The Worst Person on the Planet

Arne Duncan was the first to say it. He said that Hurricane Katrina was the "best thing that happened" to education in New Orleans. So what, he seemed to be implying, if a bunch of people died? They were mostly poor black people, and it's important to implement your charter school wet dreams no matter what. If some minorities have to drown, well, that's the price ol' Arne was willing to pay.

You'd think everyone would have learned that it isn't a good idea to root for death and destruction in order to implement your "reform" plans. And you'd really think that no one would be stupid enough to echo Arne Duncan's idiocy on the tenth anniversary of Katrina.

Enter Kristen McQueary of the Chicago Tribune, with her knuckles dragging. She wrote an Op Ed for the Tribune that looked wistfully back at Katrina, and wished a similar fate on the residents of Chicago. Here's part of what she said:

I find myself wishing for a storm in Chicago — an unpredictable, haughty, devastating swirl of fury. A dramatic levee break. Geysers bursting through manhole covers. A sleeping city, forced onto the rooftops...That's what it took to hit the reset button in New Orleans. Chaos. Tragedy. Heartbreak.

Nice, huh? And she tips her hand in the next paragraph (italics mine):

An underperforming public school system saw a complete makeover. A new schools chief, Paul Vallas, designed a school system with the flexibility of an entrepreneur. No restrictive mandates from the city or the state. No demands from teacher unions to abide. Instead, he created the nation's first free-market education system.

Yep. That's the giveaway. Katrina was fine--as long as it did away with those nasty teachers' unions and put the "free market" (i.e., hedge fund billionaires) in command.

This is why our unions should not be dealing--ever--with the proponents of "reform", like Duncan, Gates, Eva Moskowitz, or Campbell Brown. They don't give a damn what happens to people, including the kids they claim to be "saving". To them, anything goes as long as they can break the back of the unions and scoop up the lion's share of educational dollars for themselves.

Kristen McQueary offered a non-apology for her tirade, claiming that she was engaging in "metaphor and hyperbole", and basically that the great unwashed really didn't understand the point she was making or how she was making it.

No, Ms. McQueary, we know exactly what you were doing. And the reason you didn't offer an apology for your reprehensible words was that you are not sorry you said them.

That makes you the worst person in the world.

Christie Gets Booed

It appears that Chris Christie got booed as he tried to present an award to the winner of a horse race.

Apparently, the crowd was confused as to why there were two horses' asses in the winner's circle at the same time.

Of Pensions and Christie

Would you buy a used pension from this man?

We just recently purchased new vehicles for my wife and daughter. We went to a total of five dealerships for those two cars. We found that two of the dealers were fair, in the sense that they did not try to hold us upside down by the ankles and shake money from our pockets like the others did.

The shadier dealers tried every trick in the book on us, including the old "Ask Three Questions to Get Them in a YES Frame of Mind" trick, which goes like this:

Salesman: Wasn't Adolph Hitler a terrible person?
Us: Yes.

Salesman: Weren't those 9/11 terrorist attacks awful?
Us: Yes.

Salesman: Wouldn't you like me to put you in this new car TODAY??
Us: We're outta here.

As awful as some of our experiences were, we ended up with two good deals, meaning they agreed to give us a car for a reasonable price and we agreed to pay them approximately forever.

Imagine now, if you will, the worst car dealer ever. He gets you to agree to purchase a very expensive car by offering you a great trade in. He takes the old car, but never delivers the new car. And he goes to court to make sure he never has to give your promised vehicle, and that you have to make the payments even though you got nothing.

Meet car dealer extraordinaire: Chris Christie. Except it isn't phantom cars he's pedaling--it's phantom pensions.

Four years ago, Chris Christie decided that he could no longer fund the state pension system, because he needed to give the taxpayers' money to the rich to buy diamond encrusted saddles for their polo ponies, and for taxpayer funded helicopter rides to his son's baseball games. So what happened was exactly what would happen to you if you stopped paying for your car. They repossessed New Jersey.

Just kidding, of course. Only the common people get things taken from them when they don't meet their obligations. What really happened was that Christie reached a deal with NJ's public employee unions, in which he agreed to make those payments if the unions agreed to pay more into the pension fund themselves.

For four years, the unions have dutifully paid their agreed portion, but Christie decided he did not have to actually do what he agreed to do. He stopped making payments. So this time around, they really did repossess New Jersey.

Just kidding again. What really happened was that Christie was taken to court and ordered to make the payments on the law he signed. End of story, right?

Well, no. He went to the NJ Supreme Court, which decided in its infinitesimal wisdom that it could not force Christie to make the 1.57 billion dollar payment he promised to make. Instead, the court said the governor and legislature--the ones who wrote the law in the first place--should figure it all out and fix the problem.

This is akin to the car dealer mentioned above. He takes what you had, gives you nothing new, and forces you to make payments for years. When it gets to court, the judge decides that the salesman and his manager should go back and figure out what to do about it.

In the mean time, public employees are keeping up their end, because they can not just stop paying in the money they agreed to like they're the governor or something.

This should be a cautionary tale for all public employee members. Never, EVER, agree to pay into the pension fund, because if you do, there is already a judicial precedent that the state does not have to hold up their end, but you do.

As things stand right now, New York is not in any serious danger of this happening, as the public employee pension systems and TRS are pretty solvent, mostly because our previous governors went to their kids' baseball games by land. But beware--now that the precedent has been set, you can bet Cuomo is working on his spiel already:

Cuomo: Aren't pensions a wonderful thing?
Unions: Yes.

Cuomo: Aren't you glad you can retire at 57?
Unions: Yes.

Cuomo: Wouldn't you like to contribute a portion of your salary to make sure things stay that way?

Our answer should be a resounding NO. Even if he throws in free rustproofing.

Deflategate vs. Inflategate

You might have heard, if you live on this planet, that Tom Brady of the New England Patriots was found guilty of cheating because his people deflated footballs before the AFC Championship Game with the Indianapolis Colts.

This isn't the first time the Patriots have cheated, either. There was the infamous Spygate scandal, in which the Pats filmed the defensive signals of the Jets. It's difficult to blame them, because we all know how hard it was to defeat the 2007 Jets. /sarcasm

So, we have serial cheaters here in the Pats and Tom Brady. In the latest Deflategate scandal, Brady was hit with the truly harsh penalty of having to miss a quarter of the season--four games--without pay, which he will presumably spend with his supermodel wife. After that, he will go back to being a quarterback and continue making millions. How will he ever manage to recover?

Why bring this up? I think it's noteworthy to compare it to another cheating scandal--the one in Atlanta. In 2013, 35 educators in Atlanta were accused of cheating on a high stakes test by getting together and changing student answers in order to inflate scores. Let's call it Inflategate.

There are many similarities between these cases. Brady conspired with his equipment people to violate the rules, while Atlanta teachers conspired to increase test scores. Brady refused to cooperate with investigators and claimed to be innocent, and twelve Atlanta teachers refused to accept plea deals. All of them presumably did their misdeeds in order to gain an unfair advantage.

So it's safe to assume that the Atlanta teachers got a penalty at least somewhat similar to Brady, right? A fine, and a suspension for a quarter of a school year without pay so they could spend time with their supermodel spouses?

Well, no. These are teachers. Teachers are not held in the high esteem that Tom Brady is. Teachers have the meaningless task of educating our children, while Tom Brady has the highest calling one can have--throwing pigskin with accuracy.

So the judge in the Atlanta case hit three of the educators with the harshest penalties he could. Found guilty of racketeering, he sentenced them to twenty years in prison of which they would serve seven, 2000 hours of community service, and a $25,000 fine. But never fear--the judge had a change of heart and decided that these educators would only have to serve three years in prison.

Both of these cases featured people who conspired to cheat--one with balls and one with bubbles. Yet the outcomes could not have been more different. So what lesson can we learn here?

If you're going to cheat, it helps a lot to be rich. Brady got a slap on the wrist, while the guys who did the deflating have already been put out of work, although they've not been put in jail.

The Atlanta teachers had several other strikes against them. First, they were mostly black. Second, they were predominantly female. Most damning of all, of course, is that they were teachers, and it has been open season on teachers for quite some time now.

I don't condone what the educators in Atlanta did. Not at all. But whatever monetary gain they received or job security they obtained pales in comparison to what Brady and the Cheatriots got--namely a Superbowl win and all the financial benefits that accrue from that.

Cheating pays if you're rich. Just ask Tom Brady, or Alex Rodriguez. While you're at it, ask all the bankers who benefited from bringing this country to its knees financially while the poor and middle class suffered from a recession and unemployment. How many of you teachers out there lost a bundle when Wall Street tanked the economy? You know how many of those rich bastards went to jail for selling what they knew were junk securities?

That's right. None.

If you're rich, you can conspire to deflate footballs--no problem. Ditto if you're rich and deflate the economy--they'll just take taxpayer money to bail you out.

Inflate some scores? It's a long stretch in the pokey for you.

That's the American way.

EDIT AND UPDATE: In perhaps the stupidest thing I have read in a LONG time, it seems that an apparently mentally unstable Pats fan as started a GoFundMe page to help the Pats pay that whopping $1 millon fine. This is great news, as Pats owner Robert Kraft only has an estimated fortune of 4.3 BILLION dollars. Hey, stupid Pats fan, this is why the country is going to hell in a hand basket. You're trying to bail out a man who could pay a million dollar fine EVERY DAY for the next 11.78 years before he went broke. He would likely not start a GoFundMe page to hire someone to spit on you if your hair was on fire.

By Georges! The Truth about Teaching and the UFT

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Why Cuomo and Mulgrew Are Both Wrong

Governor Cuomo and Michael Mulrew have been waging a war of words in the Daily News, each accusing the other of not caring about the kids of NY. Here's what they've said:

Cuomo referred to the teacher unions and the entrenched education establishment as an “industry” that is more interested in protecting the rights of its members than improving the system for the kids it is supposed to be serving.

Mulgrew: “If he truly believes that, it’s the clearest piece of evidence that he does not understand the people who choose to make their life’s work teaching and educating children."

I believe they are both wrong, and I hope I can articulate why without sounding as if I don't care about kids. I most certainly do care about them. I've spent the vast majority of my adult life working for and with children. And part of the problem is that I felt the need to say that before the rest of what I have to say. Because if you are a teacher, and you say that anything matters to you other than the children you teach, you run the risk of being labeled a monster.  Because God forbid if teachers want to make a decent living while serving the community. How dare we?

Perhaps the best way to approach this is to remind myself, and everyone reading, what the purpose of the union is. And this applies to any union, not just teachers.

The purpose of a union is to give individual workers the ability to collectively bargain and to make a better life for themselves.

Cuomo is wrong because he believes that it is the union's responsibility to improve education. It is not. It is the state's responsibility, as part of the constitution, to provide each child with a "sound, basic education". The governor is attempting to shift the burden for this responsibility from the state to the union. If he can make people believe that the union is responsible, then he can blame teachers for all his own failures, especially the failure to address the inequality of school funding.

Mulgrew is equally wrong because he seems to confuse the union with the membership. They are, in fact, separate entities. The union is made up of teachers, of course, and it is our job to educate children, but it does not therefore follow that it is the union's job to educate children, which is what Mulgrew seems to be saying.

Frankly, I wish Mulgrew saw the union's role differently. It is absolutely the union's job to protect the rights of its members. PERIOD.

That doesn't mean that the membership shouldn't advocate for children. We should. In fact, we must, because there are wealthy forces out there looking to destroy public education for their own profit.

The reason that teachers pay union dues is so that the UFT can advocate for teachers--to protect us from abuse, to negotiate fair contracts with adequate compensation and benefits, and to ensure that we have good working conditions.

What Mulgrew needs to make clear is that by protecting teachers, the union is freeing us to do what's right for kids. No one goes into teaching to get rich, or because the job is easy (half of all teachers leave within the first five years, which clearly speaks to the difficulties teachers face). We go into teaching because we are called to it, because it is an honorable profession, and because if we do our jobs, we can make a definite impact on the lives of children and the world we live in.

I think it's high time the Mulgrew owns what the union is. But he needs to make the case that a strong union is a benefit for children. He has allowed the politicians and hedge fundies to hijack the conversation by conflating the role of the union (protecting teachers) with the role of teachers (educating and advocating for children).

He needs to make the case that when the union is strong, education is strong. When teachers feel respected and safe from unjust evaluations, we are free to do the job we were hired to do. Bright and capable college students will be attracted to teaching, and veterans won't be looking to flee as soon as they are able.

Unions working on behalf of their members helped build this country and its middle class. Instead of fleeing from this basic truth, Mulgrew should embrace it.

Unionism helps teachers help kids. That should be the message.

Political Theater, Cuomo Style

It's no secret that Andrew Cuomo seeks to crush his political foes. If you run afoul of him, watch out. The Working Families Party buckled under to him, as did the UFT by choosing not to endorse pro-teacher candidate Zephyr Teachout for governor over Andy boy.

Now let's look at recent events. Yesterday, Cuomo pushed the most anti-teacher agenda of any democrat governor in these 50 states. It's well known that he took a lot of campaign money from groups like StudentsFirst and others, then lo and behold, a series of virulent anti-education "reforms" make their way into Andy's SOTS speech.

The very next day, the man who would have stood in the way of Andy paying back his political donors, Sheldon Silver, was arrested by the Feds for corruption. Pretty neat, eh? Quite the coincidence there.

Now let me say here and now that if Silver is actually guilty, he should go to jail. Of course, he is innocent until proven guilty, but this undoubtedly taints his reputation and weakens his power in the Assembly at a time teachers need his support the most.

This is a federal indictment, so it could not have been orchestrated by Cuomo. Well, at least not entirely. But is it beyond the realm of possibility that Andy's fingerprints are all over this?

Remember the Moreland Commission--which Andy created to "fight" corruption in Albany, but which he mysteriously abandoned? Is it possible that the Moreland Commission got the goods on Silver, and then was disbanded before they got too close to the governor's mansion?

I have no proof of this, of course. But the timing seems like the entire thing was staged to discredit Silver at a time when Cuomo was determined to butt heads with him.

Would anyone be surprised if that's what happened? I know I wouldn't.