PEPSQUEAKS

Well of course the Bloomberg PEPSQUEAKS came up small once again last night. I left with Lisa Donlan and Julie Cavanagh around 10-something and we hit a bar on Lafayette S.t where we ran into other PEP fugitives. But I'll have to delve into the PEP details later. These late nights and all this activism just isn't leaving me any time for thoughtful blogging. When I got home around 12 last night, I realized I had left my video power pack and battery plugged in by the stage and I couldn't download the video without it. Oy! A trip back to Tech? Was the meeting still on? A check at Gotham and sure enough, there was Anna Philips still going at it. A few text messages back and forth and she found it. So now I have to head into the city to pick it up. And maybe some lunch and a movie. Thanks to Anna for this big favor. I owe her a scoop. I might have a goodie for her reward.

Before I leave, let me say that not everyone was happy with the UFT-led walkout and I'm in the process of sorting all that out, even my own feelings. I'm listening to all sides. NYC Educator was in the house and walked out (The Party's Over). 

I was thinking that they might all come back in and totally disrupt the meeting to such an extend that business couldn't be conducted, sort of what a parent group did on August 16. See my reports and videos:

• More PEP Video - PEP members walk off the stage to...
• Parents Close Down PEP - Commentary and First Vide...

Parent activist Lisa Donlan got into Michael Mendel's face during the walkout telling him that the PEP and all the other mayoral control crap is their RoseMary's baby and how dare they claim their own creation is illegitimate and then walk out leaving the people from PS 9K battling the DFER-led charter robots alone? We stayed to try to support them and I trailed after the green-shirted paid DFER gang even as they tried to run away from me and refuse to answer questions - but I got video of them distributing food - hey Joe Williams, with all the billionaires supporting you can't you afford to get something better than sandwiches?

It's even more fun listening to Lisa (who along with GEM's Gloria Brandman did a redux of the puppet show and the song "Which Side Are You On" when they spoke after the walkout, which really could have had an impact if the people had stayed) after a drink.

Here is a comment she made this morning:

The momentum that has been building for a year, died when the UFT and their followers walked out, leaving the victims of the closings and co-locations alone with the PEP and the astroturfed ERN coached charter folks. What exactly was accomplished by that stunt?

Other than making it clear that some give marching orders and the rest mostly march when told?

After all, the groups that led the walk out are now declaring the governance structure broken beyond repair- which is ironic because they are the very same groups that asked for this tweaked version of Mayoral control.

 Now its not working?

 Really?

What did last night do to advance any cause or strategy?

What are you proud of exactly?

See some of her other comments this morning below the fold.

Of course, this has been a tumultuous week. Monday's mostly student rally ending in a civil disobedience action opened things up with a bang (Video of CEJ Rally and Civil Disobedienc...)
followed by Tuesday's PEP meeting - Ed Notes links here

• And Now Folks, For the Entertainment Portion of Ou...
• Poison Pep Pills
• More PEP
• PEP Report

Gotham Schools blow-by-blow Feb 1 account with Anna Philips on the gun:

and of course last night's follow-up. Here are Gotham links - see especially Anna Philips' marathon effort: The Panel for Educational Policy voted to close 12 more schools. (GS, Times, DN, Post, NY1, WSJ). And make sure to read the comments.

MORE FROM LISA DONLAN



9:59 p.m. A charter school parent at the microphone elicits some boo’s by saying, “I’m grateful the UFT is gone and the riff-raff is gone because now the real parents can speak.”

“Chancellor Black,” the parent continued, “I hope you’re listening to every parent here.”

Black, who has been remarkably motionless throughout the night, nodded.

9:08 p.m. With students at schools slated for phase-out gone, much of the speech-making tonight is being devoted to two relatively minor space-sharing issue.

Both are plans to put charter schools with the Uncommon Schools network in district buildings: Brooklyn East Collegiate is set to move into the P.S. 9 building, and Leadership Prep Ocean Hill is slated to move into the building where P.S. 332 now is.

P.S. 9 parents complain that a charter school would block plans to expand the school to middle school grades. A Department of Education spokesman said that the move would only take away one classroom from P.S. 9 next year and that the school would receive multiple rooms back next year.

(In between 8 and 9 pm i mostly anti district school and pro charter speakers take the mic)

7:55 p.m. Anna estimates that there are about 350 people at Brooklyn Tech. The walkout cleared many people away.
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Dmytro Fedkowskyj, the Queens Borough President’s appointee to the panel, starts the question-and-answer period by calling attention to the many concerns he heard about class size, technology, resources, and other supports in schools that are facing closure.

“I have taken a tour of Jamaica High School and I saw how the new schools did seem to have newer technology while Jamaica didn’t have it,” he said. “And it concerned me.”

Paymon Rouhanifard, a top official in the DOE’s portfolio office, responds that the inequality is simply a function of the way the department organizes school budgets.

“What you see in Jamaica is the fact that Jamaica has been around for a long time, by virtue it has a more senior faculty that has a higher budget need to soak up the salaries of those teachers. Its principal has to work around those challenges,” Rouhanifard said. “The new [schools] may have younger teachers so their cost may not be as high.”

Let's not forget that the UFT /CEJ/AQE/Immigrant Coalition and others cut a deal with the DoE back in 2007 that included cancelling a May rally, at a time when when protests were building citywide against the DoE's move to stand-alone schools in virtual networks.

FSF not only makes each school accountable for the actual teacher salary, thus making experienced teachers a financial liability, it also has allowed DoE to transfer hidden administrative and support costs to individual school budgets.

Thus the short term opportunism of the union and its allies helped DoE take major steps to destroy our schools.

We need a labor force and grassroots groups that will fight back, not accommodate and self deal.

Lisa Donlan

And Now Folks, For the Entertainment Portion of Our Program - PEP Video: GEM Real Reformers Sing and MCA Steppers

Some lyrics:

They don’t know how to teach history,
they don’t know how to teach biology,
They don’t know much about science books,
they don’t know much about the cuts we took,
but they do know how to close down schools,
we’re fighting back you know that we’re not fools,
What wonderful schools they could be.

They know a lot about charter schools,
and that they think that merit pay is cool,
..Parents, teachers, students know there’s more
They know there’s more than just test scores
What wonderful schools these could be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbVojmHITR4






See Cathie Black buckle when faced with jeers - look how nasty and annoyed she is. How much more abuse can she stand?
http://www.ny1.com/content/news_beats/education/133278/chancellor-black-criticiz

Also see commentary here: (Daily Politics, City Room)

Poison Pep Pills

The good thing about print journalism and writing a regular column is that you have to get your thoughts together in some orderly way, as opposed to ranting and doing stream of consciousness on the blog. The deadline for my semi-monthly Rockaway newspaper Wave columns is Wednesday at 9am. How to summarize last night's PEP in a thousand words? I began at 7:30am and just about hit the deadline - ok, so I missed by 10 minutes. (Boy, I think back to those 350 word compositions we had to write in school and how painful pulling every word was.)

I have a lot more to say about the UFT and Moskowitz strategies. Maybe after breakfast. Or lunch. Or the gym. Jealous? You can retire after 35 years. Or if it's up to Cuomo and Bloomberg, maybe not.

I copied the Gotham Schools links to stories about the meeting:
The city school board voted to close 10 schools. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, Post, WNYC, NY1)

Poison Pep Pills

by Norm Scott

February 2, 2011

With so many schools being closed this year by the Department of Education – 26 at last count ­– and charter co-locations – the word the DOE uses while I use "invasion" (one commentator compared them to bed bugs) there seems to be a Panel for Educational Policy meeting every day. Actually, there are two this month and two in March. Memories of last January's marathon ten hour horror story meeting where 19 schools were being closed still haunts people. So  now will we have two 5-hour marathon horror story meetings? Not so fast.

The Feb. 1 started at 6pm and ended at 1am. I gave up by 10:30 and headed home (which might explain some wobbly grammar in this column). This meeting was billed as a big confrontation between the UFT, which had called a pre-hearing rally akin to the one last January that packed Brooklyn Tech and led to a massive round of booing during Joel Klein's speech and Eva Moskowitz' Harlem Success Academy machine which followed up the next month with busloads of parents who cheered Joel Klein while spending the evening talking about how they need charters because the school Uncle Joel ran were so awful. But Eva loved Joel because he gave her whatever she wanted. Rumors she had him locked up in her basement with a ball in his mouth have not been confirmed but I suspect the real reason he left the DOE to earn millions as a propagandist for Rupert Murdoch was to get out from under Eva.

Well, the UFT decided to postpone their rally supposedly because the weather report was bad from Feb. 1 to the Feb. 3rd PEP (where the final nail is expected to be driven into the coffins of Beach Channel and Jamaica High Schools, among others). I don't think it was the weather but a strategy to avoid a major confrontation with the HSA parents. One of my colleagues in the Grassroots Education Movement commented: "I think their moving the rally date from the 1st to the 3rd is a tactical  disaster (compounding the fiasco of their wider strategy).  Moskowitz will able to dominate the hearing (hopefully the D3 parents will out mobilize them), the vote will happen and the result will dominate the news cycle - leading to demoralization and decreasing turnout for Thursday."

Eva didn't postpone anything and showed up, depending on the reports, with either hundreds or thousands of busloads and food for them all. How many buses does that take and what did this all cost? Money that could have gone towards getting her own buildings instead of take overs of public school space. But she has a political, not an educational agenda. She is pushing into white middle class areas where public schools are overcrowded and the massive Brandeis HS campus, which already has four high schools in it, is her target. There was a lot of pushback from just about every upper West Side politician and parent leader. The community board voted 40-0 against Eva and every single PTA lined up against her. But the final outcome of the Bloomberg-dominated PEP was a foregone conclusion (Egypt's Hosni Mubarek often complains he allows way more democracy than Michael Bloomberg does) and Eva prevailed again, but leaving in her wake another neighborhood of people filled with outrage. This time she picked the wrong neighborhood and look for some severe hostility from parents who want more high school space at Brandeis but will be denied as Eva expands her school grade by grade and pushes out some of the existing high schools - which I predict at least two will be set up for failure so they can be closed and have their space given over to Eva over the next few years.

The UFT did show, but mostly with staffers. At times it seems there are almost enough of those to fill a few busloads. I didn't see food for them but then again many of them have UFT credit cards. They did have blue tee shirts to counter Eva's orange ones. The UFT shirts said, "Chancellor Black Do Your Homework" on the front and "Fix Schools = A+, Close Schools = F". Okay, a little lame but at least there was a sense of some pushback at the charter juggernaut.

One of the highlights of the evening occurred when my pals in the Grassroots Education Movement ­– who term themselves the "Real Reformers" – did their usual thing, wearing their red capes with a big "RR" on the back and this month singing "What a Wonderful World This Could Be" with lyrics like "They don't know much about history....but they do know how to close down schools..."

Battle over public schools escalates with civil disobedience

Joel Klein called the misnamed "achievement gap" the "civil rights issue of our time." Fighting back against the ed deformer strategy of forcing the closure of many inner city schools to make way for favored privately controlled charters is the real civil rights issue of the time. On Monday January 31, I attended a rally of mostly NYC  high school students near City Hall  and Tweed focused on the forced closing of schools as part of the drive to privatize by short-changing these schools of resources. Shouting “Fix Schools, Not Just Close Them" and "What does democracy look like? This is what democracy looks like" two New York City Council Members and dozens of parents and youth were arrested for blocking traffic at Chambers and Centre Street following the rally. Council Members Jumaane Williams and Charles Barron were among those arrested. 

Students began a march to the precinct but on the way they were told that the police, to curtail the march, took the arrested to another precinct. The event was organized by the Coalition for Educational Justice, consisting of community-based organizations, and the Urban Youth Collaborative. I put up a 14 minute edited video of the rally, excerpts from speakers, the push into Chambers St., the arrests and the follow-up march to the police station. Fabulous stuff from a great bunch of students who did us all proud.  You can view the video at

http://vimeo.com/19443862

I'm loading up the camera for the next PEP meeting on Feb. 3rd where the UFT promises to come out in force. By the time you read this you might be hearing about a major disruption of the PEP at that meeting to attempt to stop the vote to close the schools. Or not.

Above blackout due to CIA censorship of sensitive material. B

When Norm is not spending his life videotaping PEP meetings, he blogs at ednotesonline.blogspot.com

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Check out Norms Notes for a variety of articles of interest: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/. And make sure to check out the side panel on right for news bits.

PEP Video Highlights

How do we go to teachers and say you need a masters degree and we’re going to ignore the fact that a masters degree is needed for chancellor and most important how do we go to a student in the sytem to study and work hard and pour their heart and soul into their education and build a record of accomplishment and when the big jobs come up if you don’t go to the right cocktail party you’re not going to be considered….I’ve been her 3 years and sometimes this feels like a front seat on a show called “The Death of Democracy.”…every day we get a little bit stronger---- PATRICK SULLIVAN




Check out Norms Notes for a variety of articles of interest: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/