Announcing the new Mayoral control troll in town!

Remember when there was an anonymous person who left pro-mayoral control comments on our blog, and other blogs, without identifying himself? And we accurately guessed he was probably from Learn NY, a lobbying organization set up by Bloomberg to retain Mayoral control? His identity was subsequently confirmed by his own confession, as well as an article in Gotham Schools, which outed him as Brian Keeler, a consultant for Learn NY.

Well, there’s a new Mayoral control troll in town named “Abby,” who on March 24 wrote on the WNYC blog:

When the Mayor and the government were not involved in our education system, NYC schools failed our students. To ensure education is a top priority, we must continue to make our leaders responsible for its success. People who believe the Mayor has too much control, are not considering the growing number of schools and students who succeeding.

On the same day, "Abby" left her comments on Gotham Schools– saying that the Mayor has allowed one hundred charter schools to open, and if only we maintained Mayoral control, “NYC will eventually reach a point where all students are receiving a quality education” (presumably through the further multiplication of charter schools).

And then on March 26, she was at it again on Gotham Schools, saying that it's “time to put petty bickering and politics aside and make students and education the focus” by continuing Mayoral control. (No matter that the Mayor and Klein are the ones who engage in non-stop political spin, and spend precious taxpayer money to try to keep their chokehold on our schools.)

I was feeling a little suspicious of this Abby, even though she identified herself as a “citizen” and didn’t link to any organizational website. Paid representatives of Learn NY and the Mayor tend to produce obviously canned talking points rather than arguments that engage realistically with the matter at hand. Their comments lack substance and conviction, and read like something written for the back of a cereal box.

Sure enough, a few days ago, someone from Learn NY named Abby Sugrue sent around an email to parents, including several on our NYC education news list serv who had never signed up with the organization, bragging that in a recent article about the Assembly hearings on school governance, “The New York Times called our supporters and coalition a "heavy weight parent group"!

Clearly, if Mayoral control trolls are trolling for emails among our subscribers, a known hotbed of parent activists, acutely aware of the damaging effects of mayoral autocracy on our schools, they must getting desperate.

Marist poll results: most voters disapprove of Bloomberg's education record

On Friday, a new Marist poll was released, showing Bloomberg’s approval rating has dropped seven percent -- to its lowest level in nearly four years.

Though most New Yorkers still approve of his performance overall, the majority of voters disapprove of his handling of the public schools – 52% to 40% -- despite the millions of dollars spent to convince New Yorkers otherwise.

This disinformation campaign is being carried out through subway and TV ads sponsored by the Fund for Public Schools (a nonprofit headed by Joel Klein that was ostensibly established to improve programs for public school students); Learn NY (which is funneling cash to community groups so they will back the continuation of Mayoral control); the editorial boards of the NY Post and Daily News (which are controlled by Bloomberg’s buddies, Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman); and the DOE’s own considerable PR staff of 23– larger than that of any other city agency by far.

For more on the results of the Marist poll, see Gotham Schools: Poll: Majority of voters disapprove of mayor’s handling of schools.

Learn NY - and the future of our schools

Many parents have been asking us about Learn NY -- after having been contacted by this organization.

Learn NY is an organization established by allies of Mayor Bloomberg to retain his choke hold on our schools after the current governance system sunsets in June 2009.

The organization’s paid representatives, including Peter Hatch, Robin Warren, Brian Keeler, and Julie Wood, all claim that their activities are not funded directly by Bloomberg, but so far have refused to divulge who is paying their salaries. They admit to having raised millions of dollars, and have hired several prominent and well-connected lobbying and consulting firms to push their agenda with the Legislature in Albany.

The problem is that there are few if any involved public school parents who trust this administration’s good intentions, after having witnessed six years of unilateral, strong-arm tactics, in which the Mayor and Chancellor have ignored their views, and have imposed misguided policies on our children’s schools. So Learn NY is hard at work, trying to recruit parents and make them believe that they are actually interested in what parents think.

On the Learn NY website, they may say they have “made open dialogue with parents a priority”, but they have turned down several offers to meet with established NYC parent groups, and have so far refused to speak at any public forum that includes representatives from groups with opposing views. They also claim to want to increase parent input and transparency in the current governance system, but have not made any substantive proposals on how this would be achieved, except to suggest that there should be more public hearings.

Over the last six years, there have been numerous public hearings held by the Chancellor and/or other Department of Education representatives, but always after they have already decided what their policies would be. Never has this administration’s decisions been affected by a single comment, suggestion or proposal put forward by any parent or parent group. More public hearings without an administration that actually has to listen to the views of parents and take them into account before making decisions would be useless.

The position of Learn NY on the need to improve transparency also seems to be hypocritical, since they refuse to be transparent about who is funding their own operations, and their tactics are anything but transparent. An anonymous person left pro-Mayoral control comments on several blogs, until he was eventually unmasked as Brian Keeler of Learn NY. Moreover, their website includes much distorted data and PR spin, rather than actual fact.

Instead of Mayoral dictatorship, we need a system in which the Mayor would have to forge a real partnership with parents. Instead of PR spin, we need the truth. For more information about our concerns, please visit the NYC public school parent blog. Send us a message at NYCPublicSchoolParents@gmail.com.

And please, testify at the hearings on Mayoral control to share your views; the schedule is here.

Learn NY hears from some real life NYC parents about Mayoral control

Gotham Schools tells how Robin Warren, an employee at Learn NY, the organization set up by Bloomberg to maintain Mayoral control, has been introducing herself on various NYC parent list servs and saying that the organization is really, truly, sincerely interested in hearing their views.

Warren posted a message to Urban Baby and what an earful she received in return. I guess she’s learning quickly that it’s going to be tough to convince NYC parents who’ve had to deal with six years of an unaccountable, arrogant and dictatorial administration that the current system should remain.

Within eleven minutes, here were the first six replies:

12.10.08, 01:16 PM

· You're shilling for Bloomberg? How much is he paying you?

12.10.08, 01:18 PM

· What is your qualification?

12.10.08, 01:22 PM

· Ladies, this is a political organization (non-profit in name only) that was created to influence NYS to reauthorize mayoral control of the school system. The Board members are Bloomberg hacks who do his bidding. It's a transparent attempt to influence the public debate in his favor, that's all.

12.10.08, 01:25 PM

· Spamming for Bloomberg's czarship of schools!

12.10.08, 01:26 PM

· SPAM

12.10.08, 01:27 PM

· Here's some feedback: The testing idea has gone waaay out of control and has overtaken most of the creative and "fun" parts of the school day that used to exist, school bureaucracy is terrible because there's no one who's accessible and is willing to help, and within the schools the teachers and administrators seem hamstrung by the administrative duties they have now, field trips have almost disappeared, classes are way too big and school budgets way too small so that the only really successful schools are those in which the parents have to raise enormous amounts of money, and many parents - me included - feel entirely disenfranchised at this point in the 'Mayoral Control' experiment and would not mind at all if it went away.

Bill Gates rather meaninglessly opines...

In Newsweek, Bill Gates predictably comes out for Joel Klein as Education Secretary and also for Mayoral control:

Gates argues that rigorous accountability is the only option, from mayoral control (elected school boards are mostly a menace) to principal control (teacher tenure and onerous work rules are quality-killers) to data control (IT systems that closely track performance are a must).

I wonder if his foundation is one of the secret backers of NY Learn – the organization pushing the continuation of Mayoral control here in NYC.

Gates, of course, also strongly supports charter schools, and claims that “At YES College Prep in Houston, 95 percent of the students are African-American or Hispanic and 80 percent are poor. But since 2000, every student has gone on to a four-year college. One hundred percent.”

Wow! That is impressive. Yet according to the school’s website, “Every student must be accepted to a four-year college or university in order to graduate from YES Prep.”

Hmm. That means by definition, all their graduates must have been accepted at a four year-college. Oh well.

What this meaningless statistic does not tell you are how many of their students are shed along the way.

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.