Posts here were inconsistent the first two months of the school year. And I completely lost track of the Carnival of Mathematics and Math Teachers at Play. Both were published over the last few weeks, and I’d like to point you towards them.

The Carnival of Mathematics #59 was out longer. Very nice edition. And hosted at The Number Warrior, who does an excellent job.

Math Teachers at Play has scaled back slightly, and the upshot was a nice jump in overall feel. Even though I haven’t been contributing, they included me, which I appreciate (that sum of consecutive integers problem was a good one). And there really is a nice range, and lots of good stuff. If you haven’t visited Math Teachers at Play #20 go take a look now.

Notice, it is “math teachers” but it has not become just elementary, or just high school, or just anything. MTaP has kept some good breadth. And it is lively, and well-illustrated. MTaP is more than the sum of its links: it is a good read in its own right.

Family, teaching in NYC, foreign policy, and family again.

Thanksgiving should be a good day. For everyone, yes, but certainly for me.

In my mother’s extended family (my uncles and aunts, their kids, their kids’ kids, minus her father for decades, and her mother, my grandmother, for just the last three years) – it is the single annual event that we all come to. In my forty odd years, I missed Thanksgiving once – I was in the middle of two months in Turkey – and even then I made a long, long call from Antalya, saying hi to a bunch of those gathered. Likewise, a younger cousin was missing yesterday – but she is working as an au pair in France, and she called.

It is a gathering. Some come early and help cook. Around 1 the rest arrive. Conversation – kids play – a snack or two. We eat, break for more kids playing… some of us go for a walk. Dessert. Games. Turkey soup… We straggle out late. It’s the gathering. It’s our tradition. It’s our day. And my sister tried to make other plans. Ouch. Did some opportunity come up? Maybe, but…. whatever it was, it didn’t happen. But she quietly announced that she would miss next year. Forty years is enough. It’s not that there is something else, it’s that she’d rather be anywhere but. Nasty. I feel worst for my mother.

Thanksgiving was also the day we got to mull over the salvo Bloomberg lobbed at the teachers of New York City. The timing was perfect.

And Thanksgiving also gives us a chance to reflect on the troop build-ups Obama’s about to announce for Afghanistan. More stuff to not be thankful for.

But back to the meal. Our tradition has been to gather. That’s it. And, thinking about it, that’s really perfect for us – a collection of mostly non-practicing Jews, with spouses with a variety of backgrounds, probably the group in its majority agnostic, but a few of us, me included, not superstitious at all. The gathering has been it.

But a few years ago my sister (practicing) got her kids to give thanks at the table. Then she added that each of us should say thanks in turn. I’ve reluctantly participated, or taken a pass. It feels like mandatory prayer, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be coerced into that. (Damned if I do… that’s kind of funny?) Who am I supposed to thank? Anyway, it’s coming up, and I whisper over that I’ll excuse myself, and she says no, I should just pass when my turn comes, and I sit through 20 uncomfortable benedictions, and I’m last and I pass and my she whines at me, out loud, that I should just say something. And she prompts a kid or two to join in.

Having one’s beliefs ignored, and by family? It was hard to put away the bad feeling and relax. I left earlier than I have ever left Thanksgiving before. Awful to say: I won’t miss her next year.

For years I took notes at DAs. What was the point. But I regret not taking notes last week. What follows is from memory. The “quotes” are really paraphrasings.

This was, before I jump in, one of the more discouraging President’s Reports I’ve heard… because we are facing tough times. But it was also one of the most heartening, maybe the most heartening President’s Reports I ever listened to, because the new guy seemed in touch with reality (no matter how tough it was) and showed a willingness to… well, you’ll see.

“How are you this evening/afternoon?” In a few months or a few years, this question will get old. But Michael Mulgrew asks this of each speaker from the floor, and each pauses, decides it is a real question, and answers. It is disarming, humanizing, personalizing.

1. Motion to Authorize our Negotiating Committee to Declare Impasse

This was the biggest item, but almost a non-item. It was not a declaration of impasse, but more like a vote of confidence that the negotiators have been trying, and that the City has been difficult, without filling in any details. Will we declare impasse? I don’t know, but the option is there, and has the support of the DA, if it becomes necessary. Debate was handled well. The objections (look what the fact-finders did to us last time) are real… and must be taken into account. It would of course be better if we were so strong that it was the City that was running looking for assistance. But given the balance of forces, and if negotiations stall, we may need to take this route. At that point, if we get there, we should look at what other options we have (delay a contract, concede on non-concession issues) and make the decision. And we can do so with the confidence of the Delegate Assembly.

2. Race to the Top

I wish I had taken notes. Mulgrew says, we would like the money, but we’re not going to give up core principles to get it, we don’t absolutely need it. I wish I had the wording. In short, he says that if the money comes poisoned, we should pass.

3. Data/Progress Reports

Mulgrew got HS delegates with A’s and D’s to raise their hands, said that teachers in both groups of schools were working hard, mentioned that the DoE was manipulating its own scores by changing cuts, questioned the quality of the data, etc, etc. The Chancellor talked earlier that week about how the schools he created were doing better than the other schools, and Michael’s comment was good, quotable from memory “They are all your schools!”

4. Special Ed/ No Excuses

Update from Carmen Alvarez. Real push for more reporting of violations.

5. Thompson

UFT leadership got called to task for not endorsing Thompson. Fifty-thousand votes in NYC is pretty close, and I can’t promise that the UFT could have made the difference, nor can you tell me that a UFT endorsement would not have made a difference. We could have made it damned close.

So Mulgrew’s response, essentially that the race was not close enough, was wrong. The underlying idea, that we should only endorse winners, was wrong.

But this is the Delegate Assembly, which is sometimes the theater of the Bizarre.

Mulgrew was being challenged on our failed endorsement policy by a leader of ICE – which along with Unity and TJC, did not endorse Thompson.

Only New Action (my caucus) endorsed Thompson, and that was back in June.

At a time when workers’ benefits are eroding and becoming more costly nationwide, the UFT is enhancing the package of benefits offered by its Welfare Fund, UFT President Michael Mulgrew announced at the Nov. 18 Delegate Assembly.

With state midyear budget cuts up in the air as Gov. David Paterson and state lawmakers remained locked in disagreement, the outlook for school budgets remains murky.

To visit Elizabeth Josephson’s classroom at Island Academy, you go through the same routine, and checkpoints as someone visiting an inmate at Riker’s. She left teaching at college and private school to reach out to these students.

UFT delegates at their Nov. 18 meeting overwhelmingly approved a resolution that authorizes the union leadership to seek the intervention of the state’s Public Employment Relations Board if necessary.

While congratulating schools and teachers that earned bonuses for reaching their improvement targets, UFT President Michael Mulgrew criticized the DOE’s grading system for the High School Progress Reports.

A 98-year-old man who was bed-bound in his apartment went outside and felt the sun on his cheeks for the first time in 20 years — because of the determination of his Federation of Nurses/UFT nurse.

“We need to make sure that every school has a functioning, collaborative safety plan in place. I’m here to tell you they do not,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the City Council at a Nov. 10 hearing.

More and more city school children are enjoying a “snap, crackle and pop” start to their school day as the Breakfast in the Classroom campaign picks up speed.

To counter the daily dose of disinformation from the Post or Daily News, the UFT needs to recruit a “volunteer army” to get out the real story, President Michael Mulgrew said at the Nov. 18 Delegate Assembly.

UFT delegates overwhelmingly passed a resolution to condemn the June 28 military coup in Honduras and to restore the democratically elected president, and learned about the role of the Honduran teacher union in the struggle for democracy.

And also declares war on discussing policy with the UFT.

“As it turns out our lawyers now tell us after a very close reading of New York’s law, the current law does not actually stop us from using student data to evaluate teachers who are up for tenure this particular school year, because the way it was written it covers only teachers hired after July 1^st of 2008, and those are not up this year.”

“So today, I’ve directed our schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, to ensure that principals actually use student achievement data to help evaluate teachers who are up for tenure this year. It is an aggressive policy…”

Will Texas still sit on the sidelines during the Great Standards Conversation? If Governor Perry has his way. (Dallas Morning News)
Are those who advocate “paying more attention to the non-academic needs of poor children” paying any attention to the academic needs of poor children? (Core Knowledge Blog)

Have an idea about how to transform learning using digital media? Check out this grant competition. (eSchoolNews)

What’s the real cost of the UC tuition increase? (You Tube)

At the center of this challenge is the charter school movement. In their original conception, charter schools were to be innovative public schools, freed from the stifling bureaucracy of school districts, professionally led and directed by their teachers and organically connected to communities they served. Charter schools would be laboratories of educational experimentation, expanding our repertoire of best educational practices. This was the vision put forward by the late UFT and AFT President Al Shanker, when he became one of the very first advocates for charter schools, and it is the vision we relied upon when we started our own UFT Charter School in East New York and partnered with Green Dot to establish a charter school in the South Bronx.

Over the nearly two decades since Minnesota enacted the first state charter law, charter schools have become an increasingly important and permanent fixture of American education. But for too long, teacher unions and progressive educators paid far too little attention to charter schools, incorrectly seeing them as marginal developments. Right wing ideologues moved into the vacuum created by this inattention, and seized a very significant beachhead inside the charter school movement; from this salient, they have pushed a notion of a charter school at direct odds with Shanker’s original conception. In their world view, charter schools are a wedge to pursue the privatization of public schools and to create schools in which unions are eliminated. In this vision, charters are private schools, supported with public funds.

In New York and nationally, the leadership of the charter school movement is today dominated by outspoken partisans of this right wing agenda. Key figures in the New York Charter School Association opposed the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit to bring fairness to the funding of public schools that serve communities with high rates of poverty and high concentration of need. They brought the notoriously anti-union Jackson, Lewis law firm and its “union avoidance” campaigns to the charter school movement in New York, and they regularly take to the pages of the tabloid press to attack the UFT. The CEO of the NYC Charter School Center, a partnership between the city and leading financial backers, worked on charter schools for the anti-union Wal-Mart Walton Family Foundation before he took up his current position. Anti-union figures like the infamous corporate raider Carl Icahn, who has sponsored a number of charter schools in the South Bronx, play a prominent role in this leadership.

These forces on the right understand that K-12 public education is the one sector of the American economy that is largely organized in unions, and that teacher unions are an increasingly crucial and central component of an American labor movement that is fighting to reverse its decline in recent years, as once powerful industrial unions have been decimated by globalization. They see the pivotal role that teacher unions play in the election of progressive elected officials and in the support of progressive reforms, from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity to the current battle to establish universal health insurance. They want to break our power, and they would use their base within the charter school movement to establish an alternative system of non-union, publicly funded schools to accomplish that end.

In New York City, these forces have pursued a strategy of concentrating charter schools in three communities – Harlem, the South Bronx and Central Brooklyn. Wal-Mart specifically targets its support for NYC charter schools to those which are based in Harlem, and today that community has the second largest concentration of charter schools in the United States, surpassed only by New Orleans. The strategy is to replace unionized district public schools with non-union charter schools in these communities, until a tipping point is reached in which a charter district has been created.

While the right wing has seized key positions in the leadership of the charter school movement, it does not represent all charter schools. There is a vital progressive wing of the charter school movement, represented by organizations like Green Dot Charter Schools, teacher led cooperatives and a growing number of unionized charter schools. These schools fulfill the original promise of charter schools as powerful educational communities with real parent and teacher voice. In New York City, there are a number of unionized charter schools which embody this same vision.

A crucial battle now looms with the right wing forces within the charter school movement. At issue is not the existence of charter schools, but their character. Will charter schools be public schools in the fullest meaning of the term, educating all students, especially those with the greatest need? Will they be transparent and publicly accountable? Will they innovate, and share their knowledge with other public schools? Will they recognize parent voice and teacher voice, including the right of teachers to organize into a union? Will they supplement and enhance – not seek to replace – district public schools?

Or will all that is truly public about charter schools be their source of funding, as private interests and for profit corporations usurp public money for their own political purposes? Will at risk and high needs students be sent away from charter school doors, and left to other schools to educate? Will charters seek exemption from public, governmental oversight, and try to hide important financial expenditures? Will they do their best to thwart parents and teachers seeking a full voice in their schools, and deny teachers the right to organize a union?

Those who argue that charter schools must be always and everywhere opposed ill serve us in this pivotal struggle. They fail to understand the full dimensions of the challenge we now face, and how deeply charters have taken root in American education. When they proclaim that all charter schools are an embodiment of the right wing agenda, they surrender without firing so much as a single shot in the crucial battle over the character of charter schools. Their dogmatism would blindly set teacher unions against charter teachers at the very moment that those teachers would be reaching out to unions for our advocacy and our organizational know-how.

The future of American public education and of American teacher unions will depend, in large measure, upon how we respond to the charter challenge. Our task is to defend the public character of all schools, and to organize the unorganized charter school teaching force.

Some have dismissed the protests as an overblown sense of entitlement to an affordable education, which is not guaranteed anywhere in the California Constitution. While that may be true, California’s Master Plan for Higher Education is based on the principles of universal access and a tuition-free education for all. This is why California residents pay ‘fees’ instead of tuition, though that principle has been eroding in recent years. The proposed increases will further degrade the ideals of the Master Plan.

Others, like Ian Ayres on the Freakonomics blog, are arguing for a high-cost, high-aid pricing model, where richer students pay more so that poorer students can use financial aid to decrease their overall cost (it might even raise Berkeley’s US News rankings! Ayres adds). This is the direction many states and individual institutions are going and it may have some merit. However, when the state is $24.3 billion dollars in debt and the governor has both cut funding for higher education and expressed his desire to cut Cal grants, the main state funding source for low-income students, extra revenue from tuition will most likely be directed towards filling funding gaps rather than making college affordable for everyone.

Many see the protests as pointless. The state is facing an extreme budget crisis, and a significant portion of the University’s budget comes from the state, so cuts in funding have forced the Regents to raise fees in order to make up the difference. It doesn’t make sense to target the Regents when the problems lay with the legislature. I still support the protests – we have every right to express our displeasure, especially when these fee increases are accompanied by class size increases, reductions in class offerings, and other decreased resources – but I also recognize that demonstrating and taking over classrooms and offices will not stop the fee increases, no matter how many students are arrested or beaten with batons. However, there is one area in which the protests have succeeded: they have drawn national attention to the issue. Media attention is necessary for social movements. I’m hopeful that the protesters can harness this and turn their efforts toward more productive activities like lobbying Sacramento to increase our funding for next year and overturning Prop 13, the reason we’re in this mess. Fortunately, it seems they may be taking steps in the right direction.

What does an Indiana lawsuit teach us about the bizarre incentives school districts use to reward teacher performance when there are no incentives to reward teacher performance? (National Council on Teacher Quality)
If traditional public schools need school resource officers, do charter school kids require the same protection?(Washington Post)

Should the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) receive the NCTE doublespeak award? (Stephen Krashen)
In the age of “informational reading,” is the traditional English class counter-cultural? (Brainstorm)

Noyes Elementary School, NE Washington D.C.

Noyes Elementary School, NE Washington D.C.

Keep sending in your classroom views! Check out past views here.

In response to my last post, in which I confessed to jumping up and down as my two most notoriously troublesome students changed schools, one of my readers wondered: “What ever will you post about now?”

Oh, I don’t know, how about the time there was a lizard in my classroom?!

Scene: Monday morning, second period. My kids are finishing coloring in some turkeys that a substitute teacher gave them last period. Everything is relatively, blessedly mellow. Then I hear a voice say: “Um, Miss Brave? There’s a lizard!”

I look. My eyes see, but they do not believe. Actually, at first I think, Who brought in a toy lizard and dropped it by the door?

Then the toy lizard scurries across the floor. Then I think: A lizard? Seriously? Why me?

My kids are obviously more with it than I am, because someone started yelling out, “Call Mr. R and Mr. M!”, our science teachers. So I did, but no one picked up in the science lab, and then while I was on the phone, one of my pull-out teachers appeared and tried to open the door.

Try to imagine, if you will, just for a second, what she might have seen. She’s pushing open the door to our classroom, as she does every single day, only today there is a roomful of panicked seven-year-olds yelling at her, “Don’t open the door!” and madly pointing downward at a creature she obviously cannot see.

Anyway, she got the door open a crack, and I explained the situation. To which she addressed my class at large: “Who is not afraid of the lizard? Maybe one of you can capture it.”

Um, Mrs. C? I hate to break this to you, but there will be no capturing of any kind going on in my classroom by anyone under the age of 18.

In the meantime, the science lab is still not picking up, so I call down to the main office and say what might be my favorite opening line ever in a call to the main office: “Um, hi, it’s Miss Brave. There’s a lizard in my classroom and I don’t know what to do.”

Miss Brave: “I called Mr. M and Mr. R but they’re not there.”

Main Office: “Well, they did give each classroom a lizard.”

Miss Brave (thinking: Is this some kind of crazy science experiment by our wacky science teachers? Did they legitimately just drop a lizard in front of my door to see how my class would react? I’m going to kill them!): “Um, okay, but it’s running around on my floor.”

Main Office: “I’ll tell them.”

Now envision the next few minutes: Kids screaming each time the lizard moved. Miss Brave yelling, “SIT DOOOOOWWWWWN!!!!” at kids constantly jumping out of their seats to see what the lizard is up to. Utter freaking pandemonium.

At last, Mr. M and Mr. R arrived. They grabbed the first thing they saw — an empty drawer that had been housing the markers and crayons of the now-abandoned turkey project — and wrangled the lizard. Once they had cornered him inside the drawer, they bizarrely grabbed the next thing they saw, which happened to be Felix’s book report, and used it as a top.

“They took my book report!” Felix howled with glee.

“Felix,” I said, “you are the only person who has a good excuse for not handing in a book report.”

With the lizard gone, we debriefed. So far this year, my classroom has been home to a bee that refused to leave us and a ladybug that was the subject of much great fascination. My students were understandably delighted to have another up close and personal encounter with wildlife.

“First the bee, then the ladybug, now the lizard!” they chorused. “What’s next, a bear?”

“I hope not,” I said.

The lizard, as it turns out, had escaped from another classroom down the hall, whose members hadn’t even noticed the lizard was missing. The next period, Mr. M and Mr. R arrived and noted, with mock seriousness, that of all the classrooms in the school, the lizard had chosen ours as his refuge.

“There must be good energy here,” Mr. M said. My kids were eager to explain about the bee and the ladybug and the lizard and how we’re apparently the animal-friendliest class in the school. Martin raised his hand and asked the science teachers if the lizard was cold-blooded, which they deemed an excellent question.

And later in the afternoon we began a thrilling composition about the escaped lizard. And that, my friends, is what I deem a teachable moment…and another adventure in the urban jungle of NYC public schools.