CTA the Worst Union in America!

In Response to Troy Senik’s Article: Worst Union in America

Originally Posted on May 21, 2012 by admin

caindependentteachers.com

CTA spent over $200 million on politics in the decade prior to 2010. What should be an outrage to CTA members is that it was ONLY $200 million! That is a little more than 10% of their huge budget, where is the other 90% going?

Of course, it goes to a bloated CTA and NEA organization that has hundreds of very well-paid employees. It certainly does not go towards CTA labor negotiators or attorneys. Local CTA associations rely on teachers to do the heavy lifting on bargaining and negotiations teams, getting CTA negotiators only when absolutely necessary. Discipline cases and school site problems are handled primarily by teachers (stewards) instead of CTA attorneys (they only have 11 CTA attorneys on staff and actually say on their website that they would be too busy if CTA members were allowed to call them directly with questions…!).

California teachers pay about $1,000/year in union dues and 80% goes to CTA and NEA. Of the rest that stays local, a huge chunk goes to CTA and NEA anyway, in the form of conference and training fees for CTA and NEA events.

Teachers do have an alternative. They can decertify from CTA and be independent teacher associations. http://caindependentteachers.com/

Police, fire and many other public sector employees in California often do not belong to a big union, but rather pay much more modest dues to their local association, which uses those dues to hire labor attorneys and negotiators to handle the association’s needs. There are certainly problems with California’s economy and budget woes, but public employees did not cause the recession. Public employee associations that work collaboratively with the City, County or District they work for can and have been able to keep public services working despite the economy and the state government’s ineptitude.

CTA, though, is simply sucking money from teachers without giving much in return, other than helping perpetuate a broken system statewide.

   

Read the Article below or click here http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_california-teachers-association.html

TROY SENIK

The Worst Union in America

How the California Teachers Association betrayed the schools and crippled the state

In 1962, as tensions ran high between school districts and unions across the country, members of the National Education Association gathered in Denver for the organization’s 100th annual convention. Among the speakers was Arthur F. Corey, executive director of the California Teachers Association (CTA). “The strike as a weapon for teachers is inappropriate, unprofessional, illegal, outmoded, and ineffective,” Corey told the crowd. “You can’t go out on an illegal strike one day and expect to go back to your classroom and teach good citizenship the next.”

  

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SEAN DELONAS

Fast-forward nearly 50 years to May 2011, when the CTA—now the single most powerful special interest in California—organized a “State of Emergency” week to agitate for higher taxes in one of the most overtaxed states in the nation. A CTA document suggested dozens of ways for teachers to protest, including following state legislators incessantly, attempting to close major transportation arteries, and boycotting companies, such as Microsoft, that backed education reform. The week’s centerpiece was an occupation of the state capitol by hundreds of teachers and student sympathizers from the Cal State University system, who clogged the building’s hallways and refused to leave. Police arrested nearly 100 demonstrators for trespassing, including then–CTA president David Sanchez. The protesting teachers had left their jobs behind, even though their students were undergoing important statewide tests that week. With the passage of 50 years, the CTA’s notions of “good citizenship” had vanished.

So had high-quality public education in California. Seen as a national leader in the classroom during the 1950s and 1960s, the country’s largest state is today a laggard, competing with the likes of Mississippi and Washington, D.C., at the bottom of national rankings. The Golden State’s education tailspin has been blamed on everything from class sizes to the property-tax restrictions enforced by Proposition 13 to an influx of Spanish-speaking students. But no portrait of the system’s downfall would be complete without a depiction of the CTA, a political behemoth that blocks meaningful education reform, protects failing and even criminal educators, and inflates teacher pay and benefits to unsustainable levels.

The CTA began its transformation in September 1975, when Governor Jerry Brown signed the Rodda Act, which allowed California teachers to bargain collectively. Within 18 months, 600 of the 1,000 local CTA chapters moved to collective bargaining. As the union’s power grew, its ranks nearly doubled, from 170,000 in the late 1970s to approximately 325,000 today. By following the union’s directions and voting in blocs in low-turnout school-board elections, teachers were able to handpick their own supervisors—a system that private-sector unionized workers would envy. Further, the organization that had once forsworn the strike began taking to the picket lines. Today, the CTA boasts that it has launched more than 170 strikes in the years since Rodda’s passage.

The CTA’s most important resource, however, isn’t a pool of workers ready to strike; it’s a fat bank account fed by mandatory dues that can run more than $1,000 per member. In 2009, the union’s income was more than $186 million, all of it tax-exempt. The CTA doesn’t need its members’ consent to spend this money on politicking, whether that’s making campaign contributions or running advocacy campaigns to obstruct reform. According to figures from the California Fair Political Practices Commission (a public institution) in 2010, the CTA had spent more than $210 million over the previous decade on political campaigning—more than any other donor in the state. In fact, the CTA outspent the pharmaceutical industry, the oil industry, and the tobacco industrycombined.

All this money has helped the union rack up an imposing number of victories. The first major win came in 1988, with the passage of Proposition 98. That initiative compelled California to spend more than 40 percent of its annual budget on education in grades K–12 and community college. The spending quota eliminated schools’ incentive to get value out of every dollar: since funding was locked in, there was no need to make things run cost-effectively. Thanks to union influence on local school boards, much of the extra money—about $450 million a year—went straight into teachers’ salaries. Prop. 98’s malign effects weren’t limited to education, however: by essentially making public school funding an entitlement rather than a matter of discretionary spending, it hastened California’s erosion of fiscal discipline. In recent years, estimates of mandatory spending’s share of the state’s budget have run as high as 85 percent, making it highly difficult for the legislature to confront the severe budget crises of the past decade.

In 1991, the CTA took to the ramparts again to combat Proposition 174, a ballot initiative that would have made California a national leader in school choice by giving families universal access to school vouchers. When initiative supporters began circulating the petitions necessary to get it onto the ballot, some CTA members tried to intimidate petition signers physically. The union also encouraged people to sign the petition multiple times in order to throw the process into chaos. “There are some proposals so evil that they should never go before the voters,” explained D. A. Weber, the CTA’s president. One of the consultants who organized the petitions testified in a court declaration at the time that people with union ties had offered him $400,000 to refrain from distributing them. Another claimed that a CTA member had tried to run him off the road after a debate on school choice.

Weber and his followers weren’t successful in keeping the proposition off the ballot, but they did manage to delay it for two years, giving themselves time to organize a counteroffensive. They ran ads, recalls Ken Khachigian, the former White House speechwriter who headed the Yes on 174 campaign, “claiming that a witches’ coven would be eligible for the voucher funds and [could] set up a school of its own.” They threatened to field challengers against political candidates who supported school choice. They bullied members of the business community who contributed money to the pro-voucher effort. When In-N-Out Burger donated $25,000 to support Prop. 174, for instance, the CTA threatened to press schools to drop contracts with the company.

In 1993, Prop. 174 finally came to a statewide vote. The union had persuaded March Fong Eu, the CTA-endorsed secretary of state, to alter the proposition’s heading on the ballot from PARENTAL CHOICE to EDUCATION VOUCHERS—a change in wording that cost Prop. 174 ten points in the polls, according to Myron Lieberman in his book The Teacher Unions. The initiative, which had originally enjoyed 2–1 support among California voters, managed to garner only a little over 30 percent of the vote. Prop. 174’s backers had been outspent by a factor of eight, with the CTA alone dropping $12.5 million on the opposition campaign.

As the CTA’s power grew, it learned that it could extract policy concessions simply by employing its aggressive PR machine. In 1996, with the state’s budget in surplus, the CTA spent $1 million on an ad campaign touting the virtues of reduced class sizes in kindergarten through third grade. Feeling the heat from the campaign, Republican governor Pete Wilson signed a measure providing subsidies to schools with classes of 20 children or fewer. The program was a disaster: it failed to improve educational outcomes, and the need to hire many new teachers quickly, to handle all the smaller classes, reduced the quality of teachers throughout the state. The program cost California nearly $2 billion per year at its high-water mark, becoming the most expensive education-reform initiative in the state’s history. But it worked out well for the CTA, whose ranks and coffers were swelled by all those new teachers.

The union’s steady supply of cash allowed it to continue its quest for political dominance unabated. In 1998, it spent nearly $7 million to defeat Proposition 8—which would have used student performance as a criterion for teacher reviews and would have required educators to pass credentialing examinations in their disciplines—and more than $2 million in a failed attempt to block Proposition 227, which eliminated bilingual education in public schools. In 2002, the union spent $26 million to defeat Proposition 38, another school voucher proposal. And in 2005, with a special election called by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger looming, the CTA came up with a colossal $58 million—even going so far as to mortgage its Sacramento headquarters—to defeat initiatives that would have capped the growth of state spending, made it easier to fire underperforming teachers, and ensured “paycheck protection,” which compels unions to get their members’ consent before using dues for political purposes. (A new paycheck-protection measure will appear on the November 2012 ballot.)

Cannily, the CTA also funds a wide array of liberal causes unrelated to education, with the goal of spreading around enough cash to prevent dissent from the Left. Among these causes: implementing a single-payer health-care system in California, blocking photo-identification requirements for voters, and limiting restraints on the government’s power of eminent domain. The CTA was the single biggest financial opponent of another Proposition 8, the controversial 2008 proposal to ban gay marriage, ponying up $1.3 million to fight an initiative that eventually won 52.2 percent of the vote. The union has also become the biggest donor to the California Democratic Party. From 2003 to 2012, the CTA spent nearly $102 million on political contributions; 0.08 percent of that money went to Republicans.

At the same time that the union was becoming the largest financial force in California politics, it was developing an equally powerful ground game, stifling reform efforts at the local level. Consider the case of Locke High School in the poverty-stricken Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Founded in response to the area’s 1967 riots, Locke was intended to provide a quality education to the neighborhood’s almost universally minority students. For years, it failed: in 2006, with a student body that was 65 percent Hispanic and 35 percent African-American, the school sent just 5 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges, and the dropout rate was nearly 51 percent.

Shortly before Locke reached this nadir, the school hired a reform-minded principal, Frank Wells, who was determined to revive the school’s fortunes. Just a few days after he arrived, a group of rival gangs got into a dust-up; Wells expelled 80 of the students involved. In the new atmosphere of discipline, Locke dropped “from first in the number of campus crime reports in LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] to thirteenth,” writes Donna Foote in Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America. Test scores and college acceptance also began to rise, Foote reports.

But trouble arose with the union when Wells began requiring Locke teachers to present weekly lesson plans. The local CTA affiliate—United Teachers Los Angeles—filed a grievance against him and was soon urging his removal. The last straw was Wells’s effort to convert Locke into an independent charter school, where teachers would operate under severely restricted union contracts. In May 2007, the district removed Wells from his job. He was escorted from his office by three police officers and an associate superintendent of schools, all on the basis of union allegations that he had let teachers use classroom time to sign a petition to turn Locke into a charter. Wells called the allegations “a total fabrication,” and the signature gatherers backed him up. The LAUSD reassigned him to a district office, where he was paid $600 a day to sit in a cubicle and do nothing.

Luckily for Locke students, the union’s rearguard action came too late. In 2007, the Los Angeles Board of Education voted 5–2 to hand Locke High School to Green Dot, a charter school operator. Four years later, as the final class of Locke students who had attended the school prior to its transformation received their diplomas, the school’s graduation rate was 68 percent, and over 56 percent of Locke graduates were headed for higher education.

One of the most noticeable changes at Locke has ramifications statewide: when Green Dot took over, it required all teachers to reapply for their jobs. It hired back only about one-third of them. That approach is unimaginable in the rest of the state’s public schools, where a teaching job is essentially a lifetime sinecure. A tiny 0.03 percent of California teachers are dismissed after three or more years on the job. In the past decade, the LAUSD—home to 33,000 teachers—has dismissed only four. Even when teachers are fired, it’s seldom because of their classroom performance: a 2009 exposé by theLos Angeles Times found that only 20 percent of successful dismissals in the state had anything to do with teaching ability. Most terminations involved teachers behaving either obscenely or criminally. The National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based education-reform organization, gave California a D-minus on its teacher-firing policies in its 2010 national report card.

Responsibility for this sorry situation goes largely to the CTA, which has won concessions that make firing a teacher so difficult that educators can usually keep their jobs for any offense that doesn’t cross into outright criminality. With the cost of the proceedings regularly running near half a million dollars, many districts choose to shuffle problem employees around rather than try to fire them.

Even outright offenses are no guarantee of removal, thanks to CTA influence. When a fired teacher appeals his case beyond the school board, it goes to the Commission on Professional Competence—two of whose three members are also teachers, one of them chosen by the educator whose case is being heard. The CTA has stacked this process as well by bargaining to require evidentiary standards equal to those used in civil-court procedures and coaching the teachers on the panels. One veteran school-district lawyer calls the appeals process “one of the most complicated civil legal matters anywhere.” As the Times noted, “The district wanted to fire a high school teacher who kept a stash of pornography, marijuana and vials with cocaine residue at school, but [the Commission on Professional Competence] balked, suggesting that firing was too harsh.” The commission was also the reason that, as the newspaper continued, the district was “unsuccessful in firing a male middle school teacher spotted lying on top of a female colleague in the metal shop”; the district had failed to “prove that the two were having sex.”

Another regulatory body dominated by CTA influence is the state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), the institution responsible for removing the credentials of misbehaving teachers. A report released in 2011 by California state auditor Elaine Howle found that the commission had a backlog of approximately 12,600 cases, with responses sometimes taking as long as three years. Because the CTC—which was created by an act sponsored by the CTA—is made up of members appointed by the governor, the CTA is able to bring its political pressure to bear on determining the commission’s makeup. In September 2011, for instance, one of Governor Jerry Brown’s appointments to the CTC was Kathy Harris, who had previously been a CTA lobbyist to the body.

The CTA’s most recent crusade for job security made clear that the union was prepared to jeopardize the financial future of California’s schools. Last June, it vigorously pushed (and Governor Brown hastily signed) Assembly Bill 114, which prevented any teacher layoffs or program cuts in the coming fiscal year and removed the requirement that school districts present balanced budget plans. The bill also forced public schools to prepare budget estimates that didn’t take into account the state’s downturn in revenues—meaning that schools could budget for activities even though there wasn’t money to pay for them. Since then, state officials have forecast that revenues for the 2012 fiscal year will be $3.2 billion lower than they were when the schools were making their budgets. Eventually, accommodations to reality will have to be made—at which time the CTA will, of course, use them to plead hardship.

Such pleas seem impudent coming from the highest-paid teachers in the nation, with an average annual salary of $68,000. For a bit of perspective, if two California teachers get married (not an unusual occurrence) and each makes the average salary, their combined annual income would be $136,000, nearly $80,000 more than what the state’s median household pulls down. That’s for an average annual workload of 180 days, only two-thirds of the average total in the private sector. Don’t forget retirement benefits: after 30 years, a California teacher may retire with a pension equal to about 75 percent of his working salary. That pension averages more than $51,000 a year—more than working teachers earn in more than half the states in the nation. And that’s just an average; from 2005 to 2011, the number of education employees pulling down more than $100,000 a year in pensions skyrocketed from 700 to 5,400.

With the state’s economy in tumult, however, prospects for the teachers’ retirement fund look grim. CalSTRS is now officially estimated to have about $56 billion in liabilities and about 30 years left before it runs dry, though many outside analysts think that those numbers are too optimistic. A report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office in November 2011 estimated that restoring full funding to CalSTRS would require finding an extra $3.9 billion a year for at least 30 years.

If California is to generate the economic growth necessary to mitigate its coming fiscal reckoning, it will need to retain its historical role as a leading site for innovation and entrepreneurship. But that won’t be possible if its next generation of would-be entrepreneurs attends one of the Golden State’s many mediocre or failing schools. And what little economic dynamism is left in California will be impeded if the union gets its way and the state increases its already weighty tax burden.

Meaningful change probably won’t come from elected officials, at least for now. The CTA’s size, financial resources, and influence with the state’s regnant Democratic Party are enough to kill most pieces of hostile legislation. For years, school reformers fantasized about a transformative figure who could shift the balance of power from the union through force of charisma and personality, taking his case directly to the people. Yet when that figure seemed to emerge in Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, even he proved unable to alter the status quo, with his 2005 ballot initiatives to reform tenure, school financing, and political spending by unions all going down to decisive defeat. It’s unlikely that salvation will come from Governor Brown, either. The man who originally opened the door for the CTA’s collective bargaining has remained a steadfast ally of the union, firing four pro-reform members of the state board of education in his first few days in office and appointing a new group that included Patricia Ann Rucker, the CTA’s top lobbyist. Brown also avoided including any changes to CalSTRS in his October announcement of proposed pension reforms, probably because he had learned Schwarzenegger’s lesson that irking the CTA can lead to the demise of a broader agenda.

Parents, however, are starting to revolt against CTA orthodoxy. Unlike elected officials, parents—who want nothing more than a good education for their kids—are hard for the union to demonize. In early 2010, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit called Parent Revolution shocked California’s pundit class by getting the state legislature to pass the nation’s first “parent trigger” law, which lets parents at failing schools force districts to undertake certain reforms, including converting schools into independent charters. The law caps the number of schools eligible for reform at 75, but if early results are successful, it will become hard for Californians to avoid comparing thriving charter schools with failing traditional ones.

The CTA is fighting back, of course. In 2010, when 61 percent of parents at McKinley Elementary School in the blighted L.A. neighborhood of Compton opted to pull the trigger, the CTA claimed that “parents were never given the full picture . . . [or] informed of the great progress already being made”—despite the fact that McKinley’s performance was ranked beneath nearly all other inner-city schools in the state. Several Hispanic parents in the district also said that members of the union had threatened to report them to immigration authorities if they signed the petition. Eventually, the Compton Unified school board—heavily lobbied by the CTA—dismissed the petition signatures, with no discussion, as “insufficient” on a handful of technicalities, such as missing dates and typos. Though the union’s power had proved too much for the McKinley parents, an enterprising charter school operator opened two new campuses in the neighborhood anyway.

Institutions like Locke High School, Green Dot, Parent Revolution, and the Compton charters are glimmers of hope for California’s public school system. Despite their inferior resources, they have fought the CTA not by participating in direct political conflict but by undermining the union’s moral standing. These organizations reframe the education question in starkly humanitarian terms: In the California public school system, are anyone’s interests more important than the students’? It was a question that the CTA itself might have asked back when teachers entered the classroom to “teach good citizenship.”

Troy Senik is a senior fellow at the Center for Individual Freedom and an editor at Ricochet.com.

LAUSD, (MVUSD et al): THIS AMERICAN LIE

LAUSD, (MVUSD et al): THIS AMERICAN LIE

Originally Posted at Perdaily.com

(Mensaje se repite en Español)
Sign In  |  Not a member?  

(For a national view of public education reform see the end of this blog post)

In listening to the This American Life show entitle Back to School, it finally dawned on me what I dislike most about the Los AngelesUnified School District (LAUSD) and public school districts like it around the United States: 

Vacuous rhetoric aside, those running these failure factories have no expectation that all students can learn.

What Ira Glass and the crew at This American Life do is show why a disproportionate number of poor and minority student don't learn in public school and how to fix it.

This well documented program on This American Life shows that an increased allostatic load on students is a valid predictor of everything from physical and mental disease throughout one's life to the failure associated behaviors that make the education of some students so problematic, unless the underlying causes of it are dealt with in a timely manner.

Things like "serious self-control and behavior problems" in school or elsewhere are 32 times more likely in students who have had four or more adverse stress experiences during childhood that increase their allostatic load. And four experiences are really nothing for inner city students who encounter violence at home, in the street, and at school on a daily basis.

Something as stressful as let's say running into a ferocious bear is an exceptional life experience for most human beings. But many inner city poor and minority students encounter equally stressful situations on almost a daily basis. While our body can trigger the necessary hormonal response to deal with such a situation on an exceptional basis, the daily triggering of these reactions, according to the significant research presented by This American Life, has debilitating physical and mental effects that can destroy any student's potential, who remains subject to this cycle of unabated violence.

The good news is that there are relatively simple and inexpensive programs that can turn much of this around, even after the negative symptoms have already become dominant in a student's life. So why don't we do something? I guess it's because the hardest thing for most human beings to say is I was wrong, while being willing to try something the has a great deal of documentation to show it clearly works.

Listen to the show and share your thoughts.

If you or someone you know has been targeted and are in the process of being dismissed and need legal defense, get in touch:

Lenny@perdaily.com

NATIONAL EDUCATION REFORMERS

LA Progressive

Dick Price and Sharon Kyle
http://www.laprogressive.com/
Dick and Sharon dick_and_sharon@yahoo.com
Dick and Sharon are a pair of citizen journalists and information activists who were fed up with mainstream media. Rather than just kvetch about the media, they decided to try to become the media. So, together they founded the LA Progressive. Dick is the editor and Sharon is the publisher and webmaster, handling all technical aspects of the site.

This site was launched in March 2008, with Dick and Sharon doing most of the writing. Today, a host of gifted writers contribute to the LA Progressive's daily offering which typically amounts to about 45 articles a week. Dick and Sharon continue to write for as well as edit and publish the LA Progressive and distribute its daily e-news each morning.

Jo Scott Coe Riverside, California
Jo.Scott-Coe@rcc.edu
www.joscottcoe.com
Excellent Video Interview about Professor Coe
http://vodpod.com/watch/4959969-jo-scott-coe-teacher-at-point-blank

Assistant Professor of English at Riverside Community College and former high school English teacher. She is the author of Teacher at Point Blank and has been a teacher of English and literature in California since 1991. Her writing on intersections of gender, violence, and education has appeared in the Los Angeles Times as well as literary venues including Hotel Amerika, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Ninth Letter, Memoir(and), Bitter Oleander, and Green Mountains Review. Her essay, "Recovering Teacher," won the NCTE 2009 Donald Murray Prize, and other selections of her work have received a Pushcart Special Mention as well as Notable listings in Best American Essays 2009 and 2010. As an independent researcher, Jo authored and published the most extensive study to-date of Adams v. LAUSD, a nearly 10-year legal case of student-on-teacher sexual harassment, in (Re)Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Women's Experience (Cambridge Scholars Press). Jo values the aesthetic, political, and socially transformative powers of literary narrative--especially to dispel unhealthy silences and witness cultural blindspots. She works currently as an assistant professor of English at Riverside Community College in SoCal, and her book, Teacher at Point Blank (Aunt Lute 2010), has been selected as a Great Read for Fall 2010 by Ms. Magazine. Punk rock? Yes. Hockey games? Yes. Coffee? Always black. Find Jo on the web at joscottcoe.com and on Twitter @joscottcoe.

Betsy Combier New York, New York
betsy.combier@gmail.com
Betsy Combier's blog http://www.parentadvocates.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=488
is a jewel that chronicles the corruption in NYC's Dept of Educations (DOE)  . She has accomplished a wonderful piece of journalism, and created one of the rare places where corrupt educational governance is chronicled and revealed

Professor Samuel Culbert Los Angeles, California

is a professor at the UCLA Andersen School of Business who also teaches in the Education Department's Principals' Leadership Institute. Check out the following 3 minutes on ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/conversation-performance-review-11126992

Stuart Goldurs Los Angeles, Califonia
StuartComputers@gmail.com
Don't send LAUSD Librarians to the Inquisition, send the downtown bureaucrats
Tests, What Are They Good For? Absolutely Nothing!
LAUSD students to attend school on contaminated land, again!
Some schools teach only to the tests, so how are the students being prepared for the next grade and for life?
New LAUSD superintendent adds six-figure positions to management team

http://www.examiner.com/public-education-in-los-angeles/lausd-test-scores-up-to-failure-levels-what-are-the-students-learning

Has been a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 30 years. He is greatly aware of the district waste, large bureaucracy, and other major issues of the time. He started his blog with the sole purpose of informing the world about the truths of education in LAUSD. E-mail him at: StuartComputers@gmail.com.

LAUSD has selected a new Superintendent of Schools

Karen Horwitz Chicago, Illinois

wccbook@gmail.com

Former award winning teacher who co-founded NAPTA, National Association for the Prevention of Teacher Abuse, and wrote the book White Chalk Crime: The REAL Reason Schools Fail to expose how teacher harassment and terrorization maintains a system of deeply hidden corruption. Disposing of dedicated teachers forms the core of the White Chalk Criminal's agenda since dedication and white collar crime do not mix. Given that all agree that good teachers are essential to good teaching, a system that cannot tolerate good teachers is worthless. This is what we have in place. With Bernie Madoff-like leaders - he was as much about investing as our school leaders are about educating - anointed with unlimited power, including the ability to fill the airwaves with propaganda, education is no longer about education. It is about money and power for those who play a very corrupt game and with an agenda of privatizing schools so their power will increase. (Privatization may have merits. NAPTA does not take a position on that. But privatizing a system that is rotten to its core - where quality teaching cannot survive, where a cover up of pretense that they do not know this despite so many of us reporting these truths prevails - documents that those advocating privatization cannot be trusted! It shows they want our schools for their own interests, not the children, nor the community.)  NAPTA welcomes parents, teachers, students, citizens or anyone who understands that without a real system of education, we no longer have a democracy. Membership is free. Go to: EndTeacherAbuse.org  or WhiteChalkCrime.com. Become educated about what is going on.

Jerry Mintz Director
Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO)
417 Roslyn Rd., Roslyn Hts., NY  11577

For those of you who cannot wait for corrupt public education to be turned around, AERO offers an excellent source to get connected with viable alternatives right now.

www.EducationRevolution.org
info@EducationRevolution.org
                                                                                                                         800-769-4171                                                              (domestic)
                                                                                                                         516-621-2195                                                              (international)

Susan Ohanian Charlotte, Vermont
susano@gmavt.net
http://www.susanohanian.org
She is a longtime public school teacher who, after 20 years, became staff writer for a teacher magazine and then went freelance. I've maintained a website of activism for nearly 9 years--ever since the passage of NCLB. People can subscribe to the website and then they get updates about new content. I answer all the mail I get through the website and with the answer, people have my e-mail.  I also try to stir things up on Twitter, though I find this medium frustrating. I have a Facebook page--just so people can find me. I don't initiate anything on it, The website keeps me busy.
http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=9593

Susan Lee Schwartz Suffern, New York

Susan studied literacy education, English literature, and fine arts and holds a BA ('63) and MS ('65) from Brooklyn College, and has the equivalent of two master's degrees, earned in graduate studies of literacy, arts and education. She taught literacy skills and art, for four decades in NYC in elementary and secondary school.  In 1998 she won the New York State English Council (NYSEC) Educator of Excellence Award  for her successful teacher practice, studied by Harvard  and the LRDC at the University of Pittsburgh for the New Standards research. At the end of her research, her unique curriculum was selected by the LRDC to be used in their national staff development seminars for school superintendents. She was among six teachers -- from among the thousands across the nation-- observed during the research project, and her teaching practice met all the  principles of learning. In the nineties, she rose to prominence in national educational circles, while teaching at a new magnet school, East Side Middle School. The reading scores of her seventh grade students were at the top of the city, and on the first ELA, which two thirds of city students failed, her former students (then in the eight grade) were TENTH IN THE STATE.

 She writes often about what she learned about the genuine standards for learning, in an attempt to begin a national conversation about the authentic standards, so that there can be genuine reform. Her experience that ended her fine career in the NYC Public Schools has led her to write about the process that removed the top educators, silencing the voices of the classroom practitioners who would not accept anti-learning policies. Her essay here on Perdaily,  is one that describes this process. Read more as she talks about education, literacy  and learning on her site, from the perspective of the experienced teacher-practitioner of pedagogy. She is the voice of dedicated and talented classroom teachers who know why the schools are failing.

Her website is:

http://www.speakingasateacher.com/Susan_Lee_Schwartz_(Steiner)_/index.html


Joel Shatzky: Brooklyn, New York
Joel.Shatzky@cortland.edu
Professor of English Emeritus--SUNY, College at Cortland (1968-2005)
Adjunct instructor-Kingsborough CC (CUNY) 2006--   )
Regular contributor to the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/searchS/?q=Joel+Shatzky
Author of "The Thinking Crisis" with Ellen Hill (Authors Choice Press: New York, 2001)
Numerous articles on education in Jewish Currents.
Script-writer for three YouTube satires on educational "reform."
 "The Lessons": www.youtube.com/watch?v=D712J1V2Jsg&feature=player_embedded
"Numbers Lie": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57BRNLviVTQ
"The Charter Starters": www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnrrw5CV3Gw

Here's Joel's latest post about the low percentage of "college ready" high school graduates. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-shatzky/educating-for-democracy-t_2_b_821410.html



Lorna Stremcha Havre, Montana

http://www.endteacherabuse.org/Stremcha.html
http://twitter.com/lornapstremcha

lornastremcha.com

callmescarlet.blogspot.com
facebook


HER STORY:
"I know first hand the financial, personal, emotional and physical damage that can result when school administrators, the Montana Education Association and the National Education Association put their own interests above the students, teachers and the taxpayers of the State of Montana My files contain mountains of paperwork including depositions, declarations of truth, notarized documents and exhibits resulting from an arduous legal process that finally ended when the Havre (Montana) School District settled two lawsuits - a Federal suit and one filed in State District Court. These documents also include a letter from a union representative stating, " This is nothing more than a witch hunt." Yet the union continued to allow the school administration to harass, bully and bring harm to me.
These two lawsuits resulted from a single incident that, had it been handled differently and under the light of public scrutiny, would not have snowballed into awards of more than $200,000 worth of damages. Funds that eventually came from the taxpayers' pockets. Ironically, as a taxpayer in Hill County, my family and I are helping to pay for the damages awarded to me. This covered the attorneys' fees. The settlement did not include my attorney fees, however the district, insurance and taxpayers paid the defendants attorney bills, which exceeded mine. The settlement was made on March 2, 2006."http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Jim-Taylor/125893225652
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Jim-Taylor/125893225652
http://twitter.com/search?q=DrJimTaylor

Lois Weiner Jersey City, New Jersey
Professor, Elementary and Secondary Education
New Jersey City University
2039 Kennedy Blvd.
Jersey City, New Jersey 07305
drweinerlo@gmail.com
Blog
http://newpolitics.mayfirst.org/blog/5
Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/3/educators_push_back_against_obamas_business
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Impact of urban school characteristics on teachers' classroom practice
How race, class, and gender mediate academic achievement
Teachers' work and the school as a workplace. Effects of changes in global political economy on teaching, teachers, and schools.

(Para una visión nacional de la reforma de la educación pública ver el final de esta entrada del blog)

En la escucha de la Vida de este americano espectáculo derechoRegreso a la Escuela, que finalmente me di cuenta de lo que más me disgusta el Distrito Unificado de Los Angele s School (LAUSD) y los distritos de escuelas públicas como él alrededor de los Estados Unidos:

Vacuo retórica a un lado, los que dirigen estas fábricas fallo no tiene ninguna expectativa de que todos los estudiantes pueden aprender. 

¿Qué Ira Glass y la tripulación en This American Life hacer es mostrar por qué un número desproporcionado de estudiantes pobres y de las minorías no se aprende en la escuela pública y cómo solucionarlo. 

Este programa bien documentado en esta vida americana muestra que un aumento de la carga alostática en los estudiantes es un predictor válido de todo, desde la enfermedad física y mental durante toda la vida a los comportamientos de fallo asociados que hacen que la educación de algunos estudiantes tan problemático, a menos que las causas subyacentes de la que se tratan de una manera oportuna.

Cosas como "serios problemas de autocontrol y comportamiento" en la escuela o en otros lugares son 32 veces más probables en los estudiantes que han tenido cuatro o más experiencias adversas en la infancia de estrés que incrementan su carga alostática. Y cuatro experiencias son realmente nada para los estudiantes del centro urbano que se encuentran con la violencia en el hogar, en la calle, y en la escuela todos los días.

Algo tan estresante como, digamos, corriendo en un oso feroz es una experiencia de vida excepcional para la mayoría de los seres humanos. Sin embargo, muchos estudiantes del centro urbano pobres y de minorías encontrar situaciones estresantes igualmente en casi todos los días. Mientras que nuestro cuerpo puede desencadenar la respuesta hormonal necesario para hacer frente a esa situación con carácter excepcional, la activación diaria de estas reacciones, de acuerdo a la investigación significativas presentadas por This American Life , ha debilitantes efectos físicos y mentales que pueden destruir las posibilidades de cualquier estudiante , que sigue estando sujeta a este ciclo de violencia sin cesar.

La buena noticia es que existen programas relativamente simples y de bajo costo que pueden convertir gran parte de esta vuelta, incluso después de que los síntomas negativos se han convertido en dominante en la vida de un estudiante. Así que ¿por qué no hacemos algo?Supongo que es porque la cosa más difícil para la mayoría de los seres humanos que decir es que estaba equivocado, y estar dispuesto a intentar algo que el. Tiene una gran cantidad de documentación que demuestre claramente funciona

Escuche el programa y compartir sus pensamientos.

Si usted o alguien que usted conoce ha sido blanco de ataques y están en proceso de ser despedido y la necesidad de defensa legal, póngase en contacto:

Lenny@perdaily.com

Reformadores nacionales EDUCACIÓN

LA Progressive

Dick Precio y Kyle Sharon
http://www.laprogressive.com/
Dick y Sharon dick_and_sharon@yahoo.com
Dick y Sharon son un par de periodistas ciudadanos y activistas de información que fueron alimentados con medios de comunicación. En lugar de simplemente kvetch sobre los medios de comunicación, decidieron tratar de convertirse en los medios de comunicación. Por lo tanto, juntos fundaron la progresiva LA. Dick es el editor y Sharon es el editor y webmaster, manejar todos los aspectos técnicos del sitio.

Este sitio fue lanzado en marzo de 2008, con Dick y Sharon haciendo la mayor parte de la escritura. Hoy en día, una gran cantidad de escritores talentosos contribuir a la progresiva ofrecimiento diario de Los Ángeles que normalmente asciende a cerca de 45 artículos a la semana. Dick y Sharon seguir escribiendo, así como para editar y publicar el Progressive LA y distribuir sus diarios e-noticias cada mañana.

Jo Scott Coe Riverside, California
Jo.Scott-Coe @ rcc.edu
www.joscottcoe.com
Excelente Video Entrevista sobre el profesor Coe
http://vodpod.com/watch/4959969-jo-scott-coe-teacher-at-point-blank

Profesor de Inglés en el Riverside Community College y ex profesor de escuela de Inglés. Ella es la autora de Maestro en Point Blank y ha sido profesora de Inglés y la literatura en California desde 1991.Su escritura en las intersecciones de género, la violencia y la educación ha aparecido en Los Angeles Times, así como lugares literarios, incluyendo Amerika Hotel, Género En cuarto lugar, los dientes del Río, Novena Carta, Memoria (y), adelfa amarga, y revisión Green Mountains. Su ensayo, "Recuperación de Maestros", ganó el NCTE 2009 Donald Murray Premio, y otras selecciones de su obra ha recibido una Mención Especial de la carretilla de mano, así como listados de notables en Best American Essays 2009 y 2010.Como un investigador independiente, Jo autor y publicó el estudio más extenso hasta la fecha de Adams v LAUSD, un caso de casi 10 años de hostigamiento jurídico-estudiante-profesor en la sexual, en la (re) interpretaciones: Las formas de Justicia de la Mujer La experiencia (Cambridge Scholars Press). Jo valores de las facultades estéticas, políticas, y de transformación social de la narrativa literaria - sobre todo para disipar silencios insalubres y testigos ciegos culturales. Ella trabaja actualmente como profesor asistente de Inglés en el Riverside Community College en sur de California, y su libro, Profesor de Point Blank (Lute tía 2010), ha sido seleccionada como una gran lectura para el otoño de 2010 por Ms. Magazine. El punk rock? Sí.Hockey juegos? Sí. ¿Café?Siempre negro. Jo Encuentra en el sitio web joscottcoe.com y en Twitter @ joscottcoe.

Betsy Combier Nueva York, Nueva York
betsy.combier @ gmail.com
El blog de ​​Betsy Combier http://www.parentadvocates.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=488
es una joya que narra la corrupción en la ciudad de Nueva York Departamento de Educación nacional (DOE). Ella ha logrado una maravillosa pieza de periodismo, y creó uno de los pocos lugares donde se narra gestión de la educación corruptos y reveló

Profesor Samuel Culbert Los Angeles, California

Es profesor en la Escuela de Negocios de UCLA Andersen quien también enseña en el Instituto de Liderazgo de Directores del Departamento de Educación. Echa un vistazo a los siguientes 3 ​​minutos en ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/conversation-performance-review-11126992

Stuart Goldurs Los Angeles, Califonia
StuartComputers@gmail.com
No envíe bibliotecarios LAUSD a la Inquisición, enviar a los burócratas del centro
Las pruebas, ¿qué son bueno?Absolutamente nada!
LAUSD a los estudiantes a asistir a la escuela en tierras contaminadas, otra vez!
Algunas escuelas enseñan sólo a las pruebas, así que ¿cómo son los estudiantes que se preparan para el siguiente grado y para la vida?
Nuevo superintendente de LAUSD añade seis cifras posiciones al equipo directivo



Ha sido profesor en el Distrito de Los Angeles Unified School durante 30 años. Él es muy consciente de los residuos del distrito, burocracia, y otros aspectos importantes de la época.Él comenzó su blog con el único fin de informar al mundo sobre las verdades de la educación en el LAUSD. Él E-mail a: StuartComputers@gmail.com.

LAUSD ha seleccionado un nuevo Superintendente de Escuelas

Karen Horwitz Chicago, Illinois

wccbook@gmail.com

Profesor galardonado ex cofundador NAPTA, Asociación Nacional para la Prevención del Abuso de Maestros, y escribió el libro Crimen White Chalk: Las Escuelas verdadera razón Fail to exponer cómo el acoso y el terror profesor mantiene un sistema de corrupción profundamente ocultos. Eliminación de los profesores dedicados forma el núcleo de la agenda Penal White Chalk desde la dedicación y la delincuencia de cuello blanco no se mezclan. Teniendo en cuenta que todos están de acuerdo que los buenos maestros son esenciales para una buena enseñanza, un sistema que no puede tolerar a los buenos maestros no sirve para nada. Esto es lo que tenemos en su lugar.Con Bernie Madoff-como líderes - que era tanto sobre la inversión que nuestros líderes escolares sobre la educación - ungido con poder ilimitado, incluyendo la capacidad para llenar las ondas con la propaganda, la educación ya no es acerca de la educación.Se trata de dinero y poder para aquellos que juegan un juego muy corrupto y con una agenda de privatización de las escuelas por lo que su poder se incrementará. (La privatización puede tener méritos NAPTA no toma una posición al respecto, pero la privatización de un sistema que está podrido hasta la médula -.. Donde la enseñanza de calidad no puede sobrevivir, en un encubrimiento de la pretensión de que ellos no saben esto a pesar de que muchos de nosotros informar estas verdades prevalece - documentos que los privatización defender no se puede confiar Esto demuestra que queremos que nuestras escuelas para sus propios intereses, no los niños, ni la comunidad) NAPTA bienvenida a los padres, maestros, estudiantes, ciudadanos o cualquier persona que entiende que sin un real!. sistema de educación, ya no tenemos una democracia. La membresía es gratuita. Ir a: EndTeacherAbuse.org o WhiteChalkCrime.com. Educarse acerca de lo que está pasando.

Jerry Mintz director
Educación Alternativa Resource Organization (AERO)
417 Roslyn Rd., Roslyn Hts., NY 11577

Para aquellos de ustedes que no pueden esperar a que la educación pública corruptos que se dio la vuelta, AERO ofrece una excelente fuente para conectarse con alternativas viables en estos momentos.

www.EducationRevolution.org
info@EducationRevolution.org
 800-769-4171 (nacional)
 516-621-2195 (internacional)

Susan Ohanian Charlotte, Vermont
susano@gmavt.net
http://www.susanohanian.org
Ella es una maestra de escuela pública que desde hace mucho tiempo, después de 20 años, se convirtió en redactor de una revista y luego fue profesor freelance. He mantenido un sitio web del activismo por casi 9 años - desde la aprobación de la ley NCLB. La gente puede suscribirse a la página web y luego obtener actualizaciones sobre el contenido nuevo. Respondo todo el correo llegue a través de la página web y con la respuesta, la gente tiene mi dirección de e-mail. También trato de agitar las cosas en Twitter, aunque me parece medio frustrante. Tengo una página en Facebook - sólo para que la gente me puede encontrar. Yo no iniciar nada en ella, el sitio web me mantiene ocupada.
http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=9593

Susan Lee Schwartz Suffern, Nueva York

Susan estudió la alfabetización, la literatura Inglés, y las bellas artes y tiene una licenciatura ('63) y MS ('65) de Brooklyn College, y tiene el equivalente de dos grados de maestría, obtuvo en los estudios de postgrado de la alfabetización, las artes y la educación. Ella enseñó habilidades de alfabetización y el arte, durante cuatro décadas en Nueva York en la escuela primaria y secundaria.En 1998 ganó el estado de Nueva York Inglés Consejo (NYSEC) Educador del Premio a la Excelencia por su práctica docente con éxito, estudió en Harvard y la LRDC en la Universidad de Pittsburgh para la investigación de nuevas normas. Al final de su investigación, su plan de estudios único fue seleccionado por el LRDC para ser utilizado en los seminarios nacionales de desarrollo del personal para los superintendentes escolares. Ella estuvo entre los seis profesores - de entre los miles en todo el país - observó durante la investigación, y la práctica docente, se reunieron todos los principios del aprendizaje. En los años noventa, se levantó a la prominencia en los círculos educativos nacionales, mientras enseñaba en una escuela magnet nuevo, East Side Middle School. Las calificaciones de lectura de sus estudiantes de séptimo grado se encontraban en la parte superior de la ciudad, y en el primer ELA, que dos tercios de los estudiantes de la ciudad no, sus antiguos alumnos (en ese entonces en el octavo grado) se DÉCIMO EN EL ESTADO.

Ella escribe a menudo sobre lo que aprendió acerca de los estándares reales de aprendizaje, en un intento de iniciar una conversación nacional sobre los estándares auténticos, por lo que no puede haber una verdadera reforma. Su experiencia que puso fin a su carrera muy bien en las escuelas públicas de Nueva York le ha llevado a escribir sobre el proceso que elimina los mejores educadores, silenciando las voces de los practicantes del aula que no aceptaría las políticas anti-aprendizaje. Su ensayo aquí en Perdaily, es el que describe este proceso. Lea más, mientras habla sobre la educación, la alfabetización y el aprendizaje en su sitio, desde la perspectiva de la experiencia docente-profesional de la pedagogía. Ella es la voz de los maestros dedicados y talentosos que saben por qué las escuelas están fallando.

Su sitio web es:

http://www.speakingasateacher.com/Susan_Lee_Schwartz_ (Steiner) _ / index.html


Joel Shatzky: Brooklyn, New York
Joel.Shatzky @ cortland.edu
Profesor Emérito de Inglés - SUNY, Colegio de Cortland (1968-2005)
Adjunto un instructor Kingsborough CC (CUNY) 2006 -)
Colaborador habitual para el Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/searchS/?q=Joel+Shatzky
Autor de "La Crisis Pensamiento" con Ellen Hill (Prensa Autores Choice: Nueva York, 2001)
Numerosos artículos sobre la educación en Corrientes judío.
Guionista de tres sátiras de YouTube en la educación "reforma".
"Las lecciones": www.youtube.com/watch?v=D712J1V2Jsg&feature=player_embedded
"Los números Lie": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57BRNLviVTQ
"Los arrancadores Carta": www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnrrw5CV3Gw

Aquí está el último mensaje de Joel por el bajo porcentaje de "listos para la universidad" graduados de escuela secundaria.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-shatzky/educating-for-democracy-t_2_b_821410.html



Lorna Stremcha Havre, Montana

http://www.endteacherabuse.org/Stremcha.html
http://twitter.com/lornapstremcha

lornastremcha.com

callmescarlet.blogspot.com
facebook


SU HISTORIA:
"Sé de primera mano los daños financieros, personales, emocionales y físicos que pueden resultar cuando los administradores escolares, el Montana Asociación de Educación y la Asociación Nacional de Educación ponen sus propios intereses por encima de los estudiantes, los profesores y los contribuyentes del Estado de Montana Mis archivos contienen montañas de papeles incluyendo declaraciones juradas, declaraciones de la verdad, documentos notariales y exposiciones como resultado de un arduo proceso legal que finalmente terminó cuando el Havre (Montana) del Distrito Escolar se establecieron dos demandas -. una demanda federal y una presentada en la Corte de Distrito del Estado Estos documentos también incluyen una carta de un representante del sindicato diciendo: "Esto no es nada más que una caza de brujas." Sin embargo, el sindicato continuó permitiendo la administración de la escuela para acosar, intimidar y hacer daño a mí.
Estas dos demandas como resultado de un solo incidente que, de haber sido manejado de manera diferente y bajo la luz del escrutinio público, no habría una bola de nieve en premios de más de $ 200,000 en daños y perjuicios.Los fondos que finalmente llegó de los bolsillos de los contribuyentes.Irónicamente, como contribuyente en Hill County, mi familia y yo estamos ayudando a pagar las indemnizaciones concedidas a mí.Esta cubierto los honorarios de los abogados. El acuerdo no incluye mis honorarios de abogado, sin embargo, el barrio, los seguros y los contribuyentes pagan las facturas de los abogados defensores, que superó la mía. El acuerdo se hizo el 2 de marzo de 2006 ". Http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Jim-Taylor/125893225652
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Jim-Taylor/125893225652
http://twitter.com/search?q=DrJimTaylor

Lois Weiner Jersey City, Nueva Jersey
Profesor de Educación Primaria y Secundaria
New Jersey City University
2039 Kennedy Blvd.
Jersey City, New Jersey 07305
drweinerlo@gmail.com
Blog
http://newpolitics.mayfirst.org/blog/5
Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/3/educators_push_back_against_obamas_business
LÍNEAS DE INVESTIGACIÓN
Impacto de las características de las escuelas urbanas en la práctica docente de los profesores
Como raza, clase y género mediar el rendimiento académico
Trabajo de los profesores y la escuela como lugar de trabajo.Efectos de los cambios en la economía política mundial sobre la enseñanza, maestros y escuelas . 

Tags: Ira Glass, This American Life