I opened one of the drawers and was surprised to find hundreds, maybe thousands, of old report cards. Oddly, they were not for Stuyvesant High students. They were all for teenaged girls who’d attended some sort of trade school back in the early 1900s. Many of the report cards featured small photographs of the students, and most of them were loaded with unusually vivid commentary about everything from the students’ study habits to their personal appearance (one girl, who apparently had red hair, was described as a “real carrot-head”), all rendered in impossibly perfect fountain-pen script. I was immediately smitten.

Though we may be riveted by their pretensions and narcissism, and though one of their favorite targets of abuse is public school educators and our unions, we don’t change the channel, the ratings show. Many of these “personalities” seem incapable of embarrassment and will engage and shout down audience participants who are far more expert than they are, for they feel entitled to pass as experts on everything under the sun, just because they gab for a maximum of a couple of hours in front of a microphone.

Have you listened lately to the two main 50,000 watt AM radio stations in New York City? What a bunch of blowhards!

I heard one of these hosts, a member of a radio talk show family dynasty dating back at least to FDR, talk about how comfy teachers have it, depicting us as a bunch of spoiled, rich slackers. Another loose-lipped tongue-flapper carries on about every issue of so-called education reform, expressing totally predictable and consistent views that prove he’s a lackey and apologist for every union-buster.

On these two radio stations, almost 24/7, you will hear nothing but disrespect for us public school educators, and though many of the “hosts” are ill-informed and mean-spirited, some of us consent to being their targets because of the “trade off” of some ingredient. Is it masochism or what?

On Thursday, Aug. 19, at 6:30 p.m., the Museum of the City of New York will host a panel discussion on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike of 1968.

The Strike That Changed New York: Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the Politics of Education, & Race Relations in New York City, will feature Clarence Taylor, professor and author of Knocking At Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools, and Jerald Podair, professor and author of The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, who will discuss the crisis and its aftermath with the Reverend Herbert Oliver, Chairman of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local school board, and other participants from both sides of the struggle. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York. Reservations required. $6, museum members; $12, non-members; $8, seniors and students. Purchase tickets »

The uprising was in the Hayden Lakes area. That’s a tiny enclave to accommodate such a big conspiracy theory.  For thirty years, until they were forced by court order to surrender their 20 acre compound to the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2001 as part of a punitive and compensatory award of damages, the Aryan Nations’ headquarters was in Hayden Lakes.

According to the International Baccalaureate Program’s website, it has students in around 3,000 schools among 139 countries. The program is designed to “help develop the intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills to live, learn and work in a rapidly globalizing world.”

Drew Deutsch, the director of the program in New York, says that the IBP “approaches education from a global perspective and it reinforces a rigorous curriculum with high standards. The emphasis is on critical-thinking skills.”

The idea that a global outlook is treasonous is not restricted to any geographical unit or camp.  Allen Quist, at EdWatch, (a 501(c)(3) organization), argues that “education in America is being used as a tool for preparing our nation for global government, International Baccalaureate (IB) for example.”

He feels that the IB’s aim of creating world citizens is sinister, and its association with UNESCO, a branch of the UN, “means that its purpose is to create individuals who owe their allegiance to global government, not to the United States… If global government becomes a reality, the United States will no longer be a free and independent nation but will rather be under the control of the global government body.”

We must not fool ourselves that Quist and folks like him are mere cranks and buffoons. That kind of dismissive condescension is useless. Quist, for example, served four terms in the Minnesota state legislature, and ran seriously for governor and Congress. (A few months ago, at a Republican event, he reportedly called the health care reform bill “the most insidious, evil piece of legislation I have ever seen in my life.”)  He seems to have led a sheltered life.

Indoctrination is always risky business and its definition is slippery. It may prove as impossible to teach history as it is for police to eschew profiling.  But one thing is sure: smugness and complacency are the enemies of our national consciousness and security.

We must not look down on purveyors of curious notions lest we forget to watch our backs!

The International Baccalaureate Program is an academic course of study with a panoramic vision of global culture and the evolved values of civilization.Who are these folks who feel threatened by that? And what will be the next target of their menacing focus: Diet Cola?

On March 17, students from the Urban Youth Collaborative and Students for Transportation Justice will meet with the chairman of the MTA, Jay Walder, to urge him to work with Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Paterson to save their MetroCards.

The Working Families Party has put together a “teachers and parents petition” that the students will take along to the meeting. They want to walk in with thousands of teachers and parents at their back, to make clear to the MTA — and the media — how important free student MetroCards really are.

Please take a minute to sign this online petition and share it with other teachers, parents or family members of students who might be interested.

www.savestudentmetrocards.org

The petition says:

“We are parents, teachers, and family members awed by the enthusiasm of NYC students who are going all out to save their school MetroCards. These students shouldn’t pay for Albany, the City and the MTA’s budget troubles. We support them in their fight. Please save Student MetroCards.”

The students’ goal is to gather 5,000 signatures before the March 17 meeting. They have been fighting for months to pressure leaders from the MTA, City Hall and Albany to save their MetroCards, and it’s time to show that teachers and parents have a huge stake in this too.

Sign the petition telling the MTA, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Paterson to save student MetroCards:

www.savestudentmetrocards.org

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?

Credit must be given, you might think, to a person whose split-second reaction to sudden danger, saves the lives of strangers.

Such a reflex, as much spiritual and physical, reveals and defines that person’s true character. Virtuous acts, especially when spontaneous and dramatic, are not done for glory, promotion, or an “employee of the month” citation. Although their reward is self-validation, even heroes like to be thanked, I am told.

Here is a summary of how three school bus drivers, under similar circumstances, were celebrated.

Nicholas Frost was honored on Oct. 16 at Formen School in Litchfield, Connecticut, for keeping his bus, packed with a junior varsity soccer team, from swerving and careening off the road after his windshield was shattered by a tree branch that had been snapped off by a wind gust.

In late September on Highway 26, between Portland and Seaside, Oregon, school bus driver Terrie Miller, who was transporting a local cross-country team (what’s with these sports teams?), barely averted what would certainly have been a tragic accident caused by a queue of stopped vehicle. Terrie was feted by her community and called “a shining star” by District Transportation Supervisor L.C. Ellison.

Contrast those heroes’ receptions with the calculated, begrudged and strangely measured acknowledgment that a New York City public school bus driver got from the DOE’s pupil transportation office after a staffer, whose job was to write letters and memos, brought to their attention a newspaper story about how the decisive action of the driver had narrowly avoided what would have been a catastrophic accident caused by the negligence of others.

When I suggested that the bus driver be sent an official letter of commendation, my boss looked at me as though I had horns and asked why. He didn’t see it either as necessarily the right thing to do or even a justified public relations gesture, but he let me write it anyway as a personal favor.

He ordered three revisions of my brief letter and gutted the final version so that only two dull sentences remained before approving it to be sent. Normally my letters were hardly edited at all so I asked my boss why this letter was different. It wasn’t the quality of the work. It was the spin.

He said that it’s a bad idea for the DOE to be on record with a strong, unmitigated praise of the bus driver because in the event they wanted to take disciplinary action in the future against her for some future occurrence, that letter of praise could embarass the DOE. By the way, her work history was and probably still is spotless.

This tale is anecdotal, possibly anomolous and happened shortly before Klein became chancellor. Maybe the pupil transportation folks have become more charitable since then. They have a tough and complex job with many issues related to logistics, politics, and inter-Agency relations. The folks employed there are most likely decent and diligent. But in the wake of their monumental botch-up of pupil transportation operations a couple of years ago, under the scandalous orchestration of a DOE consultant, and especially their cold defensive posture when called to be answerable, it’s a fair bet that attitudinal adjustment is still in order.

Heroes will be heroes. But the DOE, not otherwise a shy Agency, should give them their due and stop feeling that they will lose face for being kind.

Although the crush of medical bills is the prime cause of individual bankruptcy (and the catastrophic collateral damage it does to families) in this country, and despite our nation’s lagging far behind several dozen other countries (including many less wealthy than we are) in many indicators of health care quality, (such as longevity and infant mortality), and even though not a single major political party in any of these other democratic nations has ever proposed the elimination of their existing national health system, millions of gullible Americans have been suckered by reactionary special interests into practically equating a government-sponsored health care option with the worst excesses of Marxism.

What rot!

Their resistance to proposed health care reform is macabre, not patriotic.

All sane arguments favor a national health care program. The UFT’s Executive Board has endorsed it and the AFT is mobilized to persuade federal legislators to show courage and common sense by supporting it.

There has been much deliberate blurring of the facts and orchestrated ambiguity surrounding issues of health care reform. This must be made clear:  there MUST be a government-administered health insurance plan. This so-called “public option” can co-exist (as it does in the United Kingdom where, by the way, there are no “death panels”) with private insurers.

It is essential that we protect Americans who cannot otherwise afford insurance and we must thwart efforts to tax the health care insurance of those people who already have it.

And there absolutely must be a government-sponsored public option. Reform without it is no option at all.

Do you think the Fordham Foundation’s Flypaper blog will devote the next two weeks to a Health Olympics, explaining how our showing behind such powerhouses as San Marino and Malta means economic disaster for the United States?

1 France
2 Italy
3 San Marino
4 Andorra
5 Malta
6 Singapore
7 Spain
8 Oman
9 Austria
10 Japan
11 Norway
12 Portugal
13 Monaco
14 Greece
15 Iceland
16 Luxembourg
17 Netherlands
18 United Kingdom
19 Ireland
20 Switzerland
21 Belgium
22 Colombia
23 Sweden
24 Cyprus
25 Germany
26 Saudi Arabia
27 United Arab Emirates
28 Israel
29 Morocco
30 Canada
31 Finland
32 Australia
33 Chile
34 Denmark
35 Dominica
36 Costa Rica
37 United States of America