Quote of the week.
And no, KIPP teachers don’t have job security. That is, they are not protected if they do a crumby job.
-Siobhan Sheils, guest blogger at DFER.
KIPP jokes about junkets.
KIPP jokes about junkets to the moon.
A piece in the Columbus Ohio Dispatch reports on the recent dust-up regarding KIPP charter school junkets to the Bahamas and the DR.
KIPP will be opening another franchise in Columbus next year. When the Dispatch questioned KIPP spokesman Steve Mancini about the Bronx KIPP school’s Bahamian trips, they got a joke rather than an answer.
The E-Team asked a national KIPP spokesman, and his answer was simple: The moon.
Private funders are so pleased with KIPP’s results for urban students that they have “chipped in for a rocket to fly all KIPP teachers (including KIPP Columbus teachers) for professionally development in outer space,” quipped KIPP spokesman Steve Mancini.
Science teachers are really excited for gravity-free moon walks, he went on.
Cute.
But here’s the thing. Mancini also lied stretched the truth. He claimed that NY was the only KIPP school involved in “off shore” trips. But as we already reported, a San Francisco KIPP school did their “staff development” in Cancun. Not technically “off shore,” since Cancun isn’t an island and there’s no ocean between Mexico and the U.S.
Mancini is down-right Clintonian in his ability to parse words.
Elgin’s U-46 teachers and board reach a TA.
Last night the Elgin Teachers Association, the second largest teachers’ union in Illinois, reached a tentative agreement with the board of U-46. This is the second TA. The first was narrowly rejected by the rank-and-file members of the union last October.
The Daily Herald reported this morning:
If a settlement was not reached, the union was prepared to take a vote to strike as early as Friday, Elgin Teachers Association President Tim Davis said.
U-46 teachers went on strike seven times between 1978 and 1991. The last work stoppage lasted 21 days.
The union will present the details of the tentative contract agreement to its members on Sunday. Union members will vote on the agreement Tuesday, the union’s bargaining team outlined.
Housing in NOLA.
My friend Joe Phelan from the Miami Workers Center writes:
Dear Fred,
This week 4,500 livable homes in New Orleans will be destroyed. HUD is spending $762 million in taxpayer funds to tear down over 4,500 public housing subsidized apartments and replace them with a fraction of equally affordable home - an 82 percent reduction.
The US House of Representatives passed a bill that requires one-for-one replacement of any public housing demolished. However, Sen. David Vitter (R-Louisiana) stopped the Senate version cold.
Tell Sen. Vitter (and the rest of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, of Mel Martinez from Florida) to build back all housing demolished by HUD.
The tragic response to Katrina has a clear culprit: the Federal Government and HUD. The demolitions are moving forward even though it would cost less to rehabilitate the public housing units. Residents in New Orleans have vowed to fight the demolitions. The buildings themselves have been proven structurally sound. So why is the government moving ahead with the demolition?
Hurricane Katrina was a windfall for developers and their politician friends. The storm did in a week what developers wouldn’t be able to do in a decade - force poor people of color from the city en mass.
Now all the developers have to do is move in and shut down the vacant housing, with a little help from their government friends, and redevelop the land for higher priced housing and business.
All across the U.S. gentrification is forcibly destroying community, social networks, tearing apart families and displacing long established history all for the sake of profit. New Orleans is our ground zero in the fight for the Right to the City.
-Joe
You can reach Joe here.
