BloomKlein Cabal To Close 35 Schools!!

By SHARON OTTERMAN

If you thought this year was a dramatic one for school closings — with 19 city schools shut in January over the objections of thousands of parents and teachers before being given a temporary reprieve by a court — wait until next year.

Not only does the city say it will try to close all 19 of those schools again, but it will also try to phase out 16 more, continuing its strategy of closing some of the city’s largest high schools and replacing them with small schools or charter schools.

On Friday, the city announced which of 34 schools on a state list of “persistently lowest achieving” schools it would keep open and try to improve — in a process known as transformation – and which it would most likely phase out beginning in the 2011-12 school year.

The 11 schools chosen for transformation can hire two new kinds of teachers — master teachers and turnaround teachers — who will earn up to 30 percent more than their regular salaries for training teachers in addition to their regular duties. Those premiums, and other school improvements, will be financed by $2 million a year in federal stimulus money over the next three years.

Principals at most transformation schools will be removed, according to federal rules that must be followed in order to receive the money, even though teachers will not be dismissed. That brought an angry response from the head of the principals’ union on Friday. (The city is lobbying to save principals who are making improvements. )

“Each school on this list has a different story,” said Ernest Logan, the head of the union, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators. “Some have B’s on their school report cards; some have principals with strong principal performance reviews. At least one is on the list of Newsweek magazine’s best public schools of the year. All things considered, it makes no sense to suggest removing the principals of these schools while retaining all the teachers.”

The 11 schools selected for transformation are:
Automotive High School
Bread & Roses Integrated Arts High School
Brooklyn School for Global Studies
Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School
Cobble Hill School of American Studies
Flushing High School
Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School
Long Island City High School
Queens Vocational and Technical High School
Unity Center for Urban Technologies
William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School

The additional 23 schools on the state’s “persistently lowest achieving” list that will most likely be phased out and replaced with new schools are:
August Martin High School
Beach Channel High School
Boys and Girls High School
Christopher Columbus High School
Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology
Grace Dodge Career and Technical Education High School
Grover Cleveland High School
High School of Graphic Communication Arts
Jamaica High School
Jane Addams High School for Academic Careers
John Adams High School
John Dewey High School
John F. Kennedy High School
Metropolitan Corporate Academy
Monroe Academy for Business/Law
Newtown High School
Norman Thomas High School
Paul Robeson High School
Public School 065 Mother Hale Academy
Richmond Hill High School
Sheepshead Bay High School
Washington Irving High School
W.H. Maxwell CTE High School

Additional schools that the city says it will attempt to close again next year, after having been prevented from doing so because of a lawsuit from the N.A.A.C.P. and the teachers’ union this spring:
Frederick Douglass Academy III (middle school)
Global Enterprise High School
Monroe Academy for Business and Law
School for Community Research and Learning
New Day Academy
Academy of Collaborative Education
Kappa II
Academy of Environmental Science High School
Middle School for Academic and Social Excellence
Public School 332
Business, Computer Applications and Entrepreneurship High School
Choir Academy of Harlem High School

 Readin,' Writin' and Rich Guys

cartoon by Dan Wasserman

The Future of Education IF BloomKlein & Obama/Duncan and Their Corporate Friends Have Their Way:

{Click on image to enlarge}

FOTOS FROM...

Friday June 4th Morning Save Public Education Rally at Frederick Douglass Academy 5 in the Bronx

On Friday June 4, 2010 thousands of Parents, Students and Educators Rallied all over New York City to save Public Education. Frederick Douglass Academy is just one reflection of a powerful and growing movement against the privatization of public education!

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FOTOS FROM...  

PS 307 Represents on Friday June 4!!

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FOTOS From TWEED DEMO

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GEM Fotos from PS24K

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Baruti Kafele: a Principled Principal

Newark's Principal Kafele:  

Transforming Mis Education Into Quality Education

Greetings family,

The Milken Family Foundation spent a day at Newark Tech filming a few months back.  Check out the short clip.  After 9 hours of filming, the following clip is the finished product.  Hope you like it.

I might add that I am EXTEREMELY proud of our State Standardized test results for juniors which were released last Friday – 93% of our students were proficient in Language Arts and 82% in math.  This is truly phenomenal!  I might also add that for our seniors, after retakes of the test, 100% passed Language Arts and 88% passed math.  Kudos to the Newark Tech staff and students for a job well done!

Principal Kafele
"I'm on FIRE!!!"

Author – Motivating Black Males to Achieve in School and in Life
http://www.principalkafele.com

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BIO--

Principal Baruti Kafele, whose African first name means "teacher" is on a personal mission to motivate, educate and empower teachers, counselors, administrators and parents of Black and Latino children the world over.

As an educator, Principal Kafele has excelled in the capacity of teacher and principal. As a teacher in East Orange, NJ, he was selected as the East Orange School District and Essex County Public Schools Teacher of the Year. He was also selected for Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers six times. As a principal, he led the transformation of four different New Jersey public schools, including his current school, “The Mighty” Newark Tech, which has been recognized twice by U.S. News and World Report Magazine as one of America's best high schools.

As a writer, Principal Kafele is the author of five books which include:  A Handbook for Teachers of African American Children, A Black Parent’s Handbook to Educating Your Children (Outside of the Classroom), and his new best seller, Motivating Black Males to Achieve in School and in Life. 

As a speaker, Principal Kafele is on fire!  He has "fired up" countless audiences with his empowering message of "extraordinary achievement" for over twenty years. He conducts professional development workshops for educators at major national conferences and school districts throughout the U.S. regularly. He also conducts parenting workshops, male empowerment seminars and student motivational assemblies in addition to his empowering keynote addresses.

As a family man, Principal Kafele is happily married to his wife Kimberley and is the proud father of his three children, Baruti, Jabari and Kibriya.

Finally, Principal Kafele earned his B.S. degree in Management Science/Marketing from Kean University and his M.A. degree in Educational Administration from New Jersey City University. He is also the recipient of numerous educational, professional and community awards, including the prestigious Milken Family Foundation National Educator Award in 2009 and the City of Dickinson, Texas proclaiming February 8, 1998 as "Baruti Kafele Day!"

ED Cartoon of the Week

"Race to the Top" Is Bottoming Out
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Protesting Black Cleveland Hi School Youth Get Red-Baited by Corporate Media

  

NOTE: It is becoming clearer everyday that our fight for a free quality public education for all New Yorkers is not a lonely battle. From Puerto Rico to Los Angeles to Cleveland, students, educators, parents and communityfolk are resisting the cutbacks, charterizing and criminalizing of our youth. Here is just one example of the growing resistance movement....

NOTE: This video is visually shaky but has a decent audio.

ClevelandFIST — May 15, 2010 — This video shows students from Collinwood High School gathering in a crowd of several hundred chanting save our schools! Later, Martha Grevatt is shown responding the media attempts to claim the protest was part of Caleb Maupins communist agenda. 

Devin Branch, a local organizer with the October 22nd Coalition, is seen engaging in a discussion with a leader of the local SEIU. Devin Branch says "I am ready to accept a level of disorganization the part of the youth to make up for the lack of militancy and the complacency of the adults." 

Devin Branch makes it clear that he feels the attacks on local Marxists and Cleveland FIST for supporting the student led protest are hypocritical, when NAACP and other forces ignored the students demands and have done very little to stop the destruction of the Cleveland Public School system.

•  Call the Fifth District Police station, 216-623-5618 & 216-623-6500 to demand all charges against the students be dropped and to protest the brutal treatment of the students. 

•  Call the Cleveland Board of Education, 216-574-8000 and Collinwood High School, 216-451-8782 to demand the suspensions be rescinded and that Seth Barlekamp not be threatened with expulsion.

http://www.clevelandfist.blogspot.com
http://www.fistyouth.org
http://www.workers.org

NYC Charter School Teachers  Back Off From Union!  FROM: David Galarza

April 27, 2010

By JENNIFER MEDINA

Charter schools came under a harsh spotlight last week, with State Senator Bill Perkins holding his long-awaited hearing in an attempt to examine how the privately operated schools spend their public money. The hearings prompted several articles in the papers exploring potential conflicts of interest and other practices that have raised the ire of critics — and the issues are not limited to New York. And The New York Post took on Mr. Perkins with zeal in its editorial pages.
But as the public clashes raged, a quieter battle began coming to an end.

Just a year after voting to join the United Federation of Teachers, staff members at KIPP AMP Academy Charter School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, voted to rescind the decision to sign up with the city’s teachers’ union. The petition to break from the union was filed Wednesday afternoon with signatures from 16 staff members, including one dean of the school, an office manager and an operations manager, as well as several teachers.

To explain technical matters: The staff members are asking the Public Employment Relations Board to decertify the United Federation of Teachers as their collective bargaining representatives.

The split appears to be a loss for the union, which has put an emphasis on creating chapters at existing charter schools. Teachers at charter schools tend to work longer — 12- or even 16-hour days are not unusual — and do not have the job protections the unions provide.

The U.F.T. will fight the decision with the Public Employment Relations Board by suggesting that the teachers were intimidated by management and that a group of teachers is still committed to joining the union.

Negotiations between the union and KIPP management had been quietly plodding along for months, though there was no indication that they were anywhere near an agreement. But for now, all negotiations will halt.

Unlike many of the fights over charter schools, the battle over the union at KIPP has been relatively quiet — few advocates on either side have drawn attention to it as they did with a battle in Baltimore, where the KIPP school shortened the length of the day and eliminated Saturday classes.

Lyle Zuckerman, a lawyer for the teachers who filed the petition, said that none of the teachers were willing to speak to a reporter about the matter, in part because of the union’s suggestion that it intends to fight in court.

Mr. Zuckerman said that the guidance counselor leading the charge to decertify the union, Dameon Clay, told him that the school’s administration had changed in the last year and that the current staff has an excellent and trusting relationship with them.

“We think that we can deal with them directly without a third party, and that would be best for the staff and our students,” Mr. Clay said in a statement provided by Mr. Zuckerman. “The staff and the administration know our students well, we know the parents well, and we know firsthand what’s in their best interests.

“As for personnel matters,” the statement continued, “we’re confident that we can deal with the administration directly as advocates for ourselves. We trust that the new administrators will deal with us fairly.”

When the teachers moved to join the union last year, several of them cited high teacher turnover as a reason for their worry. This year, roughly half the teachers at the school were also at the school last year. Several teachers who joined the effort to form the union last year signed the petition to remove themselves from it last week.

Last year, one teacher changed her mind about joining the union fairly quickly, saying that she came to believe the union would do more harm than good for the teachers.

So what happens next at the school? First, the state’s labor relations board would have to approve the decertification petition. If that happens, the teachers at the school will vote on whether they want to join the union.

Unions are generally anathema to charter school operators, who say they thrive on flexibility and creating their own culture at schools. And so the unions and charter school advocates are seemingly engaged in a open warfare in New York City, where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel I. Klein have embraced them with open arms.

But in Albany, negotiations continue over plans to increase the cap on charter schools — currently at 100. Mayor Bloomberg and other advocates want it raised significantly or lifted entirely, which they say would give the state a better shot at millions of dollars from the competitive federal education grant known as Race to the Top. Needless to say, there are more battles to come.
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Every Tuesday, education beat reporters for The New York Times take you inside the New York City school system. 

Have a tip? Send it to IntheSchools@nytimes.com.
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Senator Bill Perkins Fights The Charter School Bumrush in Harlem!