For more information, go to ProtectingOurKids.org.

It’s early May, and things in Albany are really tough right now. Our state is facing yawning budget gaps, while political stalemate stymies any effort to raise significant new revenues.

In this environment, the UFT’s message to our elected representatives in the Assembly and Senate has been clear: they must oppose the governor’s drastic proposed cuts to the education budget. Lawmakers are considering a $600 million cut to state funding for our city’s public schools. If we lose that much state funding, class sizes will skyrocket, tutoring and after-school programs will be eliminated, and great teachers will be laid off.

Kids don’t get a second chance at an education. If we allow our school system to be decimated like it was in the ‘70s, another generation of young New Yorkers will lose their opportunity for a better life.

In this crisis atmosphere, we have urged our mayor and schools chancellor to stand with us as we struggle for justice for New York City’s school kids. The UFT helped save our city from bankruptcy in the 1970s, when our pension finds began buying up bonds from the Municipal Assistance Corporation, and we stand ready to do whatever it takes to save our schools now.

It has been disheartening indeed to see the city administration treat this crisis as a opportunity to move a long-held political agenda — end teachers’ seniority rights, expand privatization in the form of charter schools, and so on. While they quibble about who should be laid off, we’re the ones standing with our students’ allies in Albany saying NO ONE should be laid off. Some of you may remember the years in which thousands of New York City school children were taught by uncertified teachers. Those days are over, thanks to historic salary gains and a stable employment situation. In an atmosphere of layoffs, New York City would again face a teacher recruitment crisis once the economy turns around. Few educators want to start working for an employer who’s going to turn around and fire them when the budget gets tight.

Things are tough for teachers all over. The entire high school staff in Rhode Island’s poorest school district was fired this winter because of test scores — and the president publicly endorsed the firings. In Florida, where the gap between the widely respected National Assessment of Education Progress scores and state test scores is sixty points (!), both houses of the legislature passed a bill to end tenure and convert all teachers’ contract to one year, renewable on growth in student scores on the state tests. (This measure, thankfully, was vetoed by Florida’s governor after a statewide outcry by parents and teachers.) In the District of Columbia, seniority layoff rules were abolished eight years ago, leading to a five-year turnover rate of close to 50% and an unrelenting decline in student achievement. In New Jersey, the new governor has tried to pit parents against teachers, urging voters to reject school budgets unless teachers agree to pay cuts. And here in New York City, we’ve worked without a contract since November, with no progress made by the Public Employees Relations Board’s mediator.

Whenever you’re reading this, please pick up the phone and call your Assembly Member, State Senator, and City Council Member. Tell them that you stand with your children’s teachers for a strong public school system. Remind them that election cycles don’t matter to our kids; good schools do.

If the cuts go through, we can expect class sizes of 28 in the first grade; the loss of most after-school programs; elimination of what’s left of music, art and other enrichment programs; no summer school; and a return to conditions after the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, as schools put off necessary maintenance and buildings get dirtier and more dilapidated.

We can’t ask kids to pay the price for the mistakes that adults have made with our economy. The kids deserve better than this.

We need you to call your state senator TODAY to voice your opposition to devastating cuts in this budget proposal.

Click here to send a fax to your senator and assembly member today.

Then call the state Senate at 518-455-2800 and ask to speak to your local senator.

Don’t know who your state senator is? Look it up here.

Tell Albany, “Don’t cut education — give a kid a chance!”

Photo by Jessica Ann Mills

With last week’s announcement that New York was a Race to the Top Finalist, shocked charter management bosses were attempting to explain away weeks of argumentation that a failure to capitulate to their agenda would keep New York from achieving that goal. Spinning faster than the magic teacup ride at Disney World, Peter Murphy of the New York Charter School Association absurdly postulated that New York’s initial success will have a negative impact on education funding. This insight came from the same crystal ball which had Murphy prophesying that New York’s RttT proposal was too weak to become a finalist not two weeks ago. Joining Murphy on the magic teacup ride was Thomas Carroll, the proprietor of the Brighter Choice charter schools recently exposed for denying admissions to students with special needs; Carroll had been madly promoting his list of RttT finalists — sans New York — a few days before the announcement. Charter management’s hours organs — the puerile tabloid and Wall Street press — were called in. Fresh from its visit to Disney World, the Daily News decided that it would take a “magic spell” to win funding. And the usual coterie of anti-union bloggers were brought in for reinforcements. All in all, it’s a sight that would leave any teacher with her feet on the ground quite dizzy.

In the original charter management pitch, UFT and NYSUT stood in the way of New York becoming an RttT finalist simply because we insisted that the charter schools had to be real public schools, educating all students, for the charter cap could be raised. Now that this fairy tale has come up against the real world, charter management mouthpieces like NYCSA’s Murphy are attempting to claim that teacher unions will cause the downfall of New York’s RttT proposal at the next stage of the process. Part of this accusation rests on the suggestion that the entire application would rise or fall on the issue of raising the charter cap: in fact, on the U.S. Department of Education rubric for evaluating RttP applications, charter caps are only one of five points in the category “ensuring successful conditions for high-performing charter schools and other innovative schools,” and the category as a whole is assigned only 40 out of a total 500 points. Given the relatively small number of points available, one could only reach the conclusion that the charter cap issue was decisive if you assumed that RttT was a politicized process in which the rubric was nothing more than window dressing. One would have to believe that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was lying when he said that “there are many, many factors we are looking at. Charters were never going to be the determining factor. We said that from day one.”

Just as importantly, the second point in the innovative schools category demands that charter schools “serve student populations that are similar to local district student populations, especially relative to high-need students.” The way to score higher in the category, then, would have been to adopt the legislation sponsored by State Senate leader John Sampson and State Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver and supported by the UFT, which combined an increase in the cap for charter schools with measures that would have had charter schools educate their fair share of high-need students. It was the opponents of this legislation — the New York Charter School Association, the New York City Charter School Center, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein, among others — that bear responsibility for what few points New York may have lost on this count.

New York has more of the higher achieving charter schools in the U.S. because of the balance of oversight, accountability and effective regulation struck in our state; no doubt, those factors contributed to NY’s score in this column. The calls by charter management to remove all regulation could only diminish the quality of New York charter schools.

Unfortunately, it’s not likely the view from inside the charter management crystal ball will get much better very soon, if we judge by their reaction to the news that New York was a RttT finalist. Neither evidence nor common sense play much of a role in their complaints about the results, or their disappointment that the RttT application was not the invitation to union bust they so desperately wanted.

There is, of course, another route. Charter management could work with the UFT, NYSUT and elected officials to push for responsible legislation. A charter school law that combines an increase in the cap with regulations that require charter schools to educate all students, especially high need students, seems to be exactly what the Obama administration is looking for. The Post may see equity, oversight and accountability as “poison pills,” but the RttT guidelines clearly include those three elements with the raising of the cap.

Apparently it doesn’t work.

According to ED, there was no statistically significant differences in student math or English performance between those elementary and middle schools with Leadership Academy principals and comparison schools led by other principals.

In the high schools, LA principals delivered significantly lower pass rates on math and global history Regents exams. There were no differences with comparison schools on the English and Biology Regents.

A failed experiment might have been OK when it was privately funded. But starting last year taxpayers are publicly footing the five-year $53.8 million contract for the program.

The Clearinghouse cautioned that the results are not conclusive because they couldn’t be sure the schools were totally equivalent. However, the results are of a piece with reports in the New York Post two years ago that found half of all LA-led schools got Cs, Ds, or Fs and that the program itself had a high drop-out rate.

Neutron Jack is the management figure closely associated with the idea of cutting out the bottom-performing 10 percent from your organization. One can’t help wondering if that would apply to the Academy?

A million dollar opportunity is a terrible thing to waste.

This year’s deadline, Jan. 31, is fast approaching for the UFT’s annual awarding of $1 million in total scholarships to academically excellent and financially eligible New York City public high school seniors through the Albert Shanker College Scholarship Fund.

To receive a $5,000 scholarship from the fund, those selected must be accepted in a full-time, matriculated, degree-granting program at an accredited college or university.

Visit the Scholarship Fund Web page for more information.

No, rather than take on such vital issues for charter schools, NYCSA has been waging an all-out campaign on behalf of for profit charter management firms Victory Schools and National Heritage Academies and on behalf of NYC D0E Chancellor Joel Klein. Legislation proposed by State Senate leader John Sampson and State Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver would combine an increase on the cap with a prohibition of for profit involvement in charter schools and limits on the NYC DoE policy of capriciously siting charter schools in district buildings to the detriment of the public schools already using the space. NYCSA is so opposed to these measures that it has its publicists at the New York Post call for the defeat of a bill which would extend the charter cap to 400 schools.

Victory Schools is the outfit that is sucking up 25¢ of every public funding dollar that should go to the students of Merrick Academy. In an article published in this past Sunday’s Daily News, New Yorkers learned of the involvement of Victory in a scheme which had Victory owner Steven Klinsky sending thousands of campaign dollars to State Senator Malcolm Smith; in turn, Smith directed over $100,000 of public dollars to a Victory School which had paid over three-quarters of a million dollars in management fees to Victory. National Heritage Academies is the corporation which challenged the right of its New York employees to organize into a union and bargain collectively. These are the “good” corporate citizens for whom NYCSA is going to the wall.

Truth be told, the presence of for profit corporations and money from right-wing corporations such as Wal-Mart and hedge-fund operators such as Richard Gilder and Carl Icahn has had a corrupting influence on New York charter schools. Last Friday, the Albany Times-Union published an article on how the leading voice in the anti-union jeremiad on the editorial pages of the New York Post and New York Daily News, Thomas Carroll of Brighter Choice Charter Schools, had received tens of millions of dollars from these sources. With that sort of support, no wonder that he has made the promotion of their agenda into a full-time job.

It’s this simple. New York Charter School Association: for profit, not for schools.

UPDATE:

A sharp reader points out that Jeff Clark, the President and CEO National Heritage Academies, is on NYCSA’s Board of Trustees, and that Bill Phillips, current NYCSA President, worked for two for-profits, Beacon Education Management and SABIS Educational Systems, prior to leading NYCSA.