MORE/New Action on WBAI Building Bridges, tonight

April 25, 2016 am30 8:51 am

Hear from three of the candidates running on the MORE/NAC slate (Movement of Rank & File Educators/New Action Caucus) in the upcoming UFT elections. Jia Lee (President), Camille Eterno (Secretary) and Jonathan Halabi (High School Executive Board) will explain why our membership needs new leaders in our union. Mulgrew’s Unity Caucus has controlled the UFT for over 50 years, and it’s time for a change. The UFT must stop collaborating with politicians and start building strong school chapters as well as unity with school communities and students, and effectively fight the forces that are working to privatize public education. Issues include: High Stakes Testing, the charterization of public schools, lack of union democracy, weakening of tenure and teachers rights, demoralization of the teaching profession, importance of Social Justice Unionism, and so much MORE!

Ballots will be mailed on May 5th to member’s homes.

Building Bridges over WBAI Radio, 99.5FM
with Mimi Rosenberg & Ken Nash
Mon., April 25, 7 – 8 pm EST

streaming @ http://www.wbai.org/playernew.html

smartphone streaming @ http://stream.wbai.org/

to listen, or download archived shows
http://www.wbai.org/server-archive.html

Field supervisors are the wrong administrators to observe teachers

April 18, 2016 pm30 9:47 pm

tags: ATRs, Field Supervisors, Observations

If you were going to rate a restaurant, but you were in a far away land and didn’t know the culture, the cuisine, the expectations of the customers, the habits, the menu… you could not produce a rating that made any sense. Even if you wanted to.

And if you were going to rate a teacher, but you were in a school very different from yours, with different pedagogical expectations, and different school culture, in a content area you did not know, with standards newly adopted, and students you don’t know… you could not produce a rating that makes sense. Even if you wanted to.

Whereas there exists a class of supervisors – ATR Field Supervisors – who are disconnected from students, from content, from school-specific pedagogy, from school-specific culture and who thereby are unable to engage in the rich conversations envisioned both in the Danielson Framework and Teaching for the 21^stCentury

The latter is the position that the DoE has put “ATR Field Supervisors” in. They “supervise” our involuntarily itinerant members (ATRs). Some Field Supervisors are malevolent. But even the ones who want to be fair, how could they possibly be?

And so it is the duty of the union to step in. Observations require conversations, and these supervisors can’t have them, which means are members are cheated. The conversations must be informed by investment in the school, students, and even the pedagogue. But these supervisors are not thus invested.

Today my caucus, New Action, proposed asking the DoE to stop this ridiculous practice, and to reassign the Field Supervisors to somewhere they might actually be useful. The motion was tabled, but, I believe, to refine details, not to derail it.

– – — — —– ——– ————- ——————— ————- ——– —– — — – –

The treatment of ATRs has become a symbol of the fight to right the course in the UFT. Probationers at the beginning of their careers and ATRs well into their careers are often our most vulnerable members. We deserve to be judged by how well we stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves.

The whole system should be challenged. It is absurd, and it is cruel. But taking the system head on does not preclude trying to improve conditions in small ways.

I am proud to have been the author of the Dignity for All Teachers resolution back in 2011. Friends of mine, colleagues, who advocate for ATRs pooh-poohed how weak the resolution was. But in fact, the leadership HAS implemented the first resolution, and partially the next two:

RESOLVED the United Federation of Teachers will direct its chapters and Chapter Leaders to reach out to members of the Absent Teacher Reserve who are assigned to their schools, to welcome them, and to support them; and be it further

RESOLVED that the UFT demand that the DOE create a protocol for Principals so that UFT members going into a school for the first time will be treated professionally and given the information for that particular school necessary to perform their duties; and be it further

RESOLVED that the United Federation of Teachers will continue to educate Chapter Leaders about the rights of teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve, and direct its chapters and Chapter Leaders to continue to proactively protect those rights, and to intervene if those rights are being infringed upon by administration, as the ATR may be justifiably reluctant or fearful of speaking up; and be it further

These are not huge steps – but it is far better that they are taken then not taken.

When I think of systemic challenges, my mind goes to some of what ICE has done, and especially to the relentless exposé found on Chaz’ blog. I think of today’s resolution as falling somewhere between “small change” and “systemic challenge.”

– – — — —– ——– ————- ——————— ————- ——– —– — — – –

A year and a half ago my caucus, New Action, agreed to do some limited work with the Portelos club (I was opposed every step of the way). We agreed to just two items – one of those was a joint “ATR Resolution.” Despite promises, this gang produced hot air, and nothing else.

I don’t want a “D” for Developing. Or a “D” for Duck. Part II

April 5, 2016 am30 4:56 am

tags: Chapter Leaders, developing rating, teacher evaluation

If you think a “Developing” is “nothing” “just a TIP,” then

you don’t get that being told that you are in the next to bottom category as a teacher is devastating,
you haven’t tried transferring with a D (possible, but much harder),
you didn’t get a harshly imposed Teacher Improvement Plan (most are not harsh, but enough are that we should be concerned), and
you’ve been out of school for too long.

At a Chapter Leaders meeting last week, a union full-timer picked up a single comment about the evaluation system, even though that was not on the agenda, and lectured us about the number of Ineffective ratings being lower than the number of Unsatisfactory ratings used to be.

See, he was trying to explain to us that Ineffective = Unsatisfactory.

Not all chapter leaders were grateful to be lectured by someone who works in an office. Especially when he was wrong.

Ineffectives are worse than U’s. Ineffectives cannot be challenged on the basis that the principal’s pedagogical judgment was wrong. Two Ineffectives can lead to a hearing to remove your license, with the presumption that the license needs to be removed.

And leaving Developing out of the picture is, um, wrong. Ds hurt. They hurt our pride. They lead to a “Teacher Improvement Plan” which is insulting for good teachers, and pretty much useless for everyone else. In most schools the TIPs are sort of a low-level, low-impact harassment. But in others they are a royal pain in the ass.

And it is so easy for a principal to “tip” a teacher from E to D, that the Mulgrew evaluation system has led not to a surge in “teacher improvement” but to a clear rise in “sucking up” to avoid that tip.

Also, if you try to transfer the new principal sees your rating, before you are interviewed, and most treat the adverse rating as evidence of something wrong with your teaching.

And all this based on an idiosyncratic and partially random evaluation system.

Frankly, if we can’t ditch the whole thing, we should at least roll {Highly Effective, Effective, Developing} into one category, perhaps {Satisfactory}? I mean, if Unity really believes a D is no big deal, then why not just ditch it?

I don’t want a “D” for Developing or a “D” for Duck – Part I

April 3, 2016 pm30 2:43 pm

tags: teacher evaluation, Unity Caucus

We, meaning teachers in NYC, used to be rated each year. Satisfactory. Or Unsatisfactory. S or U. Getting a U was bad. Now we get Highly Effective. Effective. Developing. Or Ineffective. H, E, D, or I. The Feds and NY State and our own union leadership conspired to make the change. Hell, Mulgrew boasts he helped write the state law.

In the old days, the principal rated you. If you got a U, that was bad. Two in a row and they could go after your license. But you could challenge the rating. The principal could have been wrong.

Under Bloomberg and Klein (and then Cathy Black – who Mulgrew failed to oppose, does anyone know why not? – and then Walcott) we got flooded with unqualified principals and principals with poor judgment. And Bloomberg and Klein said they would not let us challenge the principal’s judgment – just at the moment when their judgment was most in question. Why didn’t we fight this? Ask Mulgrew. Ask your rep.

We could have fought them over “the principal’s judgment shall not be challenged.” We could have fought them over removing incompetent principals. Instead, Mulgrew wrote a law.

You ever see those plastic ducks at a carnival, floating? You pay for a chance, and pick one up. You see if you win. There’s a number on the bottom, from 0 – 20. And that’s your State Score. Instead of fighting to remove bad principals, or to challenge the judgment of lousy principals, Mulgrew and Unity wrote us a carnival game. Except the stakes are super high.

40% of your rating depends on grabbing a lucky duck. Your principal rates you well – but you get an unlucky duck. Too bad for you. Your principal rates you low, but you grab the right duck? You are golden.

Hey, if I sucked, the duck game might give me a chance. But most of us, having 40% of our rating randomized? Not reassuring, even when we get lucky.

So good principals used to have 100% control of our rating. Now they have 60%, and 40% is random. How is that good?

And incompetent principals should not be principals. They used to have 100% control of our rating. But instead of fighting to get them out, Unity fought to let them keep 60% control. And the ducks get the rest.

Sabbatical Applications Due March 17, 2016

March 1, 2016 am31 8:55 am

tags: sabbatical

This from the UFT Chapter Leader Update: Eligible teachers who want to study to enhance their teaching skills have until March 17 to submit an application via SOLAS for a study sabbatical for the 2016-17 school year. March 24 is the deadline for a principal’s recommendation to the superintendent. Coursework must be rigorous and related to your teaching assignment. All teachers are eligible for a one-year study sabbatical after 14 years of service. Junior high or high school classroom teachers with seven years on the job can also apply for a six-month study sabbatical for the spring semester only. Teachers earn 70 percent of salary during a full-year sabbatical and 60 percent of salary during a six-month sabbatical. Members can read guidelines and eligibility requirements in the sabbatical memo on the DOE website.

And this is from me: I took a sabbatical, school year 2013-14. It was wonderful. I learned stuff in my classes. I got reminded what it’s like when material is hard, from the students’ point of view. I relaxed, caught up with friends and family, and travelled. I visited schools, for fun, and watched classes, for fun, and thought about how I teach. And I came back healthier, younger, and a better teacher.

The financial side was not too bad. I dipped into savings, true. But that was mostly because I travelled so much. 70% of your pay is more than 70% of your take home, since your taxes go down a bunch.

Well worth it. If you are eligible, I urge you to apply. -jd

Did Unity Just Start the Election Campaign by Sticking It to Retirees?

February 28, 2016 pm29 11:45 pm

tags: health care, health care costs, retirees, UFT elections, Unity Caucus

Did you see that the increased copays announced Friday affect non-Medicare retirees? Retirees vote, and heavily Unity. And right as the election period gets going? I don’t get this. Received wisdom has it that Unity’s deals mainly hurt groups that either do not vote, or are unlikely to vote, or don’t vote for Unity.

Unity’s Bad Deals Don’t Hurt Everyone (Directly)

When Unity let the City informally extend probation without a fight, and then watched as the State formally extended it to four years, those were probationers getting the short end. Many do not last in the system. Those who do have a fairly low ballot return number in the UFT elections.

When Unity struck deals with the Klein to break up many of our large high schools,* everyone knew that high schools already voted for the opposition.

When Unity unintentionally helped Bloomberg swell the ATR pool, and then struck repeated deals that kept the pool large, and rotating (so that the teachers subbed, and did not work long term in one place), the victims were relatively small in number (relatively – several thousand teachers have gone through the pool, but generally only 1000 at any given time) and in many cases were on their way out of the system (willingly, or not). This was not a big group of voters. And those that voted were probably not voting Unity anyhow.

When Unity quietly deep sixed the program designed to deal with abusive principals, it was only the members in those schools who were (directly) affected. (Actually, an injury to one is an injury to all, but some of us in the UFT need a refresher). And if those members were organized, the leadership would have already come in. So it was the unorganized who were left in the lurch, and the unorganized are often non-voters.

Giving up Step Two grievances affects all of us in the short run, but only a few of us directly felt the loss of due process at the time.

Timing

Unity opposed Race to the Top – until right after the 2010 UFT election. During that election Mulgrew opposed tying ratings to testing, and opposed a law that would undermine due process. As soon as the election ended, he flipped. These guys are masters of timing the bad news well. This election is late, and the timing matches, perhaps inadvertently, a contractual raise.

But hurting retirees before an election?

True, the dollar amounts are not huge. But they are real. Some people will shrug their shoulders and say that they understand “cost savings.” But a lot won’t. Why was Unity willing to take this risk? What’s going on here?

Unless there is something else going on here, touching retirees’ health care looks like the second worst move Unity could have possibly made (pensions would have been worse). Anyone have any insight?

* Weingarten and Gates’ NYC people chose to preemptively shut down large Bronx high schools, and create mini-schools. There was no legal requirement, no State mandate. She did this over the objections of her members in the schools, and over the objections of her elected chapter leaders in the schools. Stevenson, Walton, Columbus, South Bronx, Kennedy, Evander. The massive Bronx high school closures of the early 2000s required full support from the UFT leadership. Weingarten and Unity Caucus gave their full support to this destruction.

GHI Co-pays Increase

February 26, 2016 pm29 6:22 pm

tags: health care, retirees

Emergency Room 200% ↑
Urgent Care 233% ↑
Surgical and Dermatological Specialists 50% ↑
All Other Specialists 100% ↑
Blood Work 33% ↑
MRI 233% ↑
Physical Therapy 33% ↑

When we were presented the last contract to vote on, there was blank for health care. We warned, I warned, how can you vote on changes to health care when we do not know what will change. The agreement called for UNSPECIFIED health care savings of $400 million the first year, and then $300 million for the second (this) year, then $300 million, then $300 million, for a total of $1.3 billion, BILLION, dollars.

The UFT’s Unity leadership told us we could achieve cost savings without affecting our health care. That was not true.

Below please find the language from the Memorandum of Agreement. Following that, find the announcement about the increase in co-pays.

We need a leadership that will be honest with the members. – jd

H. Healthcare Savings
a. The UFT and the City/DOE agree the UFT will exercise its best efforts to have the MLC agree to the following:
i. for fiscal year 2015 (July 1, 2014-June 30, 2015), CONTRACT AGREEMENT 2014 there shall be $400 million in savings on a citywide basis in health care costs in the NYC health care program.
ii. for fiscal year 2016 (July 1, 2015-June 30, 2016), there shall be $700 million in savings on a citywide basis in health care costs in the NYC health care program.
iii. for fiscal year 2017 (July 1, 2016-June 30, 2017), there shall be $1 billion in savings on a citywide basis in health care costs in the NYC health care program.
iv. for fiscal year 2018 (July 1, 2017-June 30, 2018), there shall be $1.3 billion in savings on a citywide basis in health care costs in the NYC health care program.
v. for every fiscal year thereafter, the savings on a citywide basis in health care costs shall continue on a recurring basis.
vi. The parties agree that the above savings to be achieved on a Citywide basis are a material term of this agreement.
vii. In the event the MLC does not agree to the above citywide targets, the arbitrator shall determine the UFT’s proportional share of the savings target and, absent an agreement by these parties, shall implement the process for the satisfaction of these savings targets.
viii. Stabilization Fund: (1) Effective July 1, 2014, the Stabilization Fund shall convey $1 billion to the City of New York to be used in support of the pro rata funding of this agreement. (2) Commencing on July 1, 2014, $200 million from the Stabilization Fund shall be made available per year to pay for ongoing programs (such as $65 welfare fund contribution, PICA payments, budget relief).
In the event the MLC does not agree to provide the funds specified in this paragraph, the arbitrator shall determine the UFT’s proportional share of the Stabilization Fund monies required to be paid under this paragraph.

Dear Jonathan,

I am writing to inform you about coming changes to the city health care plans negotiated by the city and the Municipal Labor Committee, the umbrella group of municipal labor unions of which the UFT is a member. These changes affect our in-service members and our retirees who are non-Medicare eligible. As part of our last collective-bargaining agreement, we agreed to achieve health care savings. By collaboratively working with the city, we have been able to preserve access to quality health care while meeting our savings obligation.

We are proud that public school educators and all other New York City municipal employees have access to health coverage without an annual premium. That will continue. When the changes take effect in the next several months, certain GHI and HIP copays will be adjusted. Some will increase, but we also made certain to eliminate other copays to make low or no-cost options available for many health care services.

GHI subscribers currently pay $15 when they visit their primary care physician, the most utilized service in the plan. That copay will not change. Members using physicians at the Advantage Care Physician (ACP) offices will have no copay. There will, however, be copay increases to see specialists and receive various diagnostic tests from other providers in the GHI network.

Members seeking to keep their health care costs down should consider visiting one of the 36 Advantage Care Physician (ACP) centers created by EmblemHealth in New York City and in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Members who receive care, including urgent care, at one of these sites will have no copays for their treatment, including high-tech radiology. Bronx-based members will have access to ACP-affiliated physicians at various Bronx locations to be announced. We will also be working on extending this coverage north to Westchester, Rockland and other counties.

GHI subscribers will no longer have any copays for preventive health care. All preventive health services — including prescriptions for birth control, immunizations, mammography, prenatal vitamins and colonoscopies — will soon be available to GHI subscribers free of cost. Members will receive more information from EmblemHealth in the next few months.

One of the most expensive forms of care is hospital-based emergency room visits, which should only be used in a genuine emergency. The cost to the health plan for a visit to the ER is several times that of a visit to a doctor’s office. Our data show that some members are over-utilizing hospital emergency rooms. To discourage the use of ERs when a doctor’s visit would suffice, the copay for hospital-based emergency-room visits will increase from $50 to $150. Please be aware that you can see a doctor at short notice at one of EmblemHealth’s Advantage Care Physician offices with no copay or at a participating Urgent Care facility with a $50 copay.

As part of our Wellness programs, we will also be introducing telemedicine, which will allow members immediate access to an Internet-based physician who can guide their care and even provide a prescription if necessary. All members in a New York City health plan will also be able to join Weight Watchers at a substantial discount.

HIP subscribers will also see changes to their health plan. HIP is introducing a new plan called HIP Preferred. HIP subscribers can continue to use their HIP doctor with no copay if he or she is in the HIP Preferred network. HIP subscribers will now have a $10 copay if their doctor is not in the HIP Preferred network.

The chart below lists the GHI changes that will take effect in the coming months:


GHI – CBP Benefits	Current Copay	New Copay
PRIMARY CARE PHYSICIAN – PCP (PARTICIPATING GHI DOCTOR)	$15	$15
ADVANTAGE CARE PHYSICIAN – ACP GENERALIST (PCP)	$15	No copay
ADVANTAGE CARE PHYSICIAN – ACP SPECIALIST	$20	No copay
NON-ADVANTAGE CARE PHYSICIAN SURGICAL SPECIALIST	$20	$30
ALL OTHER SPECIALISTS	$20	$30
EMERGENCY ROOM	$50	$150
URGENT CARE FACILITY	$15	$50
MRI/CT (HI-TECH RADIOLOGY)	$15	$50
DIAGNOSTIC LAB (BLOOD, XRAY ETC.)	$15	$20
PHYSICAL THERAPY	$15	$20
ALL PREVENTIVE SERVICES INCLUDING IMMUNIZATIONS, MAMMOGRAPHY, COLONOSCOPY AND PRESCRIPTIONS FOR CONTRACEPTION		No copay

The following chart shows the changes affecting HIP subscribers:


HIP Benefits	Current Copay	New Copay
HIP Preferred Network (new)	No copay	No copay
HIP Non-Preferred Physician	No copay	$10

Here are a few helpful links:

We will be sharing more information in the New York Teacher and on the UFT website in an effort to answer any questions you might have and prepare you for the various changes.

Fraternally,

Arthur Pepper
UFT Welfare Fund Executive Director

Dick Levins, Scientist, Marxist, Mathematical Ecologist

January 23, 2016 pm31 4:34 pm

tags: Cuba, ecology, Richard Levins

“When I was a boy I always assumed that I would grow up to be both a scientist and a Red. Rather than face a problem of combining activism and scholarship, I would have had a very difficult time trying to separate them.” — Richard Levins, Scientist, Marxist, Mathematical Ecologist, Puerto Rican Independence activist, friend of Cuba… who died this past Tuesday.

These are just some notes I collected. It’s worth hunting down his work, his articles, his talks – many are available on the web – to begin to gain some understanding of this remarkable socialist and scientist. That’s what I have just started to do, and I encourage you to do the same.

Levins was a professor at the Chan School of Public Health at Harvard. His work combining population genetics with climate change, with advanced mathematical modeling, anticipated today’s leading-edge research by decades.

He was fascinated and devoted to Cuba:

“I first went to Cuba in 1964 to help develop their population genetics and get a look at the Cuban Revolution. Over the years I became involved in the ongoing Cuban struggle for ecological agriculture and an ecological pathway of economic development that was just, egalitarian, and sustainable.

“Progressivist thinking, so powerful in the socialist tradition, expected that developing countries had to catch up with advanced countries along the single pathway of modernization. It dismissed critics of the high-tech pathway of industrial agriculture as “idealists,” urban sentimentalists nostalgic for a bucolic rural golden age that never really existed. But there was another view, that each society creates its own ways of relating to the rest of nature, its own pattern of land use, its own appropriate technology, and its own criteria of efficiency.

“This discussion raged in Cuba in the 1970s and by the 1980s the ecological model had basically won although implementation was still a long process. The Special Period, that time of economic crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the materials for high-tech became unavailable, allowed ecologists by conviction to recruit the ecologists by necessity. This was possible only because the ecologists by conviction had prepared the way.”

His daughter, Aurora Levins Morales wrote:

I feel incredibly fortunate to have been his child. My father came from a long line of Jewish radicals. He became fascinated with biology at an early age, and it was always integrated with his political passions. He became one of the world’s most influential ecologists and philosophers of science. He also played a significant leadership role in the Puerto Rican independence movement of the 1950s and 60s, and for more than fifty years, helped to develop Cuban science, mentoring generations of ecologists, teaching and advising. He was raised by a feminist grandmother, and was a strong ally to women, starting with my mother, but extending to many women scientists whom he mentored and supported, and to me, his daughter. And, he would want me to add, he spent a period of his life as a blacklisted farmer in the mountains of western Puerto Rico, and won second prize for carrots.

You can read his blog at Richard Levins . com, or look at the Facebook page set up for him.

I only met him once, and briefly, but I gave away my first copy of Dirt, the Erosion of Civilizations (David Montgomery, 2007), and I think that copy eventually got into Dick Levins’ hands. I heard, second hand, the reaction of someone who met him and was asking about ecology – he was amazed, Levins was going on and on about worms! That’s from Chapter 1 of “Dirt…” Makes me feel like a shared something interesting with a great…

Here’s a talk on left and right radicalism from 1995, half an hour. He really is so clear… Take a look.

Here’s an obituary/tribute from Jacobin magazine, by a physicist and activist living near Boston.

His page at the Harvard School for Public Health will soon be taken down. Here’s what it says today:

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health > Richard Levins

Richard Levins

FEATURES

John Rock Professor of Population Sciences

* Please take notice that Professor Richard Levins is deceased.

This web page will be removed in the very near future, so
readers are encouraged to honor/capture the remaining
links to his references at this time.

Department of Global Health and Population

665 Huntington Avenue

Building I Room 1109

Boston, MA 02115

Phone: 617.432.1484

humaneco@hsph.harvard.edu

Research

Richard Levins is an ex-tropical farmer turned ecologist, biomathematician and philosopher of science whose central intellectual concern has been the understanding and influencing of processes in complex systems, both abstractly and as applied to evolutionary ecology, economic development, agriculture and health. He has carried out this program at the theoretical level by framing the problems of adaptation to the structure of the environment in space and time, the metapopulation concept for interpreting populations in biogeography, human physiology as a socialized physiology, and the interpenetration of model building as juggling the partially opposing requirements of realism, generality and precision.

His mathematical research has had the goal of making the obscure obvious by finding the appropriate ways to visualize complex phenomena. He developed the use of signed digraphs, time averaging and pre-image sets for qualitative analysis of complex systems. A major goal is the integration of evolutionary ecology and critical social theory into a broad epidemiology that can prepare for surprises. Current research examines the variability of health outcomes as an indicator of vulnerability to multiple non-specific stressors in human communities, interactions among herbivores and their natural enemies in multispecies systems on citrus trees, and short term (transient) dynamics of model epidemiological and pathological systems.

His theoretical interests have been applied to problems of community development as part of the Board of Directors of OXFAM-America and chair of their subcommittee on Latin America and the Caribbean from 1989 to 1995. Working from a critique of the industrial-commercial pathway of development, he promoted alternative development pathways that emphasize economic viability with equity, ecological and social sustainability and empowerment of the dispossessed. As part of the New World Agriculture and Ecology Group, he has helped to develop modern agroecology, concentrating on the whole-system approaches to gentle pest management. The “Dialectical Biologist,” co-authored with Richard Lewontin, presented the authors’ approach to the study of the philosophy, sociology and history of science.

He studied plant breeding and mathematics at Cornell University, farmed in Puerto Rico and obtained his doctorate in zoology from Columbia University. He has taught at the University of Puerto Rico and the University of Chicago before coming to his present position as John Rock Professor of Population Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. Levins is currently on the Advisory Board of the International Society for Ecosystem Health and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received awards as a pioneer of the ecology movement of Puerto Rico, for his long term contributions to the development of ecological agriculture in Cuba, and the Edinburgh Science Medal (Scotland) for contributions to science and the broader society. He has received awards as a pioneer of the ecology movement in Puerto Rico, for long term contributions to the development of agricultural ecology in Cuba, the Edinburgh Science Medal(Scotland) for contributions to science and the broader society, the Lukacs 21st Century Award for contributions to statistical and mathematical ecology, and an honarary doctorate in environmental science from the University of Havana.

Education

Ph.D., 1965, Columbia University

#TomPorton, Hero Teacher, retires

January 7, 2016 am31 8:29 am

tags: James Monroe High School, Monroe HS, Tom Portman

I’ll save the comments for later. These are Tom Portman’s words. Please read. – Jonathan

To all my friends and supporters:… It is with mixed emotions that I announce that I will be retiring from the New York City Department of Education on February 1, 2016.

Looking back on 47 years in education (46 in the James Monroe building), I see a mosaic of thousands of faces…students, parents, colleagues. I have so many great memories of those years, from the excitement of the classroom, to the applause for shows I directed, to the impact of my many school and community projects. My heart is filled with so many great relationships that came from those years…so many of which I maintain even to the present day.

It is because of the joy I feel when I think of my teaching career that I have such mixed emotions about retiring. And yet, as this new year began and I took inventory of my daily routine, I realized there was a need to make a change in my professional life.

First and foremost, I do not feel that I have the same impact on young people that I have had in the past. The reason I continued teaching at Monroe for so many years was the fact that I really thought I was making a difference in the lives of my students, not only in the classroom, but especially through my work in school and community activities. It was that energy and excitement of creating and working with motivated, committed young people that kept me young and vital.

However, beginning this school year, my opportunities for continuing that impact have been lessened to the point where each day has become a struggle. For over 35 years, I began each day with my Leadership class, where I was able to create a core of 40-50 students who would facilitate a wide variety of school and community events in the Monroe Campus. Now, with that class programmed away by the current administration, making those events continue becomes harder and harder. I realized this during the past several months where I struggled to continue such projects as the Blood Drive, the Thanksgiving Community Dinner, the World AIDS Day commemoration, and the Holiday Caroling Celebration. Although I made them happen, each event was met with no support from the current administration.

Also, in the past, I was given time during the day to coordinate school and community projects, which were considered valued parts of our school community. Now, based on new programming by the current administration, it has been made virtually impossible for me to find the time to keep my projects going. As an English teacher, having to teach more classes, especially those based on EngageNY, the Common Core English curriculum that allows students to go through high school without reading a single complete novel, play, or biography, is torture for me. I’m sure my former students will attest to the fact that my classes were always filled with my own enjoyment of the subject matter and my ability to bring unique and creative materials (films, music, art) into the classroom. Now, having all materials dictated by an outside source, the joy of teaching English has all but vanished.

Finally, going to school each day and facing an atmosphere wherein my very presence is greeted with animosity by my supervisor is not a pleasant experience; and one that I have decided not to continue.

For those of you who know me well, you know that my workaholic personality will not allow me to stop working. I am currently searching for venues in which I can continue to impact the lives of young people and, at least in some manner, continue the humanistic education upon which I have built my teaching career. I certainly welcome suggestions from those of you with ideas about places and/or positions where I could continue this next segment of my career.

Thanks to each and every one of you who has been part of the mosaic which has been my career at Monroe. I hope to continue those thousands of relationships which are so meaningful to me and which have kept me committed to the Monroe tradition for so many years.

For more info, see the “I support Tom Portman” facebook page, and this article from the NY Post and this interview from 20 years ago, when the State broke up James Monroe HS. Here’s a petition to have Tom’s voice heard.

Who closed the Bronx’s high schools? by Lynne Winderbaum

January 3, 2016 pm31 9:38 pm

tags: Bill Gates, closing schools, Columbus HS, Eric Nadelstern, Joel Klein, John F Kennedy HS, Lynne Winderbaum, Michael Bloomberg, Randi Weingarten, Stevenson HS, Walton HS

by Lynne Winderbaum, retired ESL teacher, JFK HS, and former Bronx High School UFT District Rep

I wrote an intro piece on the destruction of the large high schools in the Bronx last week – Lynne, a chapter leader than district rep through this process, has much more to say – Jonathan

One day in the early 2000’s the flyers began to appear in all teachers’ mailboxes at Kennedy HS. Headlined “21st Century Grants”, the finer print announcing that the Gates Foundation and other corporate philanthropists were encouraging teachers to imagine a different way of delivering instruction. To “dream” of changing education as it was. In return, they would offer seed money to flesh out the idea and further money down the road if the ideas were judged feasible. Teachers were invited to attend a meeting for further information and the time and place were on the flyer. I surmise that some Kennedy teachers were intrigued by the offer to start a new and different school because BETA, Bronx Theater, and Law & Finance all sprang from Kennedy staff (Marble Hill, now housed at Kennedy was proposed by a group of teachers and an AP from Morris). In addition, Chapter Leaders and principals of six Bronx High Schools were personally asked to attend by the Bronx HS Superintendent, Norman Wechsler, who was interested in pursuing the Gates grants. My principal, Gino Silvestri and I were not asked to attend, probably because we were not playing well at the time. In retrospect, the lack of that invitation probably saved Kennedy from earlier closing as you will read below.

At the time Norman Wechsler took the helm of the Bronx HS Superintendency, there were no schools on the SURR (Schools Under Registration Review) list. Within a short time, there were five. While I in no way blame Dr. Wechsler for this since the demographic, educational, and economic factors that made some Bronx high schools so dismal were already in motion, but it certainly explains the atmosphere in the early 2000s that made the “small school” innovation so attractive. It was a timely gift that could make it seem that “reform” was afoot. Dr. Wechsler produced charts, graphs, and reports touting the educational superiority of the small school. One day as JFK Chapter Leader, I was out with my UFT District Rep. David Shulman. While he made a stop and I remained in the car, he handed me a pile of data supplied by the Bronx Superintendents office and asked me to look at it. It surely made small schools seem like the answer to failing schools.

When the meeting took place to get the “21st Century Grant” process rolling Walton, Columbus, Stevenson, Evander Childs, were among the schools that attended with principals and their UFT Chapter Leaders. The motive for their attendance was to learn about designing their own small schools and the grant process. Attendees I know always maintained that this was the agenda of the meeting. Several years later the Department of Education took the position that by attending the meeting, the principals and Chapter Leaders agreed to the closing of their schools. Eric Nadelstern from the Bronx Superintendent’s office and John Soldini, then UFT VP of Academic High Schools remembered that the intent to close and replace the large high schools with small schools was made clear at that meeting. Others who were there were incredulous at the announcements of intent to close schools because they did not remember the meeting that way.

Of course the SURR schools were ultimately closed by the state. But the Gates grants that led to the closing of the large Bronx high schools was a NYC effort. Christopher Columbus HS fought the attempt to close it down with a vengeance. Teacher Christine Rowland, speaking the language of data that the Department of Education spoke, made an unforgettable presentation at the Department of Education. Randi Weingarten was there, I was there, and fortunately Michelle Cahill of the DOE was there and was receptive. Columbus got a reprieve. When Cahill left, no one was listening anymore. The die was cast. The other schools all were slated for closure.

The process of implementing the small schools was not fixed, it evolved. Initially, in order to get the grant money, there was a very detailed process. A group of staff members, students, parents, and community organizers imagined a themed school, wrote a proposal and presented it in front of a panel of Department of Education and UFT representatives. I was put on many of those panels. Proposals that seemed well-thought out, staffed, and inclusive received seed money. Down the road they had to pass muster with a higher level of sponsors to get the green light and the bulk of the money. The early small schools all came through this process. Most of them were crowded into the schools that attended the grant meeting clearly in an attempt to phase them out. Schools like Kennedy, Truman, and Lehman initially only got one each.

When these schools opened there were immediate problems. So many resources were being poured by New Visions to administer these schools that a selective and advantaged system was being created while the schools that housed them, and the students they served became second-class citizens. So many laptop computers were lavished on the small schools that the principals balked at funding the host schools’ libraries. The faux marble desks rolled in while the old graffitied desks graced the classrooms of the host school. To accommodate mid-day lunch periods for small school students, the host school’s students were scheduled to eat lunch as early as 9:25am. At Stevenson, there was even a separate priority entrance created to allow for small school students to enter more quickly in the morning while the host school students waited on long lines outside. Waivers were granted to allow small schools a two-year exemption on accepting special education students. And even after the waivers expired, the special education students were not the high-needs children displaced to the large high schools. The English Language Learners were not the recent arrivals who were displaced to the large high schools.

Soon, the displacement of high-needs children bore its predictable fruit. The small schools looked like magic institutions with higher graduation rates and fewer disciplinary problems. The large schools offered a complete array of special education and ELL services. They took troubled students without screening them out. As a result, their statistics began to show the impact of the small school movement. They were deemed failing. The more high risk students sent to the large high schools, the more the higher achieving students gravitated to the small schools, the clearer the fate became for the remaining large schools.

Of course the teachers in the ill-fated schools did not take the threat to their schools lying down. Groups immediately formed at Walton, Stevenson, and schools such as New School for Arts and Sciences. They studied performance indices, produced impressive cases for keeping their schools open, and quickly learned to speak that data language which they hoped would persuade the Department of Education that they filled a need for certain students in our city. The problem was, no one at the Department of Education was willing to meet with them. Calls and emails to the Department of Education were futile. As Bronx Dist. Rep at the time, I called Frank Volpicella, now the VP of Academic High Schools. He told me to go through Leo Casey to set up a meeting at the DOE. The teachers were ecstatic at the prospect of getting a hearing. Dr. Casey told me to email his contact, Peter Dillon at the DOE and meetings would be arranged. Every school had a meeting set and at the appointed time, they appeared downtown with their Powerpoints, data, and their passion to save their schools.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Peter Dillon, Julius Cohen, and the other representatives of the DOE paid scant attention to the presentations because, it turned out, they had no power to save the schools. They were the Department’s SMALL SCHOOL advocates and ended every meeting by handing the teachers brochures on how to start their own small schools. It was all very disappointing that the crestfallen teachers’ hard work and evidence were ignored. The intent of the teachers to save their schools and faculty was for nought. The UFT had sent them to meet with folks who had a vested interest in closing them down and redirecting their efforts.

Five years later, when the death sentences for each of these schools was to be proclaimed at the kangaroo PEP (Bloomberg’s Panel for Educational Policy) hearings, the same person who channeled these teachers to Dillon, Cohen, et al, was loudly railing against the school closings. At this point the support was five years too late. When the teachers were fighting the school closings, the UFT was counseling them that “this was the wave of the future and they should get on board”. In fact, New School for Arts and Sciences came out with such a good small school proposal involving a work-study partnership with the Hunts Point Market that it was co-opted by New Visions in a memorable meeting at Maria del Carmen Arroyo’s office. New Visions took the proposal and promised no jobs to those who designed it. Christine McMurray and her group of dedicated teachers from Stevenson worked hard to propose a small school in accordance with the DOE’s advice. It fell on deaf ears. Columbus fought its second closing sentence as hard as the first. But there was no Michelle Cahill this time. The demise of the historic Bronx high schools was unstoppable.

Under Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein there was a frenzy to close large high schools. The irony was that as there became fewer and fewer large high schools to serve the high needs populations, they had nowhere to go but the new small schools. Many of those started to fail as well. The system was in turmoil with schools opening, closing, and faculties that used to be stable in their schools being relocated constantly.

The process for creating the small school had undergone a total transformation under Bloomberg and Klein as well. In lieu of an orderly process of presentations by a teacher-led committee of stakeholders that had to earn the grants on the strength and viability of their proposals, there was no process. Small schools were just created by the Department of Education to place in phasing out schools. They were being formed out of whole cloth without participation from the community. There was actually one meeting at Morris that I remember where John White gathered community members and asked them what kind of school there would want in the space opening in the building. The stakeholders offered some vocational training suggestions, but it was pro forma and the DOE went ahead with creating something of their own. In the original model the principals and teachers would work in the schools they designed. In the Bloomberg-Klein model the idea for a school came first. Then they chose a principal. Then they began to hire a staff. Since the contract calls for a Union representative on the hiring committees to staff these schools, I was on many of them. We interviewed applicants who had nothing to do with the planning of these schools. This was as far away from the original idea behind the 21 Century Grants as could be.

There’s lots more to the story and somewhere on old CDs I have my union newsletters written at the time documenting how the closures were hurting the large school students. I’ll miss Kennedy High School. It was a great school in the Bronx that was made to fail, as were others, by the concentration of high needs students in their schools as a result of the “reform movement”. For sure, lots of money was made off public education funding by private corporations. But to the extent that so many of that movement’s assumptions have now been discredited, that the large schools with their traditions are gone forever, and education has not drastically improved, we have sacrificed a generation of students on the altar of “reform” and they will not get a second chance at an education.

2 years in, 2 to go – it’s time, it’s past time, for de Blasio to clean house

December 31, 2015 pm31 2:39 pm

tags: Bill De Blasio, Bloomberg, Carmen Fariña, Dennis Walcott, Joel Klein

Top priority should be cleaning house, now.
Get the remaining Kleinies and incompetents out of Tweed.
Audit principals with high staff turnover.

As 2015, de Blasio’s second year as mayor, closes, there’s not a lot to look back on. And that’s good. It’s one of the few good things I can say about his impact on the schools.

No destructive new policies. Nothing got worse. (In sharp contrast to EVERY year that Bloomberg was in office)
We have a contract. The money came late, and not enough, but it was money, and far better getting it than continuing with our 2009 rate of pay. The mystery health savings are troubling, and may come back to hurt. The expedited process for firing one group of teachers is patently unfair, though it does not seem to have come into play, at least not yet. PROSE, allowing different contracts in different schools, should offend every unionist’s sense of union. But these are (at least for now) far smaller concessions than the ones I voted against in 2005.
Universal pre-K. I don’t care how imperfectly this has turned out so far. Universal pre-K is a Good Thing.

But this is so much less than we expected! Bloomberg, Klein, and Walcott wreaked so much havoc, did so much damage! There is massive amount of repair to be done. And yet there is no repair going on. Even the UFT leadership sees this. For the first year, year and a half, they were talking about the better tone at Tweed and at City Hall, but even they now bemoan the fact that the better tone is not filtering down into the schools. Shortly after de Blasio took office, Mulgrew chided me at an Exec Board when I spoke about “undoing the damage” of the Bloomberg, Klein, Walcott years. Now he has adopted the language himself.

We cheered getting rid of the networks. But it’s not clear that the new structures are particularly good. And reëmpower the superintendents? It’s tough to comment on, when there are not boroughwide high school superintendencies. I’m leaving this as a neutral.

My instinct is to provide a laundry list of improvements. And there are many things that could be easily done to make our schools better. But let’s focus on one change, long overdue, that will make other changes possible – it’s time to clean house.

At Tweed there are far too many Bloomberg holdovers, with Bloomberg policies, and Bloomberg attitudes. At the top the scum has been skimmed off, but the organization is due a thorough cleaning.

Administrators who have been transferred due to incompetence need to be retrained, or let go. Under Klein, if you were incompetent, but mean, they found a place for you. That has to stop. They could be at Tweed, or in some field office, or foisted on some school.
In the schools, many principals were appointed through diploma mills (including the Leadership Academy) and lack management and pedagogical skills. As long as they can make their stats look ok, no one seems to care whether or not they can actually run a school. With 1800 schools, and with most administrators able, and with the issue not being statistics, where should the DoE start?
Audit the schools with high staff turnover two years in a row. That indicates a problem, which could be an abusive administrator, but is often an incompetent one. (Two years ago Unity refused to make such a list available to our members who need to transfer. We will suggest it again.) And maybe look at schools with large programming changes after October 1. The system does not need principals who do not know how to hire staff, or principals who cannot organize classes for a new school year.

There are only two years left to undo Bloomberg’s damage. Mean, incompetent principals and APs, and Bloomberg-loyal middle level managers should not be allowed to impede progress.

Student-generated problem extensions: Changing Ghost’s Options

December 30, 2015 pm31 3:17 pm

tags: mathematical problem solving

I do off-topic problem solving, as I can fit, with my students. I claim that not knowing what technique or skill to use, and having to figure out what to try, has value, helps develop students at mathematical thinkers.

Now I have students take the problems I gave them, and generate their own problems. Instead of confronting a problem with a pretty solution, they may introduce interesting complexity. They may understand the original problem better. And they really don’t know where they are going. I claim that tackling this sort of problem that you make up, instead of one the teacher gives, pushes mathematical creativity.

I make certain that they can solve the problems they propose, or come close. I give them some time in class to work on the problems (they are grouped in 3s and 4s). And then they write up their work, using this structure:

Original Problem – Understand the Problem
Devise a Plan
Carry out the Plan
Look Back – include the proposed extension
Devise a Plan for the extension
Carry out the Plan
Look Back – include, at a minimum, recommendations for future work, or if the problem is still unsolved, tips for the next people to attempt the problem

There can be more than one plan, as the first often does not work. And this needs to be reflected in the write up. And, importantly, they do not need to complete their problems to do well.

One of the two best problems we solved this year was Ghost the Bunny.

Laura’s pet bunny, Ghost, hops up a flight of 12 stairs. Ghost hops up one step or two steps at a time, and never hops down. How many ways can Ghost reach the top step?

And in each class when we discussed extensions, someone mentioned altering the size of the hops, as an example, so it’s no surprise that several proposals did just that. Here they are:

Ghost the Bunny wants to go up 12 steps. He can jump 1 or 2 steps at a time and has the option to jump up 4 steps only one time on his journey. How many ways of going up are there?

How many ways can Phantom the Ferret get to the 15th step taking 1, 2, or 4 steps? He cannot hop backwards, and every different order of number of steps counts as a different way. Ghost must land on the 15th step, and cannot hop any further.

Laura’s pet bunny, Ghost, hops up a flight of 12 steps. Ghost hops up one or three steps at a time, and never hops down. In how many ways can Ghost reach the top step?

Laura’s pet bunny, Ghost, hops up a flight of twelve steps. Ghost hops up one, two, or three steps at a time, and never hops down. In how many ways can Ghost reach the top step?

Laura’s pet bunny, Nemo, hops up a flight of ten steps. Nemo can hop up any amount of steps at a time, but can’t hop down steps. In how many ways can Nemo reach the top step?

Ghost the bunny needs to hop up a flight of 12 stairs. Ghost can jump 1 and 2 steps at a time, 1, 2, and 3 steps at a time, 1, 2, 3, and 4 steps at a time, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 etc. How many ways can Ghost hop up for each set of numbers? What about for any set of numbers?

Thoughts on these problems? On this activity?

I will share more of the extensions in the coming days. Some students, you will see, moved much further from the original problem…

Who closed the Bronx’s high schools?

December 27, 2015 pm31 12:27 pm

tags: Board of Regents, closing schools, Eric Nadelstern, Joel Klein, Michael Bloomberg, NYSED, Randi Weingarten, Unity Caucus

There’s a story that has to be told. It needs details. It needs to include conversations, arguments, protests, planning. It needs exact dates. I can’t do all of that. It needs to be told better than I can tell it. But I can start.

In recent years, nine Bronx academic comprehensive high schools were closed and three were down-sized, two sabotaged so badly that I assume they will be retargeted for closure. Also, three Bronx vocational high schools were closed, and the fourth was down-sized.

No large or medium-sized Bronx high school has escaped unscathed (save Bronx Science, which serves relatively few Bronx kids)

The usual narrative says that Bloomberg and Klein did this.

The usual narrative is (mostly) wrong.

Bloomberg and Klein completed, enthusiastically, viciously, work that was started by others. Let’s see who they were.

When I began teaching (substitute in March 1997), it was hard for me to wrap my head around the huge number of high schools in the Bronx. I came from a high school that served three towns. The city next door had three high schools for the whole city (plus a tiny alternative high school, plus a tiny arts school ).

But the Bronx! DeWitt Clinton, Walton, John F Kennedy, Christopher Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt, Evander Childs, Harry S Truman, Herbert Lehman, South Bronx, Morris, Adlai Stevenson, William Howard Taft. Then there were the vocational schools: Grace Dodge, Samuel Gompers, Alfred E Smith, Jane Addams. Each one of these schools was bigger than the entire district where I had been educated.

And there were more schools. Bronx Science, which I knew was mostly kids from other boroughs. There were Bronx Regional, University Heights, and a handful of small, alternative schools of one sort or another. I became more familiar with at least the names of the alternative schools when I worked summer school at Bronx Regional in 1999. And I learned about another batch of schools: New School for Arts and Sciences. Monroe Academy of Visual Arts and Design. Monroe Academy of Business and Law. These were some of the mini-schools that replaced James Monroe HS, closed in 1994 for poor academic performance. That made three schools I knew of that had been closed: Andrew Jackson in Queens (I had an intern at a previous job from there), George Washington in upper Manhattan and James Monroe.

James Monroe had been closed when Giuliani was Mayor and Cortines was Schools Chancellor, but I don’t know the details, and suspect the decisions were made by the State at least a year earlier. The mayor must have been Dinkins, but this was before Mayoral Control.

Then I heard about Morris High School. Morris is a beautiful building, with a spectacular auditorium, and in 1998 the State began to close it. Eventually it was replaced by four mini-schools, one per floor.Enrollments were capped, and Morris kids started showing up at other high schools in the Bronx. In 1998 the Governor was Pataki and the Mayor was Giuliani, and the Chancellor was Rudy Crew, though I don’t know how much any of those three were involved.

Next, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. The closings began in 2002, after Bloomberg’s election, and days after Joel Klein replaced Harold Levy, but the plans had been in the works for several years, and I believe (but do not know) that it was the State that had made the crucial decisions. Each school was replaced with mini-schools. In the case of Taft, some of those mini-schools have since been closed. At Roosevelt, one of the mini-schools is on the Renewal List, which may mean it is also being targeted for closure.

But the next batch of schools has a clearer group of assailants. Again, the planning pre-dates Bloomberg/Klein, although they gladly signed on. In this case the impetus came from a huge grant from Bill and Melinda Gates. They paid, a lot, to experiment on our kids. And yes, the Mayor and the Chancellor agreed. Their pointman was Eric Nadelstern. But none of this happens without the enthusiastic support of UFT President Randi Weingarten.

It’s time to tell the story, but I need to ask others to fill in the details. Weingarten and Gates’ NYC people chose to preemptively shut down large Bronx high schools, and create mini-schools. There was no legal requirement, no State mandate. She did this over the objections of her members in the schools, and over the objections of her elected chapter leaders in the schools. Stevenson, Walton, Columbus, South Bronx, Kennedy, Evander.

The massive Bronx high school closures of the early 2000s required full support from the UFT leadership. Weingarten and Unity Caucus gave their full support to this destruction.

The story does not end there. Mini-schools get created like crazy in 2002, 03, 04, 05…. Columbus and Kennedy were initially down-sized, not phased out. But at this point Klein and Bloomberg picked up the ball. Their henchman, Nadelstern, was joined by new bureaucrats, reformers with little real teaching or school leadership experience, some from Teach for America themselves. I can think of Suransky and Sternberg, but there were others. They targeted the vocational schools (now called Career and Technical Education, or CTE, schools.) They eventually retargeted Columbus and Kennedy, and killed them off. They got mini-schools into Clinton and Lehman, and even Truman. And they began shutting down mini-schools inside old Bronx high schools, including some that they themselves opened.

Klein and Bloomberg our the clearest villains in this story. Their intent was bad, beginning to end. There is no mitigating detail, no tragic misunderstanding. The Bronx was a target.

It could be said in defense of the State Education Department and the Regents and Morris, that there was some good intent. I’m not sure.

It could be said in the case of the Weingarten and her people at the UFT that they had some sort of noble goal, or they were blinded by Gates’ money or his flattery, but were too stupid or short-sighted to realize how harmful this was.

But Gates? Rich guy, liked an idea, threw money at it, saw that it failed, and walked away. “Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way.” But his obligation to remediate the damage he caused? There is none. Unforgivable.

Eric Nadelstern. Our own Peter Pettigrew. He actually knew something about education. But he saw the destruction of Bronx high schools as a stepping stone in his career. When Klein stepped down, he must have seen the Chancellor’s Office as his… When Bloomberg not only passed over him, but chose educational-know-nothing Cathie Black, and appointed Nadelstern (botching his name) as her tutor, well, I let myself smile a little. He’s now teaching at Teacher’s College, though I don’t understand how, without the usual credentials.

Now, there’s a lot to this story. One blog post is not enough. There are details that need adding. Others need fixing. Documents that need referencing. But I got the rogues right:

New York State (need names)
Bill Gates
Randi Weingarten (need names of her team on this)
Eric Nadelstern (add associates)
Joel Klein
Michael Bloomberg

Extending Problems

December 24, 2015 am31 10:13 am

In my mathematics classes I try to carve out a day or half a day here and there to do off-topic problem solving.

The usual routine in a math class is: teacher teaches new topic, skill, fact, etc, and then the students solve a bunch of problems or answer a bunch of questions applying that skill or fact.

But there is something missing… Students don’t have to select what skill or tool or fact to apply. They just pick the one they were just taught, or the one before that. In fact, year end or semester end exams are a little better, but still the students are picking from a group of related skills, and the questions posed usually make obvious which tool to use.

That’s where the off-topic problem solving comes in. What if I ask a group of you a question, unrelated to what we did yesterday, seemingly out of left field, that requires only math that you already know, but without any of the usual cues about what tool to use? That’s what I do. Questions mix counting, arithmetic, organization, and visualization skills. They require reasoning, planning. In a better world, with a less dense curriculum, I would do a whole lot of this.

With freshman classes I have a few favorite problems. Each asks “how many” which is a question we don’t ask nearly often enough. Ghost the Bunny. The checkerboard. How many subsets. We solve maybe two of these in the fall. A few years ago I started asking kids to turn in a write up of the problem, including process and solution.

But for the last two years I have asked the students to go further… to devise their OWN problem, as an extension of something we have already done. This year, they extended Ghost the Bunny, or the Checkerboard.

Laura’s pet bunny, Ghost, hops up a flight of 12 stairs. Ghost hops up one step or two steps at a time, and never hops down. How many ways can Ghost reach the top step?

How many squares are on an 8 x 8 checkerboard?

What would your students come up with? (I’ll tell you mine in a follow-up post)

Jia Lee for United Federation of Teachers President

November 3, 2015 am30 9:03 am

tags: Jia Lee, MORE Caucus, UFT elections

I am voting for Jia Lee in the spring 2016 UFT elections. I am campaigning for her. I am convincing everyone I can to vote for her.

My caucus, New Action/UFT, is running a joint slate with MORE (Movement of Rank and File Educators). Part of our agreement was that the presidential candidate would come MORE’s ranks, subject to mutual agreement. A few weeks ago MORE told us that their only nominee was Jia. New Action’s Executive Board quietly and unanimously approved. Thus MORE’s big announcement at their October 24 Conference: Jia Lee voted in as MORE/New Action’s Presidential Challenger to Michael Mulgrew and his Passive Unity Caucus.

Jia Lee is a UFT Chapter Leader at her school, The Earth School in District 1, where she teaches special education in grades 4/5. She is a leader of the opt-out movement, the parent/teacher/community fight back against standardized testing. She has taught a lot of parents and teachers about opt-out, and changed many minds. She also went to Washington and told a bunch of senators about opt out. I’m not sure if she changed any minds there, but it’s a good a photo and a good headline, and testament to her leadership role at the local level.

Jia’s teaching career began in 2001, teaching high school in District 75.

I’ve just met Jia twice, she’s certainly personable, there’s not much more I can say. But I’ve seen her speak several times at the Delegate Assembly, most recently advocating that the union try to stop the DoE from screwing mom’s on maternity leave. (She spoke well, but the woman Michael Mulgrew chose to respond argued against helping mom’s on maternity leave, since they can get paid two year’s later than everyone else and they made a choice….)

Anyway, my announcement’s not really news. But if I am going to get back to writing, this announcement needed to be in this space.

Starting to repay an overdue debt

October 31, 2015 pm31 4:52 pm

tags: Land of Milk and Money

Last night I walked into Warby Parker and ordered up some nice frames. Rowan, if you are curious. In “graphite fog” which we know really isn’t a color, but we get the idea, right?

So I’ve got one clerk helping me, and as I’m narrowing choices I’m asking another two clerks opinions, and we are chatting, and they are trying to figure how where I am on the old fogey / boring / interesting / brash / conservative / whatever spectrum, and I’ve chosen and they are putting in the order, and one guy, seemingly in charge, says he taught for a while, too.

“Where?” I ask. “An after school program.” “Where?” I ask. “California.” “Northern? or Southern?” “Central, actually.”

Now I find that surprising. Central California? I only know one guy from Central California.

“I only know one guy from Central California – back when I used to blog” (I don’t think I am actually back. We will see) “about math, among other things, there was this professor in one of the lesser known colleges in the UC system, Portuguese, off a dairy farm in Central California” “I’m Portuguese off a dairy farm” “Well, actually, I think this guy was Azorean” “Me too! My grandparents!” “And he wrote a funny book about growing up on the farm, family rivalries, old country stuff. It was a lot of fun. Land of Milk and Money I think it was called”

And the other clerk is checking me out, and this guy asks – “is he –” and he says I name that I think is right. “Oh man, these are my people, I need to get this book”

And I hope he does.

I need to do, should have done long ago, a plug for Land of Milk and Money. Zeno Ferox is the pseudonym of a math professor in the UC system, blogging at Halfway There (yes, for my mathy friends, the pseudo+blog are a joke).

The book is about an immigrant family, from the Azores, finding success in the Central Valley of California as dairy farmers. Funny stories and bits of family history are woven into an arc, where the success of the first generation leads to bickering amongst the second and the third – a tale familiar to some other immigrant groups in the US as well. In fact, I have a few stories… but I’m no writer.

Anyhow, Land of Milk and Money is an easy read, well-written, thoroughly enjoyable. I encourage you to find a copy.

State of our Union, State of our Schools Conference

October 30, 2015 am31 7:57 am

tags: MORE Caucus, New Action

I attended this past Saturday’s State of our Union conference. It was the first official MORE event I had ever been to.

I missed the opening plenary. What a shame! There was an official announcement that Jia Lee would be the presidential candidate of the joint MORE/New Action slate. I would have liked to have been there. Then there was Jia’s speech, which I caught on line, but would have liked to see in person.

But I got there in time for two of the three workshops. There was a good group of New Action supporters. But there were A LOT of people. Every room I visited was full. Not everyone else there were MORE supporters. Some were from caucuses from other cities. There were the curious. The third caucus. And people who were parts of other progressive organizations doing work in the NYC Public Schools.

The discussions I stayed for – discontinued probationers and integrating our schools – had fairly wide-ranging discussions. I agreed with a lot, disagreed with some, found some fascinating. But that’s what discussion’s supposed to be like, right? What a contrast to the UFT Executive Board, where a handful of people speak, but most members sit silently meeting after meeting, only speaking to vote “Aye” or “Nay” in unison.

We were greeted warmly. There was genuine appreciation that we are working together on this election – even from people who were incredibly hostile to us in the past. Of course, some of them might have said the same about me. Maybe there was a vague air of self-satisfaction from a few of the organizers – but I can’t imagine having double the planned turnout without feeling at least a little satisfied. Two plenaries, fifteen workshops, all full? Hell, I’d be smug about that.

In the rooms all ideas were taken seriously – MORE’s goal was to assemble/work on program. This was their outreach to their supporters, and they got a lot of input. And while the two groups will sit down later and go through finer points, I think they appreciated some of our input at this stage as well.

I stayed for the final plenary. Good idea. The speakers from Seattle and Philly were interesting, though I didn’t take notes, and don’t have great recollection of what they said. I think Megan Moskop spoke, maybe organizational stuff? wrapping up? In fact, there is only one thing I really remember from the end: Lauren Cohen gave the most amazing, moving talk. I had no idea. It was personal, it was emotional, it was brave, and it drove home why we need to stand up for every single member, why we need to change “business as usual” and sweep away every ounce of Bloomberg/Klein dreck in the New York City Department of Education.

Joint Slate – New Action and MORE

September 16, 2015 pm30 2:37 pm

tags: MORE Caucus, New Action

Today my caucus announced that New Action and MORE are running together in the spring UFT elections. I fully support this move.

Some people will be happy. Others will be angry. But some will ask, “why now?”

Now, because the time is right.

Now, because on the two biggest issues facing members – abusive administrators and teacher evaluation – the two groups are in agreement. Our leadership has dropped the ball on abusive administrators, even as far as dropping the Principals in Need of Improvement (PINI) program when it was needed more than ever. I hope they rethink this, and step up for members facing horrible principals. But today too many of our members are on their own. Our leadership partly favors the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. I hope they change this position. And in time I believe they must. But today they stand on the wrong side.

We are no longer facing a hostile City Hall, forcing us to lock arms on a daily basis. This is the time we should be doing the members business. This is the time we should be advocating for teachers, schools, education. The joint MORE/New Action campaign will be doing exactly that.

The Drive to Choteau – Photographs and Video

August 30, 2015 pm31 11:58 pm

tags: Choteau, Glacier National Park, Montana, US89

After walking 2 1/2 miles around Swiftcurrent Lake in Many Glacier, Alan and I were left with no signal, and no real way of knowing exactly how long our drive was. Except we knew at 7 that we would not make it to Choteau before dark. We are avoiding night driving because 1) we want to see the country, and 2) it’s not so comfortable driving in the dark over unknown roads. This turned out to be an unanticipated adventure.

And there was fire. No, no leaping flames. But freshly burnt forest. And forest recovering from a several-years-old burn. And smoke. Thick enough to block the sun. Thin enough to look light an 0ff-white cloud. And sometimes missing. Close enough to burn eyes and noses. Far enough to give a faint woodfire smell to everything. And sometimes, no surprise, absent.

Traffic, leaving Glacier National Park:

These two are outside the park, on the Blackfeet Reservation. Given the new pine trees, this area must have burned a few years ago.

Suddenly, the road disappeared. This stretch must have been 4 miles. The stretch in the dark later was endless.

At least this part of unpaved US89 was straight. There was an unpaved, half-closed roundabout in Browning, MT.

As the sun went down, our nerves started to jangle:

Dusk, Road, Night, Dark, Haze – blurred together and surrounded us.

A light rain earlier had blotched all the dust on the car into mud-dots – visible in this late-dusk shot of the emptiness to our right.

The dark reminded me of Annie Hall. Except no headlights. Nothing. No farm lights, very few other cars. Eerie and creepy.

On arriving in Choteau

August 30, 2015 pm31 12:09 pm

tags: Choteau, Glacier National Park

I’ve been on the road with my friend Alan. Utah, Idaho, Montana. We are still headed for Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado.

800 miles or so done. Yesterday was Glacier National Park, spectacular, even with the smoke. We had 2 hikes, one on each side of the continental divide. We had spectacular views. The Going-to-the-Sun Road was so breathtakingly majestic AND scary that we are doing laundry today….

Alan and I have been staying in little motels, no chains. Marble Motel, Trementon UT. DK Motel, Arco ID. Mountain Spirit Inn, Darby MT. Hungry Horse Motel, Columbia Falls MT. Some very nice, some adequate, no problems. All $60-$80. I didn’t do it to be cheap, but they have worked out in every respect, including $$.

But the timing across Montana is tricky – we are covering a lot of ground in just a couple of days. And I booked in advance. And the right distance from Glacier led me to look towards Great Falls, but not as far as Great Falls. And the perfect spot was $100. But it had laundry facilities (we packed knowing that we’d do laundry midway, not realizing how perfect that would be), and included breakfast.

As it turned out, US 89 out of Many Glacier was narrow, deserted, and in two significant chunks, unpaved. Half our ride passed through a Blackfoot Reservation, which seemed even emptier. And we enjoyed Glacier so late, that darkness fell as we drove. And the smoke from the forest fires got a bit thicker and more acrid. And we drove with long silent stretches. The smoke, dark, narrow, empty and unpredictable were weighing on us, and on Alan, who was driving (thank you) more than on me.

So when we got to Choteau Stage Stop Inn, and saw that it was a small hotel, not a motel, we were relieved. And when Alan saw it had a bar, and learned it was open until 2, he could have shed a tear.

Protection from Prose?

July 22, 2015 am31 12:08 am

tags: Prose

In Unity there is Strength. It’s why we negotiate as a union, instead of, for example, as math teachers. Or as high school teachers. Or as special ed teachers. Or as art teachers. It’s also why we do not negotiate one school at a time.

Except in Prose schools.

Now, some Prose schools got a pass on Danielson. They like Prose, some have told me. Honestly, we should all get the pass on Danielson. We should not have to sacrifice our union principals to get a good concession for all the teachers of NYC.

NYC Educator is writing more about Prose. He includes a shameful quote from a former UFT leader:

“PROSE … empowers teachers to make positive change”

It seems that some of our leaders forget that negotiating TOGETHER is a victory. Negotiating as isolated units would be, and is, a loss. But I guess it takes a real commitment to the idea of “union” to understand that.

Or maybe, reading our contract. I quote the contract negotiated between the New York City Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers:

It is understood that all collective bargaining is to be conducted at Board headquarters level. There shall be no negotiation with the Union chapter or with any other employee group or organization at the school level. It is further understood that there shall not be established or continued in any school a Staff Relations Committee as described in the Staff Relations Plan issued by the Board on October 23, 1956.

No school by school negotiations. This is Article 1, seventh paragraph.

Photo Credit: Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives,Cornell University Library,Group Photo, Placards, Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, Rally

Have school closings in NYC stopped for now?

July 21, 2015 am31 11:29 am

tags: Andrew Cuomo, Bill De Blasio, Carmen Fariña, Merryl Tisch, NYSED, NYSUT, school closings, school closures

One expectation that we had for de Blasio / Fariña was that school closings would stop. Has this happened?

Sort of. And now much of those decisions are out of their hands. So much so that I left it off my Mayor/Chancellor expectations list.

Bloomberg/Klein/Black/Walcott willfully closed dozens of high schools. I do not know the count, but 50 in all? Is that about right? More? They targeted bigger schools. These schools, whether incidentally, or intentionally, had larger concentrations of veteran teachers. And veteran teachers these days also means more Black and Hispanic teachers. They were mostly places where institutional memory and habit respected much of the language and spirit of the contract.

They also targeted elementary schools and middle schools for replacement by charters. That’s scores more.

Each closure dumped teachers into the ATR pool – dozens and dozens of veteran teachers who face systematic, mandated discrimination.

So new regime in, the annual PEP circus with large numbers of closures at once is over. Though the old regime already shut the biggest targets. And…

1. We are still watching the tail end of phase outs.

2. This year, under NYS pressure two Renewal schools dumped over half their staff (Boys and Girls HS and Automotive HS) – though with a promise of annual (non-permanent) placement for the next few years.

3. Now New York State (Cuomo/Tisch) is now going over the City’s head. They have targeted seven schools (five in the Bronx) for takeover next year. They have targeted an additional 55 schools (27 in the Bronx) for takeover the year after that.

Think of it this way: the Bloomberg closures also came with new schools opening. While many were charter schools, most were NYCDoE schools – so at least the number of teachers entering the ATR pool was near the number of new openings. These Cuomo closings are directly removing the schools from the DoE – those positions will be entirely lost.

This is nothing less than an attempt to break the job security provision of our contract. It is “disruptive innovation” – intentionally creating educational chaos for our schools, teachers, students, communities.

So, did de Blasio / Fariña do ok on school closures? They haven’t aggressively closed schools. But we barely got a break, between lagging phase-outs, the “Renewal” process, and Cuomo’s ill-intentions for next year, and the years after that.

I guess we could ask the mayor and chancellor to more aggressively oppose Cuomo. But what we really need is a real fightback against Cuomo and Tisch, to overturn the horrible changes to State Law, including these state-forced closures, but going back to basing teacher evaluations on test scores. We need our union, the UFT and NYSUT, to mobilize our members, both through demonstrations, and at the ballot box. But this requires some serious change of policy and practice.

de Blasio / Fariña – not performing up to expectations

July 17, 2015 pm31 2:49 pm

tags: Bill De Blasio, Carmen Fariña

I think those who are trashing them are wrong.

I think those who are defending them are wrong.

I’ll leave out the non-education stuff – that’s more complicated, and while de Blasio has chalked up some pretty big blunders, he’s miles better than the guy he replaced.

But on education, they’ve been in office for a year and a half. They only have two and a half left. I’m not so interested in what they’ve gotten right. Or in what they’ve gotten wrong. I am most concerned about how little they have actually done.

I wrote in December 2013:

I expect that teachers will not fall in love with the next Chancellor. I expect she will do a lot of things we don’t like. But I also expect she won’t be hated, and that she won’t pursue massively harmful reform strategies. And I hope that she will undo all of the Bloomberg destructive policies. And I expect that she will undo at least a few of them.

And even with my low expectations, I’ve been disappointed. Here are a few issues that could have been addressed January 1, 2014, and what’s happened with them in the last year and a half.

Remove Bloomberg/Klein/Walcott cronies. Most of this has happened at the highest levels, but it took a long time, too long. There would have been symbolism in cleaning house in the first weeks, or months. Instead they quietly left, Brodsky just this spring, and there are a few hanging on.
Get rid of the lawyers. Useless cash drain. Shameful.
Control “empowered” incompetent principals. Get rid of true problem principals. I see two high profile removals, a handful of sex removals, and minor stuff. I’m looking at this from a teacher’s point of view – these are abusive administrators. But what about from a child’s point of view? These are largely incompetents. And there are literally hundreds in the system – perhaps 200-300 out of 1800 principals. Most are poorly trained, left-overs from Klein. And as far as I can tell, no one has ever looked to see if they are competent to run our schools, to educate children. Where is the hard look at them? Where is the retraining? Where are the removals?
Progress Reports. Get rid of the stupid letter grades (done immediately when they took office). End the fake preparation for dog and pony Quality Reviews. Not done. End the reviews by strangers. Not done.
Funding. End the system of “charging” salary against school budgets. This system distorts the transfer process by rewarding principals for appointing less experienced teachers, and rewards them most for making a new hire (which adds a new cost of $60k or so to the system) instead of taking a transfer, which adds no new costs. It hurts schools, and students, depriving them of seasoned educators, and adding instability to many schools in poorer neighborhoods. This system has been kept in place, with no hint (yet) that they are even looking.
Return to districts, with superintendents responsible for their schools and their principals. Disband the networks. These borough support centers or whatever they are called are a half step. And they retain some of the “networky” feel. As far as superintendencies, high schools got screwed. The high school superintendencies when I started, in the 90s, provided some real support (including in content areas), and had a real sense of cohesion. Under the new structures, none of this is recreated.

Coming in, de Blasio was more sympathetic than Bloomberg, and Fariña was a real educator, unlike Klein or Black or Walcott. But being a real educator and being a good educator are different things. Fariña’s tenure as a principal was not one that recommended her to us – she pushed good teachers out of her school and brought in more pliant teachers. I do not expect that she will carry out the work that teachers believe needs to be done. But I think it is reasonable for us to expect some progress, more than we’ve seen.

The poster children for lack of progress are the scores of incompetent, abusive principals. And we should press to have more reviewed, retrained, removed. But the reality of the moment informs two other priorities:

We should be pressing the unit costing issue. The technical piece (this wastes money) and the affective piece (this makes principals bring in less experienced teachers for their kids, and plays out most harshly with the schools with the neediest kids), stand in sharp contrast to the argument for keeping the current system (there is none). A lot of bang for the buck is available – teachers and the DoE working together to save money and bring the best possible teachers to the kids who need them most.
We should work on cleaning house – particularly the middle level, now that Klein’s tops are gone. I think the swarm of Klein-folk collectively keep his policies in place, sometimes informally, sometimes through foot-dragging, sometimes just through attitude. This is not as easy a sell as unit costing, and one removal hardly would make a difference, but the cumulative effect of replacing dozens, scores, hundreds would be real. And the sell “new chancellor needs to have her own people at the level where policy is implemented” is not a bad one. It would be helpful if some idiot TFAer got caught, publicly, acting under expired Klein/Walcott directives that contradict what Fariña has asked for.

In any case, the lack of progress is frustrating. But it should not move us into denouncing the chancellor. Rather, we should continue to push for progress on issues that matter.

Chalkbeat asks right question – writes wrong headline

July 16, 2015 pm31 1:23 pm

tags: anti-public education reform, CC Algebra Regents, Chalkbeat, Common Core, Common Core Algebra Regents, Integrated Algebra Regents, new york state department of education, NYSED

Chalkbeat writes an article about how common core algebra rigged-lower scores have concerned parents, teachers, and schools.

But they give it headlines that say something else

Concerns mount over tougher Algebra Regents test, and officials promise a review
Responses reflect ongoing uneasiness with the pace of New York’s adoption of the Common Core standards

– that we are concerned about implementation (nope – don’t like CC at all) and that says we are worried about tougher tests (nope, we are concerned that the scoring scale was rigged to make strong students score not so well).

This is advocacy-based journalism. When the facts don’t match the preferred story-line, use the headline to tell a story that differs from the facts.

There have been many people concerned, not just me.

But here’s what I wrote. Here’s what Patrick Honner wrote. You decide.

Road trip! Ideas?

July 12, 2015 pm31 10:12 pm

tags: Colorado, Crazy Horse Memorial, Denver, Glacier National Park, Idaho, Lava Hot Springs, Montana, Mount Rushmore, Salmon River, South Dakota, Utah, Wounded Knee

I’ve never taken a real road trip before. August will be my first.

Denver to Salt Lake City. Via all or most of: Wounded Knee, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse Memorial, Glacier National Park, the Salmon River, Lava Hot Springs, ID.

Cool, huh?

So what should we miss? What shouldn’t we miss? Towns? Museums? Parks?

What’s worth spending extra time in? What should be a quick stop?

Any recommendations on specific places to stay? to eat?

On types of places to stay, to eat?

This should be fun!

Education, Math, Teaching, New York, Bronx, Union, Language, Travel

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