The Dudes Are Out at Educators 4 Excellence: Funded by Gates, A Fact Ignored by Gotham Schools

UPDATED: Jan. 31, 2011

How much fun that Jeff Kaufman crashed the E4E party for his school the other day. Jeff refused to sign the pledge that you support everything E4E believes in before they allow you in for a drink. But they allowed Jeff in anyway - and he didn't even have to bring his gun (Jeff is an ex cop). E4E got an extraordinary amount of coverage when 2 third year teachers started organizing to end "Last in First Out" for layoffs, promote merit pay and the use of data to judge and pay teachers.

Jeff wrote all about his adventure on the ICE blog. 

When I was first asked by my colleague to attend an "Educators for Excellence" (they use a number 4 for their middle name which rubs this educator the wrong way) happy hour at a Prospect Heights bar I was very apprehensive. The RSVP required that I ascribe to their "core principals" which include much of the "ed deformers'" agenda; teacher layoffs by ability not seniority, "earned tenure" which require certain student test milestones, and teacher evaluation systems based on student data which are also tied to merit-pay schemes.

You can read the entire piece at  Up Close and Personal With An Opposition

Jeff makes mention of a story on E4E at Gotham Schools.

Attending happy hour sponsored by this group reminded me to dig a little deeper into this group. When the Gotham Schools article was posted Stone and Morris were reported to be full-time teachers in the Bronx and the organization was not funded. Well, things have changed as they are now funded by the Gates Foundation and certain anonymous donors and have 3 full time employees.

I went back to the Gotham story and found this comment from 
Teacher April 11th, 2010 9:46 am
I predict that this group will soon get funding from the Gates, Walton and Broad Foundations.

There were also many comments speculating as to whether the founders of E4E would be leaving teaching. Jeff reports:

"Educators for Excellence," it appears, is run by a couple of new teachers who now teach 1 day per week at P.S. 86 in the Bronx. There are some interesting blog entries about them and their organization and if you are really interested you can go here and here.

Strictly, not new teachers as they did teach for 3 years. Teach for America I believe. 

Editorial interjection:
You know I have to say right here that I was offered many opportunities to leave the self-contained classroom - even being told to become an administrator (so I could really make a difference) or a guidance counselor - anything but teach in the trenches - and I wanted to be with the kids, not deal with adults. It took almost 20 years before I was lured out. So when I see that people leave teaching to engage almost full time in some kind of political activity - even if it was a good political activity they were doing - I have to ask about the kind of commitment they have to children.

By the way - the same with frequent commenter Kitchen Sink - who taught in public schools for 4 years before running off to start and run a charter - this is the guy who always talks about how it should be about the kids and not the adults.

Anyway, back to the program.

Is Gotham Schools a nest for E4E?
The info on E4E led some people to wonder about the space Gotham gave them but never followed up with the new info. 

NOTE FROM ANNA PHILIPS:

I wrote a post in June saying that they were getting funding from Education Reform now. http://gothamschools.org/2010/06/03/klein-celebrates-no-layoffs-hits-the-bar-with-young-teachers/

Then comes the news that Gotham Community blogger Ruben Brosbe is also an E4E. South Bronx School is driven to mirth and merriment over Brosbe's ramblings:

The Mishegas Mind Of Ruben Brosbe Of PS 310 Bronx

But of course it takes NYC Educator to nail Brosbe, as he does in today's post:

So anyhoo, like, when I wanted to support the release of value-added grades, and everyone was all like, "Dude, they're inaccurate and invalid," and everything? Like, Gotham Schools let me write about how even though I was writing that stuff, I was, like, still cool and everything? And, like, Gotham Schools is SO KEWL, because, like, they don't even make me write in my bio that I'm a member of Educators4Excellence. So I'm, like, in a group funded by Bill Gates and stuff, and they don't even tell anybody! And I'm also in a video with Michelle Rhee, and like, at Gotham, I don't even have to say why! They just say, I'm just, like, a teacher and stuff! So, I don't look, like, uncool!

Read it all at Puke-O-Rama, Dude!

So Gotham seems to be taking a few hits lately. And not just publicly. Behind the scenes a number of activists - parents and teachers - have been whispering that charter school and ed deform money - which you can tell from E4E - is flowing into Gotham and has affected coverage. Why not? Broad, Gates, Walton, et al. and the hedge hogs will fund anything that they think can control the message of ed deform. I mean, they even fund E4E so they can throw school parties and allow the founders to have to teach only one day a week - someone tell me how to get that gig.

I don't pay that close attention and can't say I see bias at Gotham - yet - but when people can give examples I will point it out. I will say that at the Gotham holiday party in December, I felt outnumbered significantly by the ed deform crowd. Tilt!

Below the fold I extracted a few of the 150 comments on the original Gotham post last April, with some significant points made by Michael Fiorillo and a blogger - jodama - regarding charges that in the corporate world people who screw up would be gone.


jodama April 9th, 2010 8:16 pm
 
Umm kids, are we kidding here. Someone actually wrote, “In what other job do you get to keep your position when you stop performing?” Like every other profession. You folks make it sound like in every other profession people are performing at peak levels all the time or else they are fired. That is not the real world. Come on! There are crappy doctors, nurses, lawyers. There are burned-out bankers. I worked on Wall Street for 20 years before I became a teacher - do we really want to talk about a profession where people make gobs of money for a couple of meagre hours a day. Let’s see when I worked in corporate I came in, went to my desk, drank coffee, read the papers, ate a bagel, and about 10 got to work. As a teacher, I work so much harder than I ever worked as a analyst. Please. This idea that everyone in the business world is fired immediately should they stop being productive is a load of bull. Leave us teachers alone. We work hard. Nobody wanted this job and now all of a sudden everyone wants to act like we have this nice, cushy job that we do very little work for. Let me tell you - children are the toughest taskmasters - they will surely let you know if you are not doing right by them. Oh and BTW when I work late, I don’t have a town car waiting anymore to whisk me home.

 Michael Fiorillo April 9th, 2010 9:14 pm
jodama is correct.
The fact is that virtually all jobs, trades and professions are performed along a spectrum that ranges from grossly incompetent to highly superior, with the majority falling somewhere in between. How is that those who are driving this discussion, most of whom have never taught and would sooner die than send their children to an urban public school (to start, see Klein, Joel and Bloomberg, Michael) have been allowed to decree that it must be different among teachers?
How many doctors and lawyers lose their license to practice due to incompetence each year? A few years ago, a doctor in Queens was discovered reusing syringes on his patients: he kept his license. How many police officers, who carry weapons and are given license to use them, are fired for incompetence each year?
How many bankers lost their jobs for the gross incompetence - to say nothing of the outright looting - that led to the financial crisis? The very same financial crisis, by the way, that now threatens new teachers with layoffs?
Maybe these two young dupes, which is the most charitable thing to call them, should direct their anger and frustration there, rather than at the organization that defends their wages, hours and working conditions. Oh, but I forget, these are the same people who are so eager to be observed more often by supervisors who, if they are themselves TFAers or Leadership Academy grads, probably have even less classroom experience than they do. Some of these new administrators are barely out of diapers, yet presume to tell seasoned educators with many years of experience how to teach. Through the irrational alchemy of the media echo chamber, inexperience is transmuted into authority and superior ability. It ain’t necessarily so.
As a NYC public school alumnus who had his share of terrible teachers, and as the father of a current NYC public high school student who’s had likewise, I see this constant braying about the threat posed by incompetent teachers as a red herring, and as nothing more than a front in the campaign to undermine teachers, their unions, and impose a hostile takeover of the public schools.
Of course every child deserves to have an effective teacher in every class. They and their parents also deserve many other things, most of which are beyond the pale of polite political discussion. That’s the real scandal.

Check out Norms Notes for a variety of articles of interest: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/. And make sure to check out the side panel on right for news bits.

One Happy Fela and Parteeee at Gotham

Wednesday was an interesting day and evening. We got home late Tuesday night from a week in Florida at Singer Island near West Palm Beach - starting with 5 cloudy/rainy days and ending with 2 beautiful days.

I had promised to help a teacher who needed a chaperon for a school trip to see the new Broadway musical Fela about Fela Kuti, an African singer and political rebel. The NY Times gave the show one of the better reviews I've seen. So I headed over to the high school on Wednesday. The class was an interesting mix. It seemed mostly white and Asian, with a few black and Hispanic kids and a few Muslim girls wearing head scarves. My co-chaperon is an activist who is about to become a teacher and though we never met, is connected to ISO and knows all the players. We had a great review of the state of ed activism on the way to the city as we reviewed all the activist groups - and they are growing by leaps and bounds. Then we all crammed into McDonald's for a quick meal before the show.

I'm leaving the school and teacher out of this because who know what evil lurks in the hearts of school and DOE administrators. There is cursing in the show - HORRORS! And sexual innuendo – YIKES! The show is based on the idea that this was Fela's final performance in his theater and he treats the audience as he would a real audience for his show. The entire audience was filled with kids and Fela is loud and stimulating, so there was noise. Lots of it. But the performers want noise. They encourage it. And the kids loved it.

After the show, the actors, including Sahr Ngaujah who alternates in the Fela role with Kevin Mambo, came out to answer questions and talk to the kids. That was after almost 3 hours of performing - and Fela is on stage for almost the entire performance. There must have been a thousand kids or more and this was so orderly as to be scary. Imagine - a class size of a thousand. Take that Leonie! I better not give BloomKlein any ideas.

Speaking of Klein, my next stop was to head downtown to the Gotham Schools blowout open invite party on Lafayette Street. But first I had to meet a visiting cousin from Oakland for a drink over on Lexington and 47th St. He is a businessman/CEO and is convinced Obama is a socialist. But his business is drilling for oil, so what do you expect? His stepdaughter recently moved to Israel and married a Hassidic Jew who is not born Jewish but converted. She was born Jewish but was not religious until fairly recently. Now my cousin and his wife, who were at the upper levels of Werner Erhard's EST lifestyle movement in the 70's - my cousin was running the organization for a while, are becoming observant Jews.

That has been one strange trip and getting the latest details of this journey made me over an hour late for the Gotham Party. I was not the only one. I came up in the elevator with City Councilman Robert Jackson and Jan Atwell of the NYC Council. I mentioned how his complaint at a recent overcrowded PEP meeting at Tweed that it was a farce for them to hold meetings for the public in so limited a space has given Tweed an excuse to move the meetings to Outer Mongolia. I hope he complains about that and gets them to move the important Jan. 26 meeting where school closings will be voted on out of Staten Island, which has no schools being closed, and into a central location that can be reached from all boroughs. Like a large high school in Manhattan near good transportation. (Maybe Jackson can also be our spokesperson to the UFT which moved the Delegate Assemblies years ago from Fashion Industries HS which held everyone comfortably to the UFT building where they hold a meeting with a potential 3000 attendees in a space that holds 850. Way too often you have to think that Tweed and 52 Broadway were separated at birth.)

Anyway, we missed Joel Klein's speech. And also missed Diane Ravitch reading from her upcoming blockbuster book - to be released in March. I'm glad I got there in time to see her before she left. A few Tweedies seemed pleased that Diane was pretty nice to them.

The party was loaded with some of the influential ed people in NYC on all sides. Leonie Haimson and Jennifer Jennings (Eduwonkette), her former mentor and co-blogger as Skoolboy, Aaron Pallas (with an interesting anecdote about the party), Alexander Russo, who I met formally for the first time, Arthur Goldstein. I saw testing analyst Fred Smith and Jose Vilson, who wrote about the party (and the wonderful ed blogging community we are all part of). I had met Jose at a bloggers gathering hosted by Gotham's Philissa Cramer and Kelly Vaughan when Gotham first began. Kelly was there Wednesday. She left Gotham a year ago and is back teaching- in a charter school and seems to be having a great time. For those who do not know, Kelly blogged as one of the major ed blogs that was world famous for many years. Philissa was there taking pictures and reporters Anna Philips and Maura Walz, who I formally met for the first time. And of course, Elizabeth Green was the hostess with the mostest.

Gotham financial backer Ken Hirsch was there beaming, all suited up. You can disagree with Ken 100% and still have great conversations with him even though Ken also backs Harlem Success schools.

I got to hang out a bit with some of my favorite Tweedies in the PR department. The entire cast of thousands didn't attend - the party would have had to be held in Madison Square Garden to hold them all. The leader of the gang, David Cantor, who makes enemies when he posts to listserves but makes lots of friends in person, suggested I write a memoir. Sure, David, distract me so I get off BloomKlein's back. No wonder he gets the big bucks. When I left the party he was huddled with Eduwonkette, maybe making amends for the attacks Tweed made on her when she was anonymous. David is one party guy. Andy Jacob, former Tweed spokesperson, who I also met at one of Kelly Vaughan's parties, is now working for Tim Daly at The New Teachers Project. It was noisy, but I think Andy said that Daly reads Ed Notes (search this blog to see the nice things we said about him). Clearly a masochist.

Leo Casey was there for the UFT. I am more comfortable talking to Tweedies than to Casey (who I don't talk to). At least Tweedies show you the knife when they stick it in. I got more than a few questions from people asking my opinion of Mulgrew. Some Tweedies wanted to know how Eterno will do in the election. "He's pretty busy as chapter leader trying to fight to keep Jamaica HS open," I said. "Isn't it a done deal," she said? "It's never over 'til it's over," I answered. "Does Eterno have something up his sleeve," she asked? I smiled, not wanting to give away the big secret that the staff and parents and students at Jamaica are installing secret devices to blast out anti BloomKlein slogans in perpetuity when the new schools take over.

A couple of charter school people came over to chat. They say they are mom and pop charters and wanted to know what GEM and Ed Notes and ICE are so anti-charter when they claim they are countering the awful BloomKlein bureaucracy. They say they would love to talk to GEM about this issue and bring some unity. They seem to be really bothered by the actions of GEM and CAPE. We had a lot of good back and forth and will continue the conversation.

And then there was the charter school operator of all time. The one and only Evil Moskowitz. Talking to Leonie Haimson, no less. I was watching this scene with Francis Lewis HS chapter leader Arthur Goldstein waiting for fisticuffs to break out. "Let's throw a bucket of water on Eva and see if she melts," Arthur said.

Help elect Arthur to the UFT exec board on the ICE/TJC slate and you'll get laughs like these all the time.

See links to all of Arthur's pieces at Gotham on the ed notes sidebar.

Thanks to David Bellel for the photoshopping

Postscript: congratulations to the crew at Gotham for pulling off an event that brought so many people with varying views into one space. This was not a cheap thing to do and they are asking for financial support. I am kicking in a few to make sure they keep doing the great work they do. Head on over and do the same to help keep some vestige of independent education press alive.

What Did Klein Know About Lehman and When DId He Know It?

Gotham Schools is reporting that the whistle blowing teachers at Lehman HS will be investigated over the fact they allegedly sent student records as proof of the cheating, apparently a violation of some law that does more to protect cheating admins that students.

City officials will investigate whistleblowing Lehman HS teachers

The teachers approached Gotham Schools with students’ transcripts after some of them had submitted the same transcripts to the Office of Special Investigations, but had not heard back for months and assumed the investigation was dead. Former Lehman teachers stood by their decision to share the documents. The principal “has a three-year contract and it takes the DOE an average of two years to complete any investigation,” one teacher said. “So she gets her bonus for increasing graduation rates and we’re supposed to keep quiet?”

The DOE sees fit to allow all sort of info to be released to charter school operators. And can phony grades manipulated by the principal be considered real grades being released?

I sent this to the NYC Education News listserve re: the Lehman HS cheating scandal, which I wrote about yesterday: Lehman HS, School for Scandal

What needs to be pointed out is that Klein was told Lehman and did nothing. He is as complicit as can be and the investigators should include him. What did Joel know and when did he know it?

My old buddy David Cantor, Tweed press chief, responded:

From: david cantor
To: nyceducationnews@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thu, Oct 29, 2009 9:18 pm
Subject: Re: [nyceducationnews] Now playing at ed notes: Lehman HS, School for Scandal

Norm, I don't know why you say the chancellor "did nothing" after learning of the allegations at Lehman. He was contacted by a teacher at Lehman in late March and asked general counsel Mike Best to follow up. Within a few days, I believe--I can get you the dates--Best met with teachers from the school, after which he referred their allegations to the Special Commissioner of Investigation (who in turn referred them to the Office of Special Investigation). The investigation began in April and has continued since. I'm not aware of any lack of timeliness around the DOE's response to the charges.

David Cantor

My response:

David, The smoking gun.

Let's see now. It seems to be almost November. Let me count the months. Hmmm, 7. I didn't get to the point where I had to take my shoes off to count past 10, but if the story didn't come out at Gotham I believe I would have had to take off both shoes before we knew anything.

If Klein knew about Lehman in late March and many of the issues reported were going on in relation to graduating students, then nothing was done to interfere in a process that just happened to lead to "improved" grad rates that June. Boy, these investigations seem to take so long. Maybe it will be completed by the end of Bloomberg's 4th term.

By the way, even little ole me knew about it months before that and was linking to the barely disguised 19 credits blog. I see the teachers will be investigated and I would bet much more effort will go into that aspect and they will suffer much more than the cheating administrators, just as happened at JFK HS a few years ago when the whistle blowing teacher was sent to the rubber room and the admins got off scot free. We know you have your priorities.

And if the principal tampered with student grades, can they really be considered true student grades and therefore did teachers violate any law in releasing phony grades? Should make an interesting court case.

Oh, yeah, what about all that student info charter school operators are allowed to access in recruiting kids?

Best Norm


Related:
As this story goes citywide and beyond, we want to point out that Ed Notes, due to our impeccable sources, had the story for months and worked with the teachers to get the story out to the press. Why didn't we break the story last spring? Because the teachers were feeling their way as to the best route to take and we were there to help in any way possible. I was asked my opinion and I and the teachers thought Gotham Schools was the way to go. And of course we love Gotham's Anna Philips over here at Ed Notes. And not only because she treated us to dinner, but listened to the entire history of Ed Notes and ICE for two hours without falling asleep into her dinner plate (though I thought I saw a few yawns being stifled).

Slugging it Out Over ATRs at Gotham, Part 1

Ariel Sacks, a 4th year middle school teacher in Brooklyn, has written a piece on ATRs at Gotham that has ignited a fire storm. See ATRs in the Teachers Lounge.

There are 60 c0mments and counting, with all sides chipping in. The Fiorillo comments are always worth tracking, as are Mr. Talk and Michael M. Of course, I agree with their sentiments. Sacks is undergoing quite a thrashing, while being defended by the usual anti-teacher crowd. She seems to really resent having people around her school who she feels don't work as hard as her but get paid more. It seems logical to some people that she is right. Naturally, I don't agree.

More interesting is the hysteria over the possibility that there are some potentially bad teachers out there. HELLO!

Believe me, I had my share of bad teachers as a kid and saw a few as a teacher. But the overwhelming majority of teachers were competent, though I think the number of great/bad teachers would come out to about the same numbers. In fact, most teachers are pretty good but few are great. Yet the ed deformers predicate their program on having all teachers be great. That's like saying you cannot have a good baseball game unless all players are a the level of Willie Mays.

No matter how hard people huff and puff to get rid of bad teachers - for instance, measure them by test scores and I bet you lose as many good ones as bad ones. In fact I surmise more honest teachers who understand and try to teach realistically will go down the drain, while the free loaders will figure out the easy ways to get better scores and never worry about really trying to teach in the best manner that meets the needs of the kids.

Look at the numbers of teachers and how many leave the job in droves within 5 years - both good and bad. The replacement factor automatically brings in a new crop of bad (and good) teachers with every round. These people get to experiment on the kids for a few years until they are denied tenure. Think of the effort - and hot air - spewing forth about removing teachers. I would rather have a 10 year bad teacher than a 2 year bad teacher. Either way, you're going to get them anyway.

My answer it to figure out a way to make the best use of whatever talents they have. There is really a lot of useful work to do in a school and some would rather do any work other than teach.

Not to say that there are impossible cases that bug their colleagues even more than the outside "experts" like Kristof and Brooks. I always believed if teachers ran the schools - even hiring the principal (along with parents) - their fellow teachers who were goof-offs would shape up or ship out. And there are certainly a bunch of people who are actually competent but don't want to work very hard or don't think much of the kids.

By the way, there are teachers who don't like kids all that much but actually teach pretty well and there are teachers who love the kids but can't teach their way out of a paper bag. There are teachers who put in a tremendous amount of time and those who don't, but don't judge them by that factor. I had to put in time because I was not organized. We should factor in the organized factor in talking about good teachers. I could get in front of a class on a dime and teach my ass off with almost no prep. Creativity sometimes seemed to flow out of me. Other times not. Getting the stuff ready drove me crazy, as did marking papers. So if you saw me in my various roles I played as a teacher, you could find many levels of competency from bad to sometimes great. (I do think today I would be a very different teacher than I was. But certainly not in the world of BloomKlein.)

Want to think about bad and good teachers? Think back to the ones you had as a kid and rate them on a 1-5 scale. Now if your kids had to rate you as a teacher, how do you think you would do? What about parents rating you? What about the principal? And your colleagues like Ariel Sacks? Better not go there. I bet the numbers might vary considerably depending on the audience rating you. Then factor in the scores your kids get on tests as your rating. How would that change the way you teach? Not for the better, I bet, though the lower level, non creative types would do better.

And by creative, I do not mean drawing pretty pictures, but creativity in reaching deep into the minds of kids and coming up with ways to hold their interest and stimulate them, a skill great teachers have, but a skill not values in the world of ed deform.


Part 2 will address the hysteria over bad teachers compared to other professions that can harm kids much worse than a bad teacher: police harassing black kids, lower quality doctors and other health professionals in the poorer neighborhoods, less competent military leaders when poor kids get to Afghanistan? Lousy court appointed lawyers to defend the overwhelmingly high numbers of Black kids than white kids - no one want to talk about that gap. Oh yeah, and when they have passed through the school to prison pipeline, they meet a few prison guards that just may be more harmful than the bad teachers.

Does Gotham Schools Have an Agenda?- UPDATE

UPDATED

Elizabeth Green says "we really do not have 'an agenda,' besides good journalism."

NYC Educator and JD2718 think they do have an agenda. (And an added piece from NYCEducator.)

Good journalism is in the eye of the beholder. While the journalism of what gets covered can be great, what doesn't get covered is indicative of selective journalism.

To her credit, Elizabeth posted these links herself and often posts links to Ed Notes and the teacher blogger world. No one is more informed on the players from top to bottom in NYC Ed, as she ran rings around almost every other ed reporter in NYC at the NY Sun. For one of her first stories, she actually called me and quoted ICE's Jeff Kaufman in an article that got the dander of the UFT. Working in the belly of the conservative anti-union NY Sun, she did some great work in exposing the DOE and made many fans among NYC teachers.

Have things changed at Gotham? I have detected bias at times. Elizabeth recently had a story where she compared the ease with which Eva Moskowitz can get things done with the difficulty faced by the principal of PS 194 due to those nasty union contracts. Call it the "light bulbs to oranges" comparison. There was so much bias dripping out of that story, I had to wipe down my keyboard.

And the current lead side panel quote from Kitchen Sink, (supposedly a charter school principal who has a hell of a lot of time to blog at times one would expect someone to be working at running a school) a noted charter school defender, just might be viewed as bias.

I miss the idea of having a teacher's voice on Gotham. I know people who disagree, but I felt that Kelly Vaughan - former blogger Ms. Frizzle - at least brought the sense of a teacher to Gotham Schools. Now as a Teach for America alum, Kelly did bring some of those biases to the table, but her 7 years of teaching in NYC public middle schools gave her some perspective. She wasn't a hard news person, but she popped up at all kinds of events like ATR rallies, that are not being covered very well at Gotham at this time. Her leaving to go back to teaching, albeit at a charter school, was a loss for Gotham - and us.

Behind Gotham Schools is Mark Gorton. Wiki says:

The financial engine behind many of Gorton's business and civic interests is Tower Research Capital LLC, a financial services firm Gorton owns that he started in 1998, following a 4 1/2 year stint in the proprietary trading department of Credit Suisse First Boston (now Credit Suisse). At Credit Suisse Gorton traded stocks and built sophisticated hedging tools used to analyze markets. Tower evolved these models and specializes in quantitative trading and investment strategies based on proprietary trading algorithms using statistical methodology to identify non-random patterns in the stock markets. Buying and selling is done through an automated trade execution infrastructure, with many of trades placed through another affiliate, Lime Brokerage LLC.

Let's see now, a hedge fund kind of guy. Any chance of bias there?

One thing we would hope from Gotham Schools is a realistic picture of what is occurring in many NYC schools. I love that they have Aaron Pallas from Columbia, alias Skoolboy of Eduwonkette fame, but Ken Hirsch? With about a thousand teacher bloggers out there on the front lines, this is where they get commentary from?

Or how about the coverage of Arne Duncan without ever really examining the awful performance of Chicago schools under his 7 years there? Or the general failure of mayoral control in Chicago after 14 years of mayoral control? Or Paul Vallas following up Chicago with failure in Philly, followed up by the privatization of the New Orleans school system, making Vallas a 3-time loser?

But the UFT cue card case? WOW! What a scoop! Talk about elevating the trivial.

Related:
See Daily News reporter Meredith Kolodner's report on the UFT cue card caper with some perspective. Meredith may not be flashy, but since her days at The Chief, she has exhibited a nuanced understanding of major education issues – and without bias.

GOTHAM TILT

http://nyceducator.com/2009/01/filling-vo.html


http://jd2718.wordpress.com/2008/12/22/gotham-leaning


A case of the hedge (fund) hogs coming home to roost?