Pot...Kettle...Leo Casey

Leo Casey is all up in arms. He alleges on EdWize that Answers Vending, which contracts with Tweed, is guilty of wage theft from its employees. Casey is upset that this company will reap a 15-18% profit from the DOE while another company--with a union workforce--lost the contract.

While all this is bad, one wonders why Leo Casey, whose wages are paid with the hard earned dues of teachers, doesn't consider himself guilty of anything. We pay his wages, we pay for Edwize, and we pay for the nice pension he receives. Yet he's using our resources to fight for a union that isn't even his own.

I think it would be nice if he would fight for us sometime. Last I looked, there were still a lot of ATRs and rubber room dwellers, overcrowded classrooms, and unresolved grievances.

Fight for us, Leo. We pay your wages.

Stumping for the Mayor4Life

Mayor4Life Bloomberg, apparently not content to outspend his Democratic opponent Bill Thompson by a 16 to 1 margin, has enlisted the help of Rudy Giuliani to help boost his cause. Giuliani immediately set about helping Bloomberg by implying that a Thompson administration would bring a return of violence and crime to NY. The Times reports that Rudy spoke to a group of Orthodox Jewish leaders:

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Mr. Giuliani told the group, in what many people in Mr. Thompson’s camp have interpreted as a reference to the days of unchecked violence during the 1991 riots in Crown Heights that started after an out-of-control car driven by a Brooklyn Hasid struck and killed a 7-year-old black child.

Apparently, Mayor4Life shrugged off the comments of his predecessor, which seems to me like tacit approval of possible race baiting by the last mayor who tried to extend term limits.

Giuliani, who is about as polarizing a politician as NYC has ever known, is apparently out to get the "I'm still afraid of Crown Heights and 9/11" vote. He has the added attraction of inspiring hobbyist transvestites to go to the polls.

In order to further support his flagging campaign, Bloomberg is enlisting the help of some other famous NYers:

Eliot Spitzer is drumming up the "Hooker and Johns" vote.

Anne Coulter is courting the "Horse faced pundits with huge Adam's apples" vote.

Bernie Madoff is stumping for the "Greedy Amoral Wall Street Banker" vote.

David Berkowitz is aiming for the "Psychopaths who Take Orders from Dogs" vote.

Mayor4Life is truly leaving no rock unturned, however slimy it may be underneath.

Kristoff, Revisited.

I've written a number of posts on Nicholas Kristof's off the wall views on education. See here, here, and here, for example.

I thought I was going to have to do it again after reading Kristof's latest diatribe in today's Op-ed section of the Times, but Thoughts on Education Policy saved me the effort. Well worth a read.

Mike and Joel Plus Eight

In a recent poll, it appears that Mayor4Life Bloomberg is a mere 8 percentage points ahead of Bill Thompson. According to the Daily News, in a poll that identified Bloomberg as a Republican and Thompson as a Democrat (as they will appear on the ballot), only those 8 little points separate the two.

Camp Bloomie is also concerned because they believe there will be a huge turnout among those who hate him, and a much smaller showing among those who just kind of tolerate him.

I'd be a little worried if I were the Mayor King, as well. He's probably spent at least $80 million dollars so far, and he is losing steam fast. All his negative ads serve to give Thompson name recognition and plausibility as a candidate.

And although most of the dailies analyzed the mayoral debate as a draw, IMO it was a clear win for Thompson. Bloomie looked dull and defensive, while Thompson was sharp and nailed all his talking points--especially the one that may well dethrone the Mayor King--term limits.

Of course, the UFT is standing by, twiddling their thumbs. A full throated endorsement from our union might be enough to put Thompson over the top. Don't expect it any time soon.

UPDATE: Philip Nobile wrote an interesting post on this topic on EdNotes here. It appears the DA, to the surprise of no one, has decided to twiddle their thumbs a little longer.

Common Misconceptions

A comment today by Gideon is so representative of the pro Fair Student Funding model that I thought it was worth commenting on separately here. Gideon comments:

You state "The opinion piece wrongly says that under the old system, richer school districts got more money. In truth, the money was for the salaries of more senior teachers who transferred into those schools." That's exactly the problem: more experienced teachers go to the least challenging schools with the least need; as a result the schools with the lowest poverty end up spending far more per student than the high poverty schools.

I don't know Gideon, but this sounds like the comment of an admin or someone who has only heard the mayor's spiel of FSF. I have worked in what Gideon would call a "challenging" school for most of my career. What made it challenging was a lack of discipline, violence, gangs, crime in the streets, and a huge turnover of the least senior people. That's right...least senior. I put in 20 years in that school, and I watched hundreds of new teachers come and go once they discovered how difficult it was to maintain discipline in such a tough neighborhood, and how dangerous it was to leave your car on the street, assuming you could find a spot within walking distance of the school. At any given time, at least half the staff had 3 years or less of experience. The problem here was not one of funding, but that conditions in the school made it hard for anyone to do a good job. It's ridiculous to think that teachers should spend their entire careers in buildings that are unsafe and where conditions make many classes unteachable. If the mayor and chancellor actually fixed the schools--made them places where people wanted to work, there would have been no need to dream up FSF as a fix.

And your argument about using Fair Student Funding to discriminate against senior teachers doesn't make sense. You yourself state that it takes 5 years to become a proficient teacher, but fail to note that most teachers don't improve significantly beyond 5 years.

Proficient isn't excellent. Many teachers become proficient in five years, but excellent takes a lifetime of experience. I don't know who dreamed up the myth that teachers don't improve after 5 years, but it's nonsense. I get a little better every year. I'm much better now that I've been teaching more than two decades than I was after my fifth year.

And let's take your argument to its logical conclusion. If teachers don't improve after 5 years, why not just sign teachers up for 5 year tours like the armed forces does? After that, you're out. Would that make the system better? Would you want your child educated by such a transient workforce?

Ignoring the ATR problem doesn't make it go away. It was caused directly by FSF, no matter what they mayor and the Daily News say. Principals have no incentive to hire senior teachers, and that is discrimination, pure and simple. Young teachers are more pliable and cheaper, but they certainly aren't better.

FSF is just a way to claim the schools are getting better without doing a damn thing. If BloomKlein ever get serious about fixing the schools, they will focus their energy on making every school a safe, pleasant place for teachers and students alike to be.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

You have to wonder how the Daily News can get it wrong just about every single time. Today's attack on teachers focused on Fair Student Funding, a bullshit idea that BloomKlein have fed to the press as a way of democratizing schools but is nothing more than a way for the DOE to skirt the UFT contract and try to fire or marginalize senior teachers.We blogged on this issue several months ago.

The opinion piece wrongly says that under the old system, richer school districts got more money. In truth, the money was for the salaries of more senior teachers who transferred into those schools. As far as I know, almost none of that money went to the kids, but to the teachers who worked in those schools.

This article says that under 'Fair' student funding, money is allocated based upon student needs, which again is false. Schools get a certain amount for each student, but they can spend the money as they wish, including on large catered affairs for the superintendents who visit or on extra copy machines or perhaps even betting on cockfights for all I know. The idea that the students get the money is absurd. What has happened in reality is that principals have denied high needs students something they desperately need in order to succeed--highly qualified teachers. If a principal can hire a newbie for 50K or an experienced veteran for 90K, whom will he hire? And there is LOTS of evidence to show that newbie teachers are not as effective as senior teachers--most research shows that it takes 5 years to become really proficient at teaching--but principals generally don't hire those teachers because they cost more.

The article says, "What's wrong with this? Nothing. The students in these schools are clearly in need. If they either can't entice senior teachers, or if they are happy with the junior teachers they have, why shouldn't they be allowed to use the money allocated for their particular students' needs for more books, supplies or additional staff?"

Actually, there's a great deal wrong if a school can not entice senior teachers. That usually means that the school is broken in some way. It's violent, it's abusive to teachers, or it has no intention of enticing them in the first place. Rather than take real action, such as actually fixing the schools no one wants to teach in, BloomKlein concocts a cockamamie funding scheme.

Let's use an example. Suppose a school has 100 teachers making an average of 80K. That would be 8 million in salary. Let's further suppose this school has 1500 students, which is about right for this many teachers. That's a student teacher ratio of 15:1. If fair student funding worked as advertised, a principal could hire 100 newbies at a cost of 5 million, leaving 3 million. With that 3 million, a principal could hire another 30 newbies, bringing the total staff to 130 and a student teacher ratio of 11.5 to 1. Can anyone show me a single example--just one--where this has happened? Where anything close to this has happened? So where does that extra 3 million go?

I'll tell you exactly what happens in real life. Principals look to cut senior teachers to save money, or they replace retirees with newbies. Then when the savings come in, Bloomberg institutes draconian cuts to school budgets and tells principals to just deal with them. So teaching staffs become less and less experienced, and needy kids don't get squat because Mayor4Life cuts the money from the budget anyway.

Finally, the author of the article, one Raymond Domanico, makes the patently absurd claim that, "...fair Student Funding plays no role in putting teachers into the reserve pool." Pardon me? When schools close or enrollment declines, excessed teachers are put in the ATR pool and principals do not hire them because they do not want to take on the salary of a senior teacher under fair student funding because doing so will cost them as much as 50K a year. As a result, we have a bloated ATR pool that has cost the city well over 200 million dollars so far.

Imagine how that much money could have helped needy kids.

The Revenge of Jerry Lewis

I think about Jerry Lewis about once a year. It's around Labor Day, right before we have to return to work. That's when he holds his MD Telethon, which I used to hate because it reminded me of the end of summer. Then Randi gave away the Labor Day weekend, and Jerry and I were at peace once more. This year, however, we got the weekend back, so I blogged about how I might have to go back to hating Jerry.

That's how Jerry got his revenge. I used the picture you see above in that post, and now, every time I check the traffic to this site, I see that someone arrived at this blog because of the picture. If you type "Jerry Lewis" into Google and click on Images, you'll see that this picture is linked to this blog, probably forever. I don't know why. All I know is that every single day, perhaps for the rest of my life, I am doomed to think about Jerry Lewis.

I'll never blog alone.