Luther Price sent me a comment to a blog post I wrote which said I was supporting Will Guzzardi and opposing Machine incumbent Toni Berrios for 39th District State Rep.

He was appalled.

“What kind of journalist are you?” I hadn’t even talked to Toni Berrios.

Of course, I’m not a journalist. But more on that in a moment.

I think it is odd that someone from the Berrios campaign (which Mr. Price sounds suspiciously like he is) would demand that it is the constituent’s responsibility to meet with the candidate. Of all the progressive candidates I have worked for over the years, all have assumed the responsibility of meeting with the voters they were courting. None attacked the voters for not having made the effort to talk to them. Apparently Machine candidates like Toni Berrios have an alternative campaign strategy: “Get your ass over to my office so you can vote for me.”

You wouldn’t know it from looking at Berrios’ web site (which I did) but she voted in favor of Senate Bill 7. Her vote helped destroy the tenure and seniority rights of teachers throughout the state, restricted the rights of Chicago teachers to bargain a contract, and generally undermined collective bargaining.

It was a bill paid for with money that came out of the deep pockets of Jonah Edelman and his group, Stand for Children.

By the way, Guzzardi would have voted no on Senate Bill 7.

There are other issues too, but I have to get to class and teach.

A word about being a journalist.

A year ago, a state senator called me and yelled at me for writing about the pension bill.

“What kind of journalist are you?”

Look, guys. I’m not a journalist. I’m a K-5 art teacher who blogs.

See the difference?

But journalists had nothing to say when Jonah Edelman snuck into town with $3 million and bought Senate Bill 7. That took bloggers like me to expose.

If you ask me what needs to happen, I have a few suggestions. First, unions need to widen their discourse beyond bread-and-butter issues like compensation and work environment. Teachers must be able to engage seriously and continuously in their profession’s discussions of evaluating teacher quality, of developing standards and curriculum, of allocating resources. Only then will we see substantive engagement, and not the kinds of rushed reactions I’ve seen recently from New York City teachers over the current teacher-evaluation debates.

Second, in order to do this, leaders of all teacher professional associations must do a better job of organizing teacher voice. Here there is fault in our unions and our professional associations, which for too long have served as top-heavy lobbying organizations. Small, local associations such as the New York Collective of Radical Educators have found ways to foster and direct teacher voice by creating member-led committees that develop projects and actions; a few national organizations have done similar work with membership networks. It is imperative that our unions and largest associations find ways to build spaces for member action, and to focus member discourse on innovative practices and policy.

Third and finally, teachers need to find ways to engage with education policy. This engagement—which the act of caring for our students demands of us—includes finding and creating spaces within our professional associations where we can speak of issues that matter to us, and where we can act in ways amplified by the weight and work of the associations.

These are not easy tasks, and I do not have a precise blueprint for where to start. But my experience working in several cities and participating in teacher associations has convinced me that there’s an eagerness among teachers to participate in our profession as professionals, not as technicians isolated in classrooms and subject areas. To build that capacity after years and perhaps decades of isolation, though, will require careful attention and hard work.

Money Talks Too Much, Josh MacPhee, Just Seeds.

Just when we thought our kids were safe, “Fast Eddie” Vrydolyak is back. The convicted felon and former Machine alderman has sold polluted industrial land in his old ward to CPS to build a new school. Any student or teacher would face health risks. The deal smells in more ways than one.

Haven’t they heard? You don’t throw money at schools. An article in this morning’s NY Times describes the trauma facing the One Percent: finding a place for their li’l darlins’ in private schools that are charging $40K a year. I couldn’t help but notice that in light of Rahm’s drive for 7.5 hour schools days and longer school years, the one percent have a different view of things for their own kids:  ”Also unlike New York public schools, which are required to be in session 180 days a year, private schools set their own schedules. At Horace Mann, where the parents of kindergartners are paying $37,695 with additional fees, the children attended 155 days last year. For those doing the math, that’s $243 a day.”

As my district’s Professional Development Day approaches, a day of wasted time and missed opportunities, Nancy Flanagan writes about the problem in Education Week. “There are really two big factors at play here. Number one, teachers aren’t considered true professionals–and policy is leading us further away from a professional work model.We’re still talking about “training” teachers, rather than drawing on their wisdom.”

Principals are complaining that the new evaluation procedures based on test scores and numerous observations is overwhelming them. Yes. I can see that.

Richard Rothstein takes on the urban myths of the school reformers.

An LA teacher reviews her review: 

I teach 10th-grade English and journalism. My “10th grade” English classes are actually made up of ninth-, 10th-, 11th- and 12th-graders. The 11th- and 12th-graders are repeating the class because they failed it the first time. The ninth-graders are students who didn’t pass enough classes the first time they went through ninth grade to be promoted to 10th.

With my scores, the district also sent a notice that, for reasons not explained, the 10th-grade scores were not considered reliable at this time, and so my overall score had been derived solely from the ninth-graders who happen to be in my 10th-grade English class. Because these happen to be my least motivated students, I was therefore judged not on my best students but on my worst.

With that realization came trepidation because the scores may very well be used to determine my salary one day, and they may also be published for all the world to see in this newspaper, which is suing to have teachers’ scores made public.

It’s hard for those who finished high school 20 or 30 years ago, as I did, to fathom the conditions in a typical L.A. Unified high school classroom these days. Classes are huge. Students face overwhelming family and social issues. Drugs are rampant. Students are incredibly disrespectful, testing authority constantly at the beginning of the year. Teachers must be able to get a strong grip on their classes all by themselves because consequences for bad behavior in class are often nonexistent outside it.

My school has two full-time police officers, a full-time probation officer and several full-time security personnel to handle about 3,800 students. Yet we still have a hard time keeping kids from smoking pot on a regular basis in our restrooms.

Today’s teacher must be highly skilled in her subject matter just to make it into the classroom, more so than at any other time in the history of education. She also must play the role of parent, custodian, psychologist, drug and alcohol interventionist and parole officer, to name a few.

On a recent Wednesday, my second-period class was interrupted by a student who overdosed on alcohol and Ecstasy and nearly died. Earlier in the year, one of our students was shot in the face and hospitalized. Last year, a student was shot in the neck and paralyzed for life; one of my students was standing next to him when it happened. The year before that, one of my students was inside her house when her sister, sitting in a car outside, was shot and blinded in one eye in a gang drive-by. The baby she was holding was struck by a bullet and killed.

There are days, or perhaps just moments, when I feel like giving up. I have had to resign myself to the incomprehensible idea that society has decided to blame many of its failings on teachers. But I know we don’t deserve the rap. I work with an incredibly intelligent, caring, talented group of people. I also work with many brave, sweet, bright, extraordinary teens.

It’s not that test scores aren’t useful to me. I can look at my numbers dispassionately and say that I didn’t challenge my honors class enough last year, or that I could have spent more time teaching the concepts that are likely to be on the standardized test. But test scores alone tell so little of the story as to be practically useless in evaluating teacher performance. The best educators know that. Coleen Bondy

Times are so tough that Rahm can find people to carry his signs for 20 bucks a pop.

Rahm’s rent-a-protester. A report on WGN TV news:

Paid-to-protest?

ALEC calls teacher unions Nazis.

Anthony Cody in EdWeek:

As state after state rewrites their education laws in line with the mandates from Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver process, the teaching profession is being redefined. Teachers will now pay the price – be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students’ test scores. Under NCLB it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers to NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label.

This revelation came to me as I read the Score Card on Education prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), authored by Dr. Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips. This is a remarkable document. It provides their report on where each of the states stands on the education “reform” that has become the hallmark of corporate philanthropies, the Obama administration and governors across the nation.

It begins with a histrionic comparison between the struggle over our schools and the Battle of Britain in the Second World War. The authors write:

Britain’s enemies overreached, invading the Soviet Union and attacking the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Finally, British forces defeated the German army in Egypt, securing their hold over the strategically vital Suez Canal. Prime Minister Churchill recognized the turning point:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth Hitler’s Nazis will meet equally well armed and perhaps better armed troops. Hence forth they will have to face in many theatres of war that superiority in the air which they have so often used without mercy against others, of which they boasted all round the world, and which they intended to use as an instrument for convincing all other peoples that all resistance to them was hopeless.

We mean to hold our own.

In 2011, America’s struggle for education reform may have also reached a turning point–an end of the beginning.

Cody adds:

In case you missed it, in this analogy, the teacher unions represent the Nazis, while the forces for corporate reform represent the doughty British and their allies.

A slight dusting of snow fell overnight.

This morning it is sunny, windy and crisp.

Matthew and Harley are running a half marathon along the Lakefront.

I think that’s crazy for a whole bunch of reasons. But Matthew and Harley love running and are in great shape. And I’m not. So there you go.

They will finish at the Cubby Bear by Wrigley Field. They asked me to join them there, but traffic on the north side is also crazy on a Saturday afternoon.  I had to turn them down. Plus they will be having a beer after running 12K and I would be having a beer after not running a 12K and that wouldn’t get me into shape for sure.

So no.

This past week the talk at school was about an upcoming Professional Development Day.

Teachers complaining about PD days is like complaining about the weather. We all do it and it never makes any difference.

The Curriculum Department apparently thinks they are being very progressive by providing a menu of choices to waste our time at.

Originally the February PD day was supposed to be about the district’s strategic plan. Our SP discussion was initiated two years ago and was strategically planned to last five years. Discussions about a strategic plan that is planned to last five years means that a student of mine that is in first grade would be leaving our school in 5th grade by the time the discussion of our strategic plan is completed.

To me, this is not good strategic thinking. Not that the board or the Assistant Superintendent of Student Learning (Yep. That’s her title.) asked me.

And even if I offered her the suggestion without being asked, she is notorious for never returning phone calls or responding to email, so that wouldn’t do any good either.

Naturally the discussion about our strategic plan ran out of steam around the time of our first PD in the Fall.

Now we have menu options.

I can go to a training session on smart boards, iPads or constructing a website.

Since I am retiring in June, a training session on smart boards seems pointless since I will never use a smart board again after that. And I’ve had a smart board for two years and pretty much know how they work and I know what to do with it. So do most of the other teachers who have smart boards. And the teachers who don’t have smart boards wouldn’t find that session particularly useful either. Well. Because they don’t have smart boards. 

There is no other group. We either have one or we don’t. It is hard to figure out who this smart board session is designed for.

The other options are just as ridiculous. So I am taking the day off and heading out to the suburban office of the Illinois Teacher Retirement System to make sure my pension ducks are all lined up.

I think that is a pretty good use of professional development time.

Tim Furman at School Tech Connect also wonders why we’re not heading for Springfield in May for Lobby Day.

But he has a suggestion:

It all seems like a golden opportunity to move forward with the suggestion I keep making about “back-home lobbying.” If it’s such a good strategy, then it should be supported.

My colleagues in the IFT and the IEA will soon be electing delegates to their respective annual meetings. I would humbly suggest that someone in these organization organize a new business item that calls for the creation of a state-wide, opt-in database that lets members see who else lives in their legislative and senate districts. Such a database would make it so much easier to organize a Back Home Lobby Day any time during the year.

I probably live within one mile of dozens of IEA, IFT, and CTU members, but the only way I could determine that would be by starting a Meetup or going on Craigslist and placing a personal ad, or walking around the neighborhood in a sandwich sign with a megaphone.  But our organizations have this information. I could design the database architecture in about an hour.

Most people won’t go sit one-to-one with their representative; however, if they know twenty other people are going, they’ll join in. That’s the beauty of Lobby Day.  A little data would go a long, long way toward people taking responsibility for organized “back-home lobbying.” I live in Heather Steans’ district, and I’m sure I could get a hundred people to meet me at her office to express our dismay about the corrupt-by-design state charter authority that she dreamed up.  But how will I organize that? On my blog? With SPITBALLS?

Well, Tim. Delegates to the IEA RA have already been elected. I’m one of them.

I will be proposing the data-base idea. We’ll see if they’re serious.

Meanwhile, Tim’s suspicions that a deal is in the works?

Yep. Sounds like it to me.

Thursday, Feb. 2 from 6:00 to 7:30 pm

Mt. Greenwood Library

110th & Kedzie

You are invited to a townhall meeting on the controversial plan to lengthen the CPS school day.

Jesse Sharkey from the CTU will answer your questions on the proposed longer day and longer year, and how it compares with the current school day.

CPS will not confirm this, but there is talk that the school year will begin mid-August, and there is talk that Chicago Park District programs will be rescheduled to start later as a result of the longer day.

Petitions will be available to sign.