Fred Klonsky’s PREA Prez Blog

Naomi Shepherd, Des Plaines EA local prez.

A drive up to Northbrook where north suburban Illinois House representatives were holding budget hearings.

Naomi Shepherd is my union sister president of the Des Plaines District 62 IEA Local. She’s also Region 36 Chair. She talked to the three state reps and represented the IEA position well: Support Senator Meeks’ Senate Bill 2288.

What Meek’s bill would do is raise the state income tax and rebate the school districts for the local property tax bill. Local districts can raise, keep static or lower their local property tax bill, but the state would meet their constitutional obligation to equitably fund local schools.

This will be what we will be taking to Springfield on April 30th when we head down there to talk with State Senator Dan Kotowski.

Whitney Tilson hires Norm?

Hedge fund manager, DFER angel and education hobbyist, Whitney Tilson, thinks he is an expert on teaching. Why can’t Ed Notes‘ Norm Scott handle Whitney’s portfolio? Norm thinks a one-week course is good enough and so do I.

From Pat Buchanan last week:

America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

My brother Mike has two posts on his blog Small Talk I want you to go to.

One concerns the blog that Alexander Russo runs under the sponsorship of Catalyst, a Chicago journal that covers school reform. Russo, who was one of those responsible for the bogus story of Obama’s support for vouchers, is now linking his readers without making any comment to a web site of a wing-nut outfit called Patriots and Liberty.

And Mike reports on the latest news about Debbie Almontaser, who was forced to resign her position as principal of Khalil Gibran Academy last year after attacks by the NY Post and anti-Arab groups.

There’s a proposal before our board of ed to hire more middle management while leaving years of classroom supply cuts in place, even after we busted our butts to pass a referendum.

I know it is no news to anyone, but apparently this is universal SOP.

Eduwonkette reports that NY’s Bloomberg and Klein are paying 1.1 mil to a British consulting company to explain to NY teachers what they are doing wrong while at the same time they are cutting funding for tutors of 8th grade students who are facing retention.

My friend Jon Scieszka (OK. I had a ten minute conversation with him at a party in Brooklyn last summer) is the U.S. Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and the author of the Stinky Cheese Man.

In an interview with the Washington Post:

Scieszka calls himself “a fan of stupid reading.”

“I’ve been a big champion of stuff like ‘Captain Underpants’ and ‘Junie B. Jones,’ ” he said. “It horrifies some parents and teachers because it is not grammatical and there are misspellings, but that is fun reading.”

Cachao dies at 89.

This was close enough to the truth about their real lives - they were musicians and songwriters who had left Havana for New York in 1949, the year they formed the Mambo Kings, an orchestra that packed clubs, dance halls, and theaters around the East Coast - and excitement of excitements, they even made a fabled journey in a flamingo-pink bust out to Sweet’s Ballroom in San Francisco, playing an all-star mambo night, a beautiful night of glory, beyond death, beyond pain, beyond stillness.

- The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love: A Novel by Oscar Hijuelos

BAGHDAD (AP) — The overall U.S. death toll in Iraq rose to 4,000 after four soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad, a grim milestone that is likely to fuel calls for the withdrawal of American forces as the war enters its sixth year.

Back in December, as an ice storm blew across the Heartland, Kris, Carol, Steve and I were at the IEA’s Winter Advocacy Conference in Springfield.

We were going to workshops for negotiations training. It is not a bad conference, one of the few I can attend without the state leadership turning off my microphone.

I posted at the time that Steve and I escaped the Conference to find the original home of the corndog on a stick. Which we did. It’s on the south side of Springfield across from a big mall.

What I didn’t know at the time was that there is a National Corndog Day. It is celebrated on the first Saturday of the NCAA men’s basketball championship. That’s right. Just this past Saturday.

The slogan: Dogs, Hoops, Tots, and Beers.