NEA RA: It is frequently an out-of-body experience.

Teacher activist Jose Lara and NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia.

Sitting in the giant meeting hall that holds the NEA Representative Assembly, it often has an out-of-body experience feel about it.

One day we can pass a major initiative against institutional racism unanimously and with no debate.

The next day we can debate for two hours whether the Confederate flag and statues of Jefferson Davis are symbols of racism that should be removed from the public square.

Although, it should be remembered that my amended NBI calling for taking down the confederate flag was passed overwhelmingly.

Then today the NEA RA awarded my friend Jose Lara for his social justice activism.

NEA awarded the Social Justice Activist Award to Jose Lara, a social studies teacher at Santee Education Complex High School in Los Angeles, for his work in educational justice. The award was presented on Sunday, July 5 at NEA’s Representative Assembly in Orlando.

The award is given to an NEA member who demonstrates the ability to lead, organize and engage educators, parents, and the community to advocate on social justice issues that impact the lives of students, fellow educators, and the communities they serve.

In his remarks to the delegate assembly, Lara said, “Social Justice is a verb. It is a sense of community and responsibility that goes beyond the classroom. It is fighting for the most vulnerable in our society. And today, it is precisely those students, the most vulnerable and historically oppressed, who are left out of our curriculum.”

I’m not sure Jose even remembers this: We first met at the San Diego RA a couple of years back just talking at a table in the convention center lobby. I think we were talking about the still cordial relationship the NEA had with Arne Duncan. I think I defended the relationship and he was critical.

I went up to the stage after Jose’s wonderful speech on social justice and the right of students to know their history. He was surrounded by friends and supporters, but I managed to reach in to shake his hand and congratulate him.

“I’ve been following the flag debate,” he said. “Nice job, my brother.”

Truthfully, I just offered up a New Business Item with no expectation that it would turn out the way it did. And the fact is that the parliamentary maneuver of “requests for information,” while limiting many from telling their stories, meant that I stood at the mic and fielded questions and challenges for most of the two hours. It made me the center of the debate in a way it normally never would.

That was good AND bad.

And then there was the question of the NEA taking money from Gates.

Many remembered that both AFT President Randi Weingarten and our Lily Eskelsen Garcia sat on the stage at the Network for Public Education conference in Chicago telling Diane Ravitch that they would no longer take Gates money.

And then both back tracked on it later.

“It was a technical response,” Lily told the RA.

The NEA never took money from Gates because Gates never gave the NEA money, she said. “Gates doesn’t give money to unions.”

He gave it to the NEA Foundation.

And continues to.

A technical response?

Diane Ravitch’s blog. A Mass teacher’s hopes for Lily.

Newly elected NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia and this blogger.

– Diane Ravitch.

This just in from a member of NEA from Massachusetts who is at the Denver convention. She hopes that Lily Eskelsen, the new president, will be a champion and fighter for kids, teachers, and public schools. Is she THE ONE? Will she stand up to the phony “reformers”? Will she fight for democratic control of the schools? Will she tell the plutocrats to use their billions to alleviate poverty instead of taking control of the schools?

I think Lily has it in her. Until proven wrong, I am placing bets that she will stand up fearlessly for what is right, that she will tell Arne Duncan to scram, that she will tell the billionaires to get another hobby.

Here is the message from one of her members.

The in box. Glen Brown writes to Diane Ravitch on teacher pensions. Update. Ravitch responds.

Dear Diane Ravitch:

You are a powerful, reasonable, and articulate voice and an invaluable resource and forum for teachers in this country. Your blog offers rebuttals to many injustices, including educational reform, corporate privatization of public schools, and the denigration of teachers. Teachers need your help now to fight another injustice.

As you are aware, across the United States and elsewhere in the world, there is an unprecedented attack on public employees’ rights and benefits, especially teachers’ pensions. Those of us in Illinois have felt, as has the nation, the impact of the 2008-09 financial crises. State policymakers have responded to this catastrophe, not by addressing the structural deficits that are resultant of the lack of revenue growth needed to meet the increased cost of services, but by irrational public pension “reform.”  In one particular state, however, its economic austerities have also been intensified by decades of legislative irresponsibility and deceptiveness. The results are the unconscionable, unfunded liabilities of the Illinois public pension systems.

Since 1953, Illinois policymakers have consistently failed to make the annual required contributions to the state’s pension systems, primarily because they could then pay for services and their “pet projects” without raising taxes; they have bargained with previous union leaders and allowed for enhancements of pension benefits without fully funding the public pension systems; moreover, they have created a flawed re-funding schedule, and they have refused to correctly amortize the pension systems’ unfunded liabilities. In short, they have favored corporate interests rather than the interests of their citizenry and; thus, they have seriously sabotaged the public employees’ retirement plans and the State of Illinois’ future economic solvency through calculated mismanagement and fiscal irresponsibility. Past state policymakers left us with this fiscal debacle.

Current Illinois policymakers are not more trustworthy or competent either. They are equally as reckless in employing the old cost-avoiding tactics as their predecessors. They continue to use an ineffective and “cheaper” actuarial cost method (a projected-unit credit which back loads required contributions) instead of an entry-age normal cost method for determining pension funding and benefits earned; they continue to issue obligation bonds with the assumption that they will reap high investment returns, and they continue to be concerned more about Bond-Rating organizations than the protections of their public employees’ guarantees and security. They prefer to jeopardize the public employees’ retirement plans through pension “reform” by contesting teachers’ constitutional rights and cutting their benefits, even though revenue and pension debt reform is the legal and moral solution.

Instead of protecting public pension rights and benefits, which have a legal basis under Illinois State Law; instead of restructuring the state’s revenue base to pay for the state’s growth in expenditures and its injudiciously-accumulated debts and obligations, current policymakers have chosen to challenge the Illinois constitutional provision (Article XIII, Section 5) and diminish (and predictably destroy) the public employees’ defined-benefit pension plan, their health care benefits, and their cost-of-living adjustments. Their masquerades of proposed pension “reform” bills to be considered conveniently after the November elections include increasing public employees’ contribution rates (which are already one of the highest rates in the country), raising public employees’ retirement ages, capping earnings for final pension calculations, eliminating or reducing cost-of-living adjustments by forcing public employees (and retirees) to choose between a COLA or their health care benefits with duress, and inducing public employees to select an unreliable and inadequate self-managed retirement plan (none of the above-mentioned address the pension debt created by policymakers).

For most teachers, their pension plan is their only retirement subsidy, since nearly all of them cannot receive Social Security benefits. Furthermore, instead of funding crucial services and benefits in a time when they are most needed, many ill-informed policymakers want to shift the state’s normal costs for the Teachers’ Retirement System to public employees and school districts and further slash public services and health care benefits. For most school districts, the effects of the policymakers’ proposal to shift the normal costs of the pension systems to school districts will raise property taxes and devastate public schools’ resources and programs, increase class sizes, purge teachers’ jobs, and freeze contractual salary enhancements for those who remain employed (on average, wages for teachers and other public employees are lower than employees in the private sector with comparable education). Because the best possible teaching candidates will most likely forego working in Illinois, as a result, students will become victims.

The irony, of course, is that poverty, inequality and violence are not issues to be “reformed” in Illinois or anywhere else in this country. Citizens United, Super Political Action Committees, and the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago’s “We Mean Business” will perpetuate that incongruity. In Illinois, policymakers are sanctimonious about their recent lacerations of Medicare, and they are foolhardy about granting excessive tax breaks for wealthy corporations that have extorted the Illinois General Assembly and the citizens of the state. In Illinois, and in other states, political policies are created for the corporate elite, all in the name of “Free Market” principles and anti-unionism. In Illinois, they are espoused by Illinois Is Broke (the Civic Committee’s obverse group), the Civic Federation, Illinois Policy Institute, Pension Fairness for Illinois Communities, Taxpayers United of Illinois, and the Chicago Tribune, and their ilk.

We are not alone fighting this assault in Illinois. In New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Louisiana, policymakers have not been held accountable for their incompetence and betrayal as well. They are not held responsible even though their state’s current and retired public employees’ will suffer disastrous consequences as a result of their policymakers’ negligence to fully fund their pension systems. Furthermore, in Maine, Oklahoma, Washington, Wyoming, Rhode Island, Minnesota, South Dakota, New Jersey and Colorado, the public employees’ COLA has been either reduced or suspended. These states do not have a constitutional provision to protect this benefit (Alicia H. Munnell, Director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College).

“[Moreover,] twenty-one states [have] raised employee contributions for current and future [public] employees only, which diminishes the net compensation received in the form of pensions for these workers. Thirty-one states [have] reduced benefits for new employees, primarily by increasing the age when full benefits will be paid, and five states [have] introduced a less expensive hybrid defined benefit/defined contribution system for new employees. In all cases, new employees will receive diminished pension compensation… [It is important to reiterate that] current actions, without any compensating changes in wages, have the potential to adversely affect the quality of people willing to teach in public schools” (Munnell, State and Local Pensions: What Now?).

These pervasive attacks on public employees’ pensions are aligned with the undemocratic, corporate dismantling of public schools for privatization or profiteering through unaccountable, biased charter and simulated schools; dictatorial Race to the Top and unreliable value-added modeling for rating schools and teachers’ effectiveness and students’ learning;  counter-productive merit-based pay knotted to standardized test scores; the irresponsible failure to renovate dilapidated public school buildings and rectify the depletion of public schools’ resources and personnel, such as school psychologists, social workers and nurses; the oppressive stripping of collective bargaining and due process rights; the despotic destruction of public employees’ unions; the propagandized demonization of teachers; and the disparate distribution of wealth and “shared sacrifice.”

I am asking you to fight this assault on teachers’ pensions with other stalwart teachers; I ask humbly for a link about this injustice in your Blog Topics entitled “Pension Reform,” so all teachers and other public employees, their family and their friends across the nation can have this essential discussion and opportunity for unification and purposeful action. This is my entreaty to you. I hope this letter will be your first post appearing in that category.

Respectfully,

Glen Brown 

Update: Diane Ravitch responds.

Saturday coffee.

Photo credit: Sarah-Ji Fotógrafa 

In a post earlier this week about the AFT convention in Detroit I suggested that one difference between it and the NEA RA was that no resolution in support of the CTU coming from the AFT was needed or was necessary.

Maybe not.

But they’re going to get to vote on one anyway. Hey. More the merrier.

I’ve heard from friends who are delegates. They are looking forward to hearing from Diane Ravitch who is keynoting today. This is a big improvement over the last AFT meet when Bill Gates was the keynote speaker.

I’ve also been hearing from my new friends in the North Lake Shore Illinois Retired Teachers Association that  they are gearing up for the Fall veto session of the General Assembly. A bill that looks like HB1447 is likely to come up which forces retirees to choose between health care and a cost of living increase.

They are planning an information and action planning meeting at the Wilmette Public Library on August 23rd at 7PM. I’ll be there, sharing what I know along with others who know far more than me. Keep checking this space for further information.

You don’t have to be a retiree to come.

Speaking of HB1447. It’s not a lock, according to Democratic Senate President John Cullerton. However, if it does pass the House this summer, count on it coming to the General Assembly in another form, going after teachers, after the November elections. Cullerton has made it clear he has no intention of legislators taking a cut and not punishing teachers for it.

The measure does not affect judges or teachers and university workers. Some reform advocates fear that lawmakers will pass the measure, claim victory and abandon the push for further changes. But Cullerton said that’s not the case, arguing that legislators aren’t going to cut their own benefits and then “let teachers off the hook.”

This is typical Springfield-think. 

It demonstrates why the goal isn’t pension reform by cutting benefits. The goal must be Springfield Reform by fixing the revenue problem inherent in Illinois’ structural deficit and regressive flat tax system. And ending the tax give aways to corporations like Sears, CME and Motorola.

Motorola, recently purchased by Google, received a $100 million ten-year tax break. What new jobs were gained by moving Motorola from Libertyville to Chicago? How did this improve the economy of Illinois?

And the retirement tax, which is what HB1447 is, pays for the deal.

Park Ridge Senator Dan Kotowski calls health care for seniors a sweetheart deal.

That’s the mindset in Springfield. Ten-year tax breaks for corporations like Motorola, paid for by seniors giving up health care? Good economic policy.

Seniors with health care and a pension allowing them to buy the things they need and create jobs? A sweetheart deal.

IEA Executive Director Audrey Soglin gets up with fleas.

Tim Furman points me in the direction of Diane Ravitch’s latest blog post on the National Council on Teacher Quality.

This is an organization born from the sperm and egg of the right-wing Fordham Foundation and the Bush Department of Education.

Ravitch’s blog post reads in part:

An hour after this blog was published, a reader told me that NCTQ was cited as one of the organizations that received funding from the Bush administration to get positive media attention for NCLB. I checked his sources, which took me to a 2005 report of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education (a link in this article leads to the Inspector General report), and he was right. This practice was suspended because the U.S. Department of Education is not allowed to expend funds for propaganda, and the grantees are required to make full disclosure of their funding. At the time, the media focused on payments to commentator Armstrong Williams. According to the investigation, NCTQ and another organization received a grant of $677,318 to promote NCLB. The product of this grant was three op-eds written by Kate Walsh, the head of NCTQ; the funding of these articles by the Department of Education was not disclosed.

I have special interest in this story because of who sits on NCTQ’s Advisory Board.

IEA Executive Director Audrey Soglin.

This I discovered about a year ago when IEA Communications Director Charlie McBarron mentioned Audrey and NCTQ  on a Facebook post. When I did a piece on Audrey’s connection to this most conservative of anti-teacher outfits, McBarron immediately unfriended me.

Apparently McBarron was embarrassed by his mistake. And by Audrey having lunch with Michelle Rhee, Fred Hess, Wendy Kopp, and Joel Klein while discussing methods for improving us.

As well he might be.

Joel Klein’s emails. Going after the union, Ravitch and Meier. Courting “overweight billionaires.”

When Kyle Olson FOIAed my work emails he didn’t find anything.

Now that former NY school’s Chancellor Joel Klein’s emails have been released, it reveals a lot. An enemies list that included the AFT, Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier. And charter school friendly hedge fund managers that Klein was courting on the one hand but describing as “overweight billionaires.” on the other. The emails concerned Klein’s battle to establish more charter schools.

Klein in now an executive with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

A lot of the emails are between Joe Williams and Klein. Williams runs DFER, Democrats for Education Reform. DFER is heavily funded by the overweight billionaires.

From the NY Times:

But one of the callers on the line with Mr. Klein in 2010 said Friday that the chancellor did ask the Robin Hood board to commit more funding to Education Reform Now, rather than start its own lobbying organization. Mr. Klein told them “their philanthropy was going to amount to minuscule results unless they stepped it up,” said the caller, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.Attempts to reach Mr. Klein through News Corporation, where he is now a top executive, were unsuccessful on Friday.Though Ms. Scaperotti said Mr. Klein did not fund-raise on the call, it is not clear whether any rule prohibited him from doing so. After everyone on the call had hung up, the rapid e-mailing resumed.

“You were terrific,” Mr. Klein wrote to Bradley Tusk, a consultant for Education Reform Now. “Perfect pitch, perfect message.”

“Who’s the heavy breather on the call?” wrote a participant, whose name was redacted. “Normally, I’d ask them to mute their phone but I don’t want to alienate any donors.”“Some overweight billionaire,” Mr. Klein replied.

Ravitch commented on her blog about the email dump:

The first thing I noticed was the chummy exchanges between the public officials in change of the New York City public school system and the top dogs of the charter leadership–the Wall Street hedge fund managers, the leader of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the leader of the New York City Charter Center, and various others. It comes clear that there is a strong and concerted effort to hand over as much public space as possible to the charters. The charter leaders are not the poor and oppressed of New York City; they are the powerful and monied, and the public officials who are paid to protect and support the PUBLIC schools of New York City are working hand-in-glove to advance the interests of the privately-managed charters, not the public schools. You will also notice, in one of the emails, that the charters are very concerned to make sure that there is no cap on their executive compensation. Heaven forbid! It’s important that their leaders continue to pull down $400,000 a year to oversee a few small schools.

The collusion between those who are sworn to protect the public schools and those who are incentivized to privatize them is surely the most important thing to be gleaned from this correspondence.

For me, the other interesting point is that they are so afraid of any criticism. They are especially afraid of Deborah Meier, me and Jonathan Kozol. They refer to columns by Deborah Meier and myself–she an educator with decades of experience, I a historian with a long view–as “moronic” and “idiotic.” They refer to Jonathan Kozol and me as “deranged crackpots.”

How can anyone take these mean-spirited, ignorant, arrogant people seriously?

Following his work with Bloomberg and Klein, and before his work with Education Reform Now, Bradley Tusk worked for Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Sunday links.

Protest in Chicago on Saturday.

Why Illinois is broke? Caterpillar bleeds it dry.

The Gingrich campaign was always about book tours and speaking fees. But that doesn’t make him any less a racist prick.

Linda Darling-Hammond suggests that maybe it’s time to ask teachers. Actually, that time was a long time ago.

Beating the parent trigger law. Diane Ravitch wants us to learn from Florida.

If a loose framework of common national standards was the end point of this adventure, I wouldn’t worry so much myself. I can see value in a slim, overarching outline of essential content. It’s the standardized national tests and the on-line curriculum Gates and Pearson are developing  that freak me out.

In 2010, I was part of a group of teachers who used the CCS to develop model units to be taught or used as exemplars all over the state of MI. My take? The standards are…meh. Some things to like. Some things to disagree with. And some genuine professional arguments (like the war over fiction vs. non-fiction “balance”) that have not been illuminated through a national conversation among the people–actual K-12 teachers–who have been teaching them for years.

One thing is certain. The CCS do not represent a unilaterally agreed-upon set of common, shared values from the field about what is important–and how it must be taught. They were designed to frame out the narrowest, easiest-to-test “core” of disciplinary skills. Not common–and not really core, if you broadly define what kids need to know and be able to do.

In my experience, there are three groups of people who like and embrace the new CCS: The ones making money from them, the ones making political hay from them–and new teachers who entered the profession thinking nobody had ever created solid content standards before. Nancy Flanagan

The in box: Jose Vilson on Why the NY Times is asking me to validate myself.

Jose Vilson’s blog:

Not sure if you’ve heard, but, against their own wishes -ahem-, the NYC Department of Education is releasing their infamous Teacher Data Reports, a set of papers ostensibly compiling a teacher’s student scores on English and Math scores from 3rd to 8th grade to determine their effectiveness, normalizing scores for effects like poverty and growth. For anyone that finds this as absurd as I do, you’ll know that not only is there a huge margin of error on using such a report to determine teacher effectiveness, it’s so narrow and limited that parents probably won’t get much information about the teacher they seek. If anything, it might obfuscate the debates that happen in principal offices and households when kids vouch for their teacher, but adults with no understanding of pedagogy point to the scales and rebuke opponents.

I said it. Twice. Diane Ravitch said it. Bill Gates said it. Yet, they’re being released in papers large and small.

Almost every outlet has salivated at the chance to put these reports out (except for Gotham Schools). At first, I thought we would just see the yellow rags like the New York Post and Daily News post these, as they proliferate the bad teacher framework. I’m sure the other media outlets like the Village Voice or Manhattan Times has some intention to do something with these reports, but by the time they do, the bomb will have already dropped on our industry.

However, the one rag that considers itself the vanguard for objective journalism is the New York Times. While I’ve shared my disappointment with one of their events in the past, I still understood their role in pushing forth the news of the day and the voices they’ve highlighted from Bob Herbertand Charles Blow to the inimitable ones, Stephen Lazar and Arthur Goldstein. I still read the Times a fair amount, and even when I disagree, I also get that they often set the table for certain discussions.

Thus, believe me when I say how disappointed I am in the fact that they’re asking teachers to justify their reports to them.

Go to Jose Vilson’s blog for the rest of this great post.

Ravitch weighs in on the NEA TFA controversy.

DVR and Kopp. Maybe not such an odd couple after all.

Education historian and leading critic of corporate education reform, Diane Ravitch,  has weighed in on the controversial marriage (or maybe it was just a coffee date) of NEA President Dennis Van Roekel and Teach For America’s Wendy Kopp.

Prominent teacher-activists responded immediately to the USA Today editorial with outrage. Ken Bernstein, who blogs regularly for The Daily Kos, accused Van Roekel of betraying his members.

Anthony Cody, who blogs for Education Week, wondered why the NEA was partneringwith an organization that sends teachers into challenging schools with minimal preparation, knowing that most will leave teaching after two or three years. Fred Klonsky pointed out that NEA delegates had passed a resolution critical of TFA at its annual national convention only six months earlier.