A Parent Responds to Learn NY's Spokesman

In this earlier post, we identified how "anonymous" comments pitching the renewal of mayoral control left on this and other blogs were actually being made by a paid operative for MASS / Learn NY, an organization chaired by Geoff Canada. The operative's return visit, this time as Brian Keeler, drew a strong comment in response from one anonymous parent. I've given it space here as a separate post so more people will see it:

Hey BK!

Just want to know how your kids fair in our public schools? If they attend high school in any number of our poverty stricken (read ghetto) neighborhoods, do they tell you how it feels to be searched and wanded before entering their school buildings? Do they speak on the daily humiliation of being verbally assaulted by security staff and teachers for minor infractions like talking to their friends? Have they spoken to you about being yelled at constantly while contained in overcrowded classes that offer no meaningful instruction relevant to their cultures, interests or futures, or feel patronized by over-wrought, inexperienced newbie teachers who liken their classroom experiences in any of NYC’s over 900 Title 1 schools to being Peace Corps workers in Third world countries?

Oh, that's right-- you aren't a NYC public school parent! Nor did you grow up here or attend our highly segregated school system. As an out-of-towner, can we safely assume your children (if you indeed have any), aren’t participating in the Mayor's great social experiment?

Let’s be very clear about the PR spin at Learning NY. You don’t represent students and their concerned parents’ needs or interests-- just the Mayor's and Chancellor's. In fact, you really have NO CLUE about what really goes on inside the majority of NYC’s very out dated, overcrowded, shabby buildings located all over the five boroughs---you'd be scared to park your car down the street from most of them. None of you have the faintest intention of responding to the Y.R.N.E.S. (Youth Researchers for a New Education System) report sponsored by the Independent Commission on Public Education (iCOPE) and presented to the Department of Education by our high school students who overwhelmingly claim race, class, income and gender bias against them. Nor is there a plan to address the Girls Gender Equity Inc. survey of over 1,400 middle and high school boys and girls who report that 80% of them have been sexually harassed inside their schools.

Still, in all your wisdom and experience with bureaucratic BS, maybe you can give me a quick solution to this nagging school environment concern. My son’s high school has 525 students, is located on one and ½ floors in a shared building with three other schools and it has no lockers. Last year, my son had to divert his learning attention to act quickly in order to remove his jacket from his seat back and zip up his book bag so the mouse scurrying around in his English class wouldn’t climb in. When he saw this, the novice teacher laughed and said the school's mice and other assorted roaches and rodents are just trying to get taken back to where they came from: my home.

Nice.

As soon as you and all the other upper income, Caucasian honchos at the DoE integrate the schools by enrolling your own children in them, we parents will believe you really care and will do meaningful, innovative work that provides a high quality, equitable education to all children of this city. Only then will we know that our concerns are yours.

Until then-- as the kids say, "stop frontin'" which loosely translated means, just shut up.

Learn, NY parents -- about Learn NY!

The NY Times blog and Gotham schools ran stories about the new organization founded by Bloomberg to keep control over our schools – formerly called MASS, but now renamed Learn NY.

"... the group unveiled a Web site dedicated to spreading the Bloomberg school-reform gospel, a hub filled with fact sheets, carefully culled news clips and grassroots platitudes. (“We will listen. And we will be heard.”) One section, promoting the “real results” of mayoral control, takes a page from the global-warming-is-real play book. “It’s not just a feeling,” it declares. “It’s really happening.”

In interviews with reporters, the group’s director, Peter Hatch, “offered what he called “opportunities for improvement” (he rebuked the term “criticisms”)—among them, finding ways to give parents more input, make city finances more transparent and nurture independent analyses of school data.”

I expressed skepticism to the Times reporter that Hatch would propose ways to give parents more actual input – rather than simply suggest more public hearings. As any NYC parent knows by now, we’ve been subjected to hundreds of hearings, and never once has this administration really listened to anything we’ve said. If Bloomberg or Klein had been had been interested in our views, after all, they would have included questions in the parent survey about whether we agreed with their policies, but this they refused to do.

“Leonie Haimson, a critic of Mr. Bloomberg’s efforts and executive director of the nonprofit Class Size Matters, said she saw the group’s efforts as an attempt to preempt an onslaught of criticism from parent groups. She said she was skeptical of the group’s proposed changes to the mayoral control law. “What we want is real input, giving us some actual say in school policy,” she said. “Hearings are meaningless.”

While Hatch denied to reporters the organization has received funding from Bloomberg himself, he refused to disclose his contributors, though he admits to having “millions” to work with. His refusal to disclose the sources of his funding make his protestations that DOE’s own spending should be “more transparent” rather unconvincing, to say the least.

And the way in which Brian Keeler, the group’s media consultant, whom we had dubbed "the Mayoral control troll" left anonymous comments on our blog promoting Mayoral control, without disclosing his identity, does not bode well for this group’s sincerity about the need for more transparency.

From Gotham Schools:

“Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters has already done impressive digging into the group’s media strategy. A spokesperson for the group confirmed to me today that the blog commenter Haimson noticed voicing his passion for mayoral control is indeed on the payroll of Learn NY. Brian Keeler, an online-media specialist who ran unsuccessfully for state senate in 2006 with the help of a following he built at Daily Kos, has been posting positive comments on this blog, Leonie’s, and others. He is also an employee of the Web design firm that built Learn NY’s Web site and will write a regular blog on the site, the spokesperson, Julie Wood, said.”

The Times article confirms that the MirRam group has been hired as one of the lobbying firms that will try to push Mayoral control through the legislature. As noted previously, MirRam’s chief lobbyists are Roberto Ramirez, formerly chief political boss of the Bronx, and Luis Miranda, who is also head of CFE’s board. The other lobbying group that will work on this campaign is Brown, McMahon and Weinraub, one of whose principals, Tom McMahon, is the brother of CM Michael McMahon of Staten Island, who is now running for Congress.

The Mayor and the DOE won't stop there, of course. Along with the nakedly political campaign of saturation subway ads, etc. being pursued by the Fund for Public Schools, Elizabeth Green of Gotham Schools in a separate article has the goods on how Garth Harries, head of DOE’s portfolio office, used a retreat paid for by the Gates Foundation to persuade charter school and small school operators to help proselytize for continued Mayoral control;

There was also a lot of worrying about what is probably a bigger potential obstacle: The possibility that, come 2009, when the state Legislature votes on whether to keep, abolish, or alter mayoral control of the public schools, the system could be organized in a completely different way. There was no question on which side the Department of Education stood. At the end of the first day, a group that is fighting for the preservation of mayoral control of the public schools, but which has said it has no formal ties to the Bloomberg administration, spoke about its political plans. Chancellor Joel Klein also gave a speech passionately declaring that the successes that have happened would endangered if mayoral control was abolished.

Our tax dollars hard at work.

The Mayoral control troll introduces himself!

One of our brilliant readers suggested the name of “the Mayoral control troll” for the Anonymous blogger who left pro-Bloomberg talking points all over our blog and throughout cyberspace in support of the Mayor keeping his iron grip on our schools.

Unfortunately, Anonymous outed himself before we could write about him – in the comment section on our blog below.

He is Brian Keeler, VP of Politics and Advocacy for VShift – a media consulting company, and as we guessed, he is working for MASS, and its new website, www.learn-ny.org, the organization Bloomberg established to retain control over our schools. VShift is conveniently located at 895 Broadway, along with MASS, and its consultants, the Global Strategy Group, NY’s most influential political consulting firm. On the same floor is the “MirRam Group” run by lobbyists Roberto Ramirez, former chief political boss of the Bronx, and Luis Miranda, also chair of the board of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity.

Elizabeth Green of Gotham Schools writes about Brian and the launching of MASS’s new campaign. Another article quotes Brian about how to work online “social media” to market a product:

Brian Keeler, a vice president at media consultancy VShift, said the key to social media is credibility and enlisting consumers in the act of marketing itself. But if you upset your audience, it can mean trouble. “With the online media, things can go viral and spin out of control really fast,” he said.

Oops!

Here are excerpts from the VShift website, which reminds their clients:

It is important to remember that competitors will respond in some way to your actions in the market so it is useful to consider what they may do and prepare for it. We help you respond to the competition and determine the best course of action.

This is a good lesson for us all to keep in mind, as we work to succeed in the competitive marketplace of ideas. Of course, Bloomberg will be able to spend his millions on consultants, ads, websites, and glossy pamphlets in the interest of retaining control, with the editorial boards of all three dailies in his thrall as well, while we poor public school parents only have this blog – which thankfully, Google supplies for free.

Here is the message I sent Brian today:

Dear Brian:

Nice to meet you, and thanks for introducing yourself on our blog.

A question: are you a NYC public school parent? Do you live here in NYC? Are these webpages about you, or another Brian Keeler?

http://www.epluribusmedia.org/archives/interviews/2006/keeler200608p1.html or http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howie-klein/brian-keeler-a-respecte_b_23694.html [They are apparently about him.]

In any case, to give you some background, we’ve been living the last six years under the nightmare of an administration that is both incompetent and that doesn’t give a damn about how parents feel about how their kids should be educated; and that openly and continually dismisses the issues we care about, like class size, even though Bloomberg and Klein themselves sent their own kids to schools where no classes were larger than 15.

Though you may have millions of dollars to spend try to convince less involved and aware NYers otherwise, it will be a hard slog to convince us that this administration has been accountable to parents, or to anyone else for that matter, aside perhaps from the “real” stakeholders in this system, which as Gary Babad has pointed out, have been the Gates and Broad foundations, as well as the sons and daughters of Bloomberg’s billionaire buddies, who’d like to set up their own charter schools inside our already overcrowded school system.

But hey, we’re open to listening to what substantive proposals your organization may have to ensure that parents have more input in the future, that there is more transparency, and even perhaps, that in the future, the administration may intend to comply with state and city laws. Indeed, accountability in our democratic system surely does not equal dictatorship.

And though you claim that you “are advocating for the renewal of the law regardless of who the mayor will be”, it is well known that Mayor Bloomberg intends to spend up to $100 million of his private fortune to get re-elected, as well as countless millions more retaining his iron grip on our schools.

How about having a public discussion about some of these matters? You or anyone of your choosing? I’ll even bring the snacks.

Thanks, by the way, for you or whoever corrected the misspellings and at least some of the statistics on your website, after I’d pointed out these errors on our listserv late last night. Perhaps Bloomberg could pay me a salary to copy-edit your site?

Please keep in touch,

Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters