I began teaching at Washington Irving in the fall of 2002, not knowing a thing about what I was in for. I had moved to New York from Chicago a few months before, and before that I had been in San Francisco. As well, I had never been inside a public school. After two days, I felt sure I would fail the students and myself. After two years I thought I could last a couple more years maybe. Now I look back and see how this experience of teaching at Irving has sustained me and given me purpose. As well, it answered this question: what is New York City?

My whole life I had been in awe of New York, amazed by it, and when I moved here I thought, I’ll finally understand what New York means. I went to Midtown, hated it. Went to Coney Island, loved it, but it felt like 1898 mixed with desperation. Went to Ellis Island, the ocean was beautiful, the halls were inspirational. But where was this New York I needed to find? The bridges amazed me, Brooklyn neighborhoods reminded me of the other cities I had lived in, or had those reminded me, in retrospect, of Brooklyn?

Finally, I realized New York wasn’t in any of those places the way I hungered for it. But New York, the New York I needed, was right in front of me, in my classroom. These kids come from all over, the Heights, East New York, Q-Boro, Parkchester and the Lower East Side. I even taught kids from Staten Island — they grew up where Wu-Tang grew up: Shaolin, my friends.

My students are the New York I searched for.

And it was my responsibility to help them identify what their dreams were, to explore. It is my responsibility still.

The problems they struggle with are huge. The problems are bigger than any school, but the students can bring them here, and I will help them. We will help them. Every teacher I met here was more committed to this job than I would have imagined before I joined them. They were fighting for this New York. Every year I choose to fight with them. I can’t stop now.

The mayor says this is failure. But what is failure? Is it this struggle against poverty, against class and race division? The one group I don’t see here in my class are from the class that goes to Florida when it gets too cold, or wear their ski pass tags on their jackets when they come to school on Monday morning . They don’t come here. So what do the kids here matter to the mayor? That’s his people. And he’s made that clear since day one.

They close this school, our kids will get pushed around in the system, will disappear, sent from school to school, so that each school can play the numbers game politics forces them to play.  A school can focus on one thing if it is to do that thing well. The choice we face is do we focus on a school’s future? Or its students’ future? A message will be sent to other schools, is being sent: protect yourself, give us the numbers we want, so the newspapers talk about those created numbers like they mean something besides “protect yourself.” Meanwhile, pushed around a system focused on itself, our students will be nobody’s responsibility, so they’ll be everybody’s problem. Most importantly, their dreams are the ones we won’t count.

I will fight to count their dreams, I’ll fight for this school, because this school doesn’t turn away students, doesn’t try to hide the problems these students struggle with. We are proud of our struggles, we wear them like badges, even when they’re scars. We might not have numbers, but we aren’t trying to make numbers here, we’re trying, against all these odds and divisions, to create students who get to count their dreams, and I dream they’ll need more than two hands to do it. They’ll need a community to do it. So I ask Gramercy, I ask New York, I ask the mayor, be part of that community that counts their dreams. Don’t close schools, open your minds, and make this school work. It deserves that.

There was a parade the day this school was opened. Right down Irving Place. This city was one that celebrated education and its possibilities, it wasn’t about answers we had, it was about the beautiful question our students future were. Move your numbers around, make your spreadsheet god dance. But all your data doesn’t have a place for their dreams in it, I say to you though: the biggest necessity our educational system faces is this: where are we going to put these dreams our students have?

Schools with high-needs students most likely to face ax
Ten years into Bloomberg’s education reforms, the New York City school system has come full circle and is now shutting down new high schools at the same rate as old ones. High schools established by Bloomberg represent about 40 percent of all existing high schools and 38 percent of the high schools on the closing list.

PS 22, Brooklyn: Principal blamed for plummeting enrollment
For more than five years, the Department of Education has turned a deaf ear to the persistent complaints of the staff that PS 22 Principal Carlen Padmore-Gateau has harassed, humiliated and driven teachers out of the Prospect Park school. According to District 17 Representative Rick King, more than 50 staff members and two assistant principals have been forced out.

PS 215, Queens: Crippled by cuts
The staff and parents of Far Rockaway’s PS 215 — one of the 25 schools on the mayor’s original hit list for this year — paint a picture of a school crippled by four years in a row of budget cuts. Like most of the other schools targeted by the mayor, PS 215, located in a historically neglected outlying neighborhood, serves a high-needs population.

Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Manhattan: ‘This is not a lost school’
A Harlem institution with 111 years behind it, Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts may have narrowly escaped being closed outright by the Department of Education this year, but the school must now battle to save its middle grades from the DOE’s ax — and battling it is.

Legacy HS for Integrated Studies, Manhattan: Improvements don’t count
Legacy HS for Integrated Studies appears to have turned the corner under a new principal, but the Department of Education wants to yank the rug out from under the Union Square school before the new principal’s reforms have a chance to take hold, say staff, students and parents from the school.

Manhattan Theatre Lab HS: Poor air quality, bugs just part of problem
It’s a strange education reform policy that opens a school to great fanfare, allows it to founder and then shuts it down, say staff and students of the Manhattan Theatre Lab HS. Opened in 2004 and touted by the Bloomberg administration as one of the new small schools of the future, it is now on the chopping block.

The city can’t get rid of teachers? Attrition numbers tell a different story
With all the mayor’s talk about firing “ineffective” teachers, it seems there must be a big supply of replacements just waiting in the wings, busily perfecting their lesson plans and brushing up on testing metrics. One can only hope so. Because 6,000 teachers and support staff left on their own last year, even more than the year before.

UFTers protest mayor’s ‘Decade of Disaster’
Enraged at the mayor’s threat to close 33 “persistently lowest achieving” schools and remove half the staff in each school, more than 1,000 UFT-represented educators descended on a Jan. 18 meeting of the city’s Panel for Educational Policy at Brooklyn Technical HS, disrupting the proceedings with whistles and chants before walking out in protest.

UFT: Prepare kids for college, not tests
An administration which has “never stopped congratulating itself for ending ‘social promotion’ has created a new program — ‘social graduation,’” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the City Council Committees on Education and Higher Education on Jan. 19.

“Einhorn is an experienced professional with a high profile in the industry,” said Tracey McDermott, the FSA’s acting enforcement chief. “We expect someone in his position to be able to identify inside information when he receives it and to act appropriately. His failure to do so is a serious breach.”

If the name sounds familiar to many New Yorkers, it may be because of his recent flirtation with becoming the white knight of the beleaguered Mets franchise; others may remember him for his fame as the financial analyst whose decision to bet on the collapse of Lehman Brothers made him a huge profit in 2008.

For those who follow education, however, Einhorn now joins the ranks of fellow hedge funders who have been implicated both in questionably ethical business decisions and in the New York City charter school sector. Up to this point, the most famous case of this was probably that of Raj Rajaratnam, who was just sentenced to 11 years in prison for his own insider trading. Rajaratnam was a long-time supporter of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, and Canada himself testified at the trial on his behalf.

In Einhorn’s case, his involvement in the city’s corporate school reform lobby goes back at least to 2006, when, as Steven Brill’s recent book points out, his gift of $250,000 in cash to Democrats for Education Reform (where he still serves on the Board of Advisors and is a major donor) was instrumental in getting that organization off the ground. Einhorn was also an early financial supporter of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network — which, as Brill also notes, emerged after Einhorn’s DFER allies recruited her to found the chain.

As questions continue to be raised about the role of these loosely regulated financial firms in the current economic crisis (and about the inadequate taxes their founders pay on their income from them), it’s an apt time to question whether the large role Einhorn and others in his field are playing in our city’s charter schools is in the best interest of the students in the system.

This narrative of American cultural decline, with the public school teacher playing a starring role as villain, is a trope that appears frequently in conservative circles dedicated to waging ‘culture war’ on issues of race, gender and sexuality.  In his piece, Finn cites a forthcoming book by paleo-conservative Charles Murray on the decline of ‘industriousness’ in the America’s white working class. (Murray is best known as the author of The Bell Curve, with its theory of a genetically based African-American intellectual inferiority; apparently, the industriousness of American workers of color is not worth discussing.) Finn links to a chapter from Murray’s book, just published in the Wall Street Journal,  in which he characterizes the declining rate of full-time employment among male white workers as a cultural failing of the workers. Amazingly, Murray has no discussion of the impact of the current economic downturn, the deepest and longest since the Great Depression, on working class employment, and no mention of the effects of four decades of globalization, during which corporations exported decent paying industrial jobs abroad to countries with very low labor costs enforced by authoritarian regimes. No, in Murray’s hands, the decline of full-time working class employment is entirely a cultural flaw, a loss of the Puritan ethic of hard work, to be found in the workers themselves.

Finn does not simply endorse Murray’s narrative of working class cultural decline; he provides his own supporting argument, centered on Apple Inc.’s outsourcing of its production work to China. He offers as evidence a New York Times article which recounts a dinner conversation between Barack Obama and the late Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple, Inc.  Obama reportedly asked Jobs what it would take to bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., and Jobs tells the President in so many words that it just wasn’t happening. According to the Times, the reasoning of Jobs and other Apple executives is along these lines: “the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.” Finn swallows the Apple, Inc. justification for exporting manufacturing jobs abroad, hook, line and sinker. He objects to Obama’s Osawatomie, Kansas speech in which the President notes that the broken social contract and the long economic downturn in the U.S. has meant that “(h)ard work stopped paying off for too many people.” No, the real problem, Checker tells us, is that Apple, Inc. finds in China “the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills” that American workers lack.

If Finn had given a careful reading to the entire Times article, he would have found a revealing description of the Chinese manufacturing enterprise to which Apple, Inc. outsources most of its production, Foxconn Technology. The workers in Foxconn’s China plant that manufactures Apple’s iPhones work under 19th century sweatshop conditions — they work 12 hour days and 6 day weeks, sometimes doing ‘double shifts’ of 24 hours, live in company barracks and earn less than $17 a day. In echoes of the Cultural Revolution, workers who arrived late for work were sometimes required to write confession letters and copy quotations. The Times article describes how, when Apple, Inc. redesigned its iPhone, the glass for the new product arrived in at the Foxconn factory in the middle of the night and all the workers were dragged out of bed to begin production immediately. Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, told that the Times that Foxconn “could hire 3,000 people overnight. What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?

SACOM (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour) staged a protest in front of a Foxconn shareholder meeting in Hong Kong in 2010. (www.sacom.hk)

A subsequent New York Times article documents just how unhealthy and unsafe the conditions in the Chinese factories producing Apple, Inc. products are. Chinese workers report being forced to stand so long in production that their legs swelled and they could hardly walk. Child labor is commonly used in the factories. The Chinese manufacturers have falsified records and improperly disposed of hazardous waste. Two years ago, 137 Chinese workers were injured after being forced to use a poisonous chemical to clean the glass of iPhones. Last year, explosions at factories producing iPads killed four Chinese workers and injured 77 others. A Hong Kong based advocacy organization reported that it had told Apple of the hazardous conditions that led to explosions, and Apple did nothing. “If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department, told the Times. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”

What’s undeniable is the desperation of the Chinese Foxconn workers. In recent years, there has been an epidemic of worker suicides at Foxconn — 19 in all according to the Times. Just this month, 300 Foxconn workers producing Sony’s Xbox threatened mass suicide in a dispute over pay and working conditions.

In a written statement to the Times, Foxconn said that “(a)ny worker recruited by our firm is covered by a clear contract outlining terms and conditions and by Chinese government law that protects their rights.” But the truth is that Chinese law only allows for one “union,” the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which is directly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese state. The CCP appoints all ACFTU officials, and they come almost exclusively from outside of the ranks of that organization. The ACFTU’s own documents pledge fealty to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, and Chinese law mandates that when workers engage in strikes and other work-related protests, the role of the ACFTU is that of strike-breaker. Far from protecting Chinese workers, the Chinese state and Chinese law establishes and enforces the conditions necessary for their brutal exploitation.

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” one former Apple executive told the Times, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

Academics and manufacturing analysts consulted by the Times estimated that the shifting of the manufacture of iPhones to the U.S. would add approximately $65 to the cost of the product, which would still leave Apple with a substantial profit, given its margin of hundreds of dollars of profit on the phone. But the lower price of labor is only part of the equation for Apple: the sweatshop conditions in the factories and the near absolute rule exercised over the workplace are just as important for Apple’s ‘in time’ production.

“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” Li Mingqi, who until April worked in Foxconn management, told the Times. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where one of the explosions occurred. “Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.

That’s one helluva of a system of “flexibility, diligence and industrial skills,” Checker.

(An earlier version of this post was inadvertently published before it was completed. This is the final post.)

Aim: How can the ability to identify and understand basic propaganda techniques empower you to make better informed decisions?

Do Now: Read and briefly discuss with a partner “Recognizing Propaganda Techniques and Errors of Faulty Logic”

Motivation: How many of you have ever been excited to purchase an item, partake in an activity, or follow a course of action, only to find yourself disappointed by the outcome? Who would like to share the situation? Elicit a response or two. Why did you specifically make the decision that you did? What led you to make the decision?

SWUT: The best way for the individual not to be manipulated into making decisions not in their best interest is to understand propaganda techniques.

Step 1: Briefly discuss and elicit examples of the propaganda techniques found in Cuesta College’s “Recognizing Propaganda Techniques and Errors of Faulty Logic”

Group Task/Differentiation:

1. Have students work in groups of four or five to do a close reading (pen, pencil, and/or highlighter in hand to underline main ideas of each paragraph, write notes, and/or write questions/comments on doc) of DOE “Turnaround” doc, dated January 13, 2012.
2. Have roughly half of the students in each group answer the following questions:
   1. (p.1) What evidence of additional support have you seen this year? Have support services and or programs increased or diminished this year?
   2. (p.2) Based on the context of this paragraph, how does Walcott define meaningful system? Does the paragraph imply that the current evaluation system is meaningless?
   3. (p.3) Does the misuse of the plural possessive form in the first sentence imply Walcott is performing poorly in his educational duties? Why would the specific “conditions the UFT insisted on” be left out of this document? Is there any evidence to show the replacement teacher would better serve our students?
   4. (p.4) Is “real accountability” clearly defined? If so, what does it specifically mean? If not, why not?
   5. (p.5) Does Bloomberg currently have the authority to carry out his plan? Why would the DOE hold back the details of their plan?
   6. (p.6) What specifically will be used to screen the existing staff? What are “rigorous standards for student success”? Why is the term “significant portion” used? Is there an insignificant portion?
   7. (p. 7) Does the DOE currently have the authority to carry out their plan? Is the approval of the plan presented here the only course of action in restoring the funding? What does the phrase “whatever it takes” mean? What details are provided to clarify “best equipped”?
   8. Using one sentence, clearly describe the DOE’s plan to improve your educational experience at John Dewey High School.
3. Have the other half of students in each group use the DOE source doc to try to identify examples of the four propaganda techniques listed in “Recognizing Propaganda Techniques and Errors of Faulty Logic”
4. Have the groups discuss and share out their answers.

Closure: Exit slip: Other than the “turnaround” model, decide what other solutions are possible?

HW: What appropriate and viable means are available to students to influence major decisions made regarding their education?

Mulgrew: Mayor lost in fantasy world
“The mayor seems to be lost in his own fantasy world of education, the one where reality doesn’t apply,” declared UFT President Michael Mulgrew in response to the mayor’s State of the City speech on Jan. 12, in which, among other proposals, he threatened to fire half the staffs in 33 schools receiving federal School Improvement Grant support.

UFT asks PERB to help restart evaluation talks
The UFT on Jan. 13 asked the state’s Public Employment Relations Board to order mediation to bring negotiations on a teacher evaluation system for 33 restart and transformation schools back on track, after the city walked out of the talks during the Christmas break week.

Tweed OKs unwanted Eva in Cobble Hill
When charter school impresario Eva Moskowitz comes knocking at your school’s door, the Department of Education lays out the welcome mat. That’s what parents and educators in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood discovered when the city’s Panel for Educational Policy on Dec. 14 gave the green light to the co-location of Moskowitz’s newest Success Academy in a local school building already housing three schools.

UFT spreads holiday cheer for homeless kids: ‘The kids leave walking on air’
While the disc jockey in the UFT auditorium in Manhattan spins tunes ranging from Christmas songs to those by Rihanna and the Black Eyed Peas, the crowd starts dancing. Welcome to the annual holiday party for children, hosted by the UFT and the Coalition for the Homeless, which features carnival games, face painting, lunch, cake and presents from Santa for kids of all ages from family shelters throughout the city.

STARRR treatment: Professionals in the arts make key contributions at city schools — as UFT educators
While New Yorkers are not surprised to discover that an office temp or the waitress serving them is really an aspiring performer, not many know of the Actors’ Work Program which helps professional performers find meaningful sidelines to supplement their incomes — including bringing them into the classroom as substitute teachers.

Corporate tax loopholes must be closed
The UFT on Jan. 9 joined community, labor, student and faith organizations calling on state lawmakers to close corporate tax loopholes that are costing the state more than $1 billion a year.  “What we’re asking for here are very reasonable solutions,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew at the Albany press conference.

Cuomo to appoint new education commission
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo used the occasion of his State of the State speech on Jan. 4 to announce a new state commission to recommend education reforms in two key areas: teacher accountability and student achievement, and management efficiency.

UFT: Parents ‘marginalized’ by Tweed
“As major stakeholders in our schools, parents need to be engaged and respected,” Anthony Harmon, the UFT director of parent and community outreach, told the City Council Education Committee on Dec. 15 as he detailed the UFT’s varied efforts to help parents voice their concerns about their children’s education.

Funding cuts, city child care initiative concern providers
Testifying at a Dec. 12 state hearing, UFT Family Child Care Providers Chapter Chair Tammie Miller made clear her union’s concerns about both funding cuts to early childhood education and a new city initiative, Early Learn NYC, which threatens the livelihood of many of the UFT’s 28,000 providers.

Protesters call for Bronx principal’s ouster
The Columbus complex school community rallied on Jan. 10 in support of embattled teachers at the campus’ Bronxdale HS to protest the Department of Education’s mild disciplining of Principal John Chase Jr., who is accused of a string of lewd remarks to female staff in his one semester on the job.

It starts with this chart (and then gets worse).

Even though DOE claims that the Progress Report grades are demographically neutral, DOE did not fail a single high school with lowest concentrations of high-need students (that top 1/3 in dark green).¹ And, though the D’s and F’s are spread across the bottom 2/3 (in blue and red), it was overwhelmingly the D’s and F’s with the highest needs that made the “pre-engagement” list — the short list from which DOE would ultimately choose the final closures. 65% of the highest-need D’s and F’s were put on the short list, but only 15% of the schools in the middle where the students on average had fewer challenges to overcome.

And it gets worse.

Because to be on the short list only means that you might or might not close. Once they create the short list, the DOE claims it “reviews the school data, consults with the superintendents and other experienced educators who have worked closely with the school, and gathers community feedback.”

That’s what they say, and it is certainly true that they make a good show of it, running from school to school and having all sorts of sympathetic meetings. But in the end? Take a look at which ones land on the final list.

So then: half the D’s and F’s fall into the middle of the needs spectrum, but only 15% of them made the short list — and none of those will close. Not so the schools with the highest need students, where 40% of the D’s and F’s are slated to shut down.

But even within that bottom third there are variations in need. Here are all the schools that made the short list, school by school, arranged by the level of need. The higher the bar, the better prepared students are when they arrive in high school. Red schools on the final list for closing. Blue schools are not.

Keep in mind, these schools are arranged by need level, not performance level. So, for example, Gateway (third from the right), got a higher Progress Report score than every school on the short list except for one.² But Gateway ranks among the neediest in the city. It is also one of the few new schools to take high-need special education students in comparable numbers to the older city schools. So, it’s closing.

All five of the neediest schools are closing, but six of the seven least needy are staying opened.

And here is one more comparison. This time let’s take a look at the three schools on the far ends of the spectrum — the schools that are will not close on the left, and the schools that will on the right. Here are different challenges the schools face.

The closing schools have higher levels of poverty, special education students, high-need special education students, overage students, and boys. Concentrations of special education and overage students are factored into the DOE Progress Reports. Poverty and gender are not.

The difference in the number of boys is especially worth noting. Most schools on the short list have about as many girls as boys, but Gompers is 77% boys, virtually all of whom are black and Hispanic. Graduation rates for black and Hispanic boys citywide is over 10 percentage points lower than the graduation rates for black and Hispanic girls. Gompers also has the highest citywide concentration of self-contained students, other than two schools already closing. Legacy and Gateway are not far behind. I cannot find the city’s graduation rate for self-contained students, though I have heard it is in the single digits. Special education rates in general, are at 30%, city wide.

Why do I bring this up? Because it shows how differences in the levels of school challenge can be presented as differences in school quality. DOE doesn’t factor the rates of boys and girls into its Progress Reports, but even worse, it justifies shutting schools like Gompers by citing those rates out of context. Graduation rates at Gompers are “in the bottom 1% of high schools” says DOE, failing to mention, however, that the school it is also in the bottom 1% of all schools when it comes to need, the only other schools joining it there being a handful of schools already shutting down. And it’s in that bottom 1% even before you factor in the extraordinarily high numbers of boys, and the extraordinary number of boys that are high-need special education boys. Last year, the DOE shut down a school that was 100% boys, citing low graduation rates. Maybe the rates were low compared to a citywide average. But for the population, which was 10% self-contained and 100% boys? For all we know, it was doing about as well as Stuyvesant, given the obstacles confronting so many of the students in that school.

And this is the biggest bone I have to pick with DOE. Should the city do better by its most disadvantaged students? Of course it should. But will it ever do better by them if it continues to harp on the politically convenient claims about “school quality” while failing to speak openly about the overwhelming needs. A few years ago, DOE commissioned a report that basically said that if you concentrate very high need students in very large numbers in schools, the schools would be overwhelmed. At the end the report listed several suggestions going forward, including “constraints on the HS admissions process” that take the needs of students into account — and avoid high concentrations.

But DOE buried that report, and continues to blame the school instead of evolving its school choice model into one that does not disenfranchise students and cause concentrations.

Are there differences in school quality? Maybe there are, but we are not going to find them if we keep measuring — and the punishing — the wrong thing.

¹ School need in all of these charts is based upon the DOE’s calculation of school need, the peer index. For high schools, this includes the average student’s entering score, the percent of students with IEPs and high-need IEP’s, and the percent of student who enter the school overage.

² The Progress Report Letter Grades are based upon number scores. Gateway’s score was 46.