles has published two books on this topic: Misreading Reading: The Bad Science that Hurts Children, and Reading the Naked Truth: Literacy, Legislation, and Lies. Prof. Garan has published a book with the title Resisting Reading Mandates. I hope your staff and other house Democrats will take a closer look into No Child Left Behind. Stephen Krashen Pelosi Statement on Fourth Anniversary of No Child Left Behind Washington, D.C. - House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi released the following statement today marking the fourth anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law on January 8, 2002: “Four years ago, Democrats and Republicans joined together to make a promise to our nation’s children: that we leave no child behind in our educational system. No Child Left Behind was a promise to improve student performance, increase school accountability, and provide students with the resources they need to learn the skills crucial to their future success. “Unfortunately, President Bush and Republicans in Congress have failed to live up to their part of the bargain. Over the last four years, they have shortchanged No Child Left Behind by $40 billion, leaving states with new mandates, but not enough funding, and leaving children without the necessary resources. Failing to provide a quality education undermines our responsibility to protect our values of fairness and opportunity for all. “Underfunding No Child Left Behind is one in a long line of Republican attacks on our country’s education system. Proposed Republican budget cuts reduce opportunities for young people by cutting funding for student aid by more than $12 billion and heaping more debt on students. And for the fourth year in a row, Republicans have refused to increase Pell Grants, pricing hard-working students out of a college education. “Sadly, Republican policies continue to leave millions of our children behind. Together, America can do better for our children and for their future.” Union fails to rebut attacks In recent weeks Chicago Public School teachers have come under attack from the CPS and Mayor Daley. First the CPS want to balance its budget firing over 1,000 teachers and by not making a mandatory contribution to the Teachers Pension Fund and the Mayor agrees to the extent of calling it a “Pension Holiday”! CPS teachers are some of the lowest paid teachers in the area and now the Mayor, whose sister was a teacher, thinks it’s good idea to further dishearten them by damaging their pension fund. (If CPS offered 5+5 they could solve the budget problem — thousands of veteran teachers would retire and CPS could replace them with new teachers at half the salary!) Then Arne Duncan announces that more schools will be closed, teachers fired, students sent hither and yon because of low achievement. The Mayor likes this too. These are the schools that the CPS failed; they stripped them of important programs, took their top-performing students and sent them to magnet schools, and they have consistently degraded them by publicly tagging them as failing. (Do they have any idea the effect that kind of label has on the culture of a school?) The staffs of these schools have courageously continued to present consistent and positive education programs in spite of the inadequate support of CPS. Now, teachers and staff are blamed and have to find other jobs, and students and parents have to find other schools, AND CPS will send these children to schools with even lower test scores. Does this make sense? Next, CPS complains that teachers take too many sick days and the Mayor scoffs at the idea that teaching is stressful! Let’s see what might cause teachers’ absences; poor unsafe and unhealthy working conditions; voluminous paperwork exacerbated by new mandates from IEOs, NCLB, the State, the city, anyone’s aunt, uncle, brother, who think they know everything; exposure to all forms of germs, viruses, colds, flu, etc brought in by hundreds of children everyday; low salaries, threats to jobs and pensions; physical threats by students and parents; public ridicule by supervisors (Arne and Richie); etc. etc. etc. All of these attacks have gone, to all intents and purposes, unanswered by Marilyn Stewart and the Chicago Teachers Union. Gone are the days when the CTU president (Deborah Lynch) was on every newscast defending members against any assault from CPS and the Mayor. Now it seems like every other day we are bombarded with vicious criticism and no one at CTU is doing a thing about it. The Stewart team has given CPS and the Mayor’s office carte blanche, and they’re really taking advantage of it. What a shame! |
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