Spending Sunday with Tim Walz on his birthday & the wonderful Network for Public Education conference

The annual conference of Network for Public Education, on whose board I sit, was held last weekend in Columbus, Ohio.  It was terrific as usual, with wonderful speeches and incisive and illuminating workshops and panel discussions on how to strengthen our public schools and protect them from the depredations of budget cuts, privatization, and censorship.

But the highlight for me and many others was Tim Walz' inspiring keynote address on Sunday afternoon, where he spoke about how we have to fight Trump's attempt to dismantle and defund our public schools. An article about his speech is here, though the article underestimates the numbers in the audience and the response: there were actually about 350 people there, including state legislators, Commissioners of Education, educators, parents, and advocates, who were ecstatic to hear him speak.

Walz was introduced by Randi Weingarten, who was introduced by Diane Ravitch.  Diane approvingly noted how earlier, Randi had been called "the most dangerous person in the world" by Mike Pompeo.

Randi said that we cannot give into the "autocrats who want to bully people into silence," and asked what does it mean when the President "wants to destroy the only federal agency devoted to education."

She noted it was Tim Walz' birthday, and after he stepped up to the dais, she presented him with a cake and we all sang him Happy Birthday.

Both Tim Walz and Randi hailed the protest rallies and marches the had occurred nationwide the day before, demanding that Trump and Musk take their "Hands Off" our democracy and our schools.  Tim Walz assured us that we aren't overreacting, since "The road to authoritarianism is littered to people saying you’re overreacting." 

He added: "People say that they’re not into politics but I say that  politics are into you. When I’m asked who’s leading the Democratic Party I say they’re in the streets like yesterday."  

Walz pointed out that the takeover of our public schools is being engineered by the oligarchs -- though "we shouldn't call them oligarchs but greedy bastards."  He also said that the middle class was built in the US by our public education system and the unions.

Of course, I did get a selfie with Walz -- and when I introduced myself, I said I was from Class Size Matters.  As a long time teacher, he immediately responded, "yes it does!"  I added that he was the best thing to come out of the 2024 election, and he replied, "You're too kind."  As opposed to so many politicians, he truly comes off as the warmest, most humble human being -- and funny besides.

Earlier that day,  I had been a presenter at a workshop on the risks of AI in the classroom, along with Cassie Creswell from Illinois Families for Public Schools, and co-chair along with me of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.  Concluding the workshop with eclat was the retired teacher, brilliant blogger and education guru Peter Greene.  Our presentation is below.

My Interview with AFT President Randi Weingarten

This morning on my WBAI radio show, "Talk out of School",  I spoke to Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, about what’s happening to schools, teachers and families during the coronavirus crisis, and Randi’s proposal that students should be engaging in completing a meaningful “capstone” project.

A link to her essay describing her idea in more detail is below. 

We also discussed the threat to schools from looming budget cuts, the risk to student privacy by the rapid adoption of unvetted ed tech programs, the Governor’s elimination of spring break in New York state, and more.  You can download the episode here.

Some of the resources that we mentioned are below.

AFT links:
Randi Weingarten’s essay,  On how teachers and students should cap this unprecedented school year
Share My Lesson with teacher resources.
Colorín Colorado! A bilingual site for educators and families of English language learners

Privacy links:
The Educator Toolkit for Student and Teacher Privacy – written by the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and Badass Teachers Association (with support from the AFT )
The ACLU recommendations on what should be demanded of ed tech companies at this critical time
Advice to parents from the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy on maximizing privacy and minimizing screen time
A model privacy-protective Google contract negotiated by  NYS administrators  that other districts could adopt

Special guest on Wednesday's "Talk out of School" - Randi Weingarten of the AFT

Join us on Wednesday from 10-11AM on WBAI 99.5 FM or at WBAI.org for "Talk out of School" when I'll interview Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers,  about what schools should and should not be trying to do during the time of coronavirus, and how to prevent remote instruction from overstretching and over stressing the capabilities of teachers and families.  Also, how the crisis threatens to lead to more education cuts, to further undermine student privacy and more.  

Please also call in with your questions at 212-209-2877.

Fair student funding & the ATR system - two bad policies undermining NYC schools

Today Chalkbeat covers the budgetary ramifactions of the new agreement between the UFT and the NYC Department of Education in which the DOE will place ATR teachers (on Absent Teacher Reserve) in schools with vacancies, whether the principal chooses these particular teachers or not.  In addition, unlike earlier years, the principal will have to pay the full amount of their salaries – which are often much higher than the average teacher salary, even though the school only receives funding for the average salary under the Fair Student Funding system, implemented by Joel Klein in 2007, after much controversy and protest.

As an earlier Chalkbeat article explained, the cost of the ATR pool has risen to more than $150 million per year, according to an IBO estimate, and included 822 teachers at the end of the last school year -- teachers who had no permanent assignments but had been “excessed” because of school closings, enrollment decline, disciplinary offenses or low ratings from their principals.  The existence of a  wasteful system like this is the confluence of large number of factors and policies adopted by the DOE during the Bloomberg administration: mass school closings and their replacement with charter schools, NYC’s  version of a student-weighted funding system called Fair Student Funding, and the agreement made in 2005 not to place tenured teachers who had lost their positions into schools with openings, but leave the choice of who would fill these positions completely up to the principal’s discretion.

Earlier this summer, the DOE announced plans to place hundreds of these teachers into school vacancies by Oct. 15, even if principals objected. And yet one of the reasons that the ATR pool has grown so large and principals remain reluctant to hire them, no matter  their qualifications, is that one of the peculiarities of the Fair student funding system, at least in NYC, is that it requires principals to cover the whole cost of their staff, by allocating per student funding to a school based on the average teacher salary -- which has decreased in recent years due to teacher attrition.  

According to Chalkbeat, based on IBO estimates, “on average each ATR teacher received a total of $116,258 in salary and fringe benefits for the past school year. (By comparison, the base salary for a city teacher as of May 2017 was $54,000). “ Thus for every average teacher hired from the Absent Teacher Reserve, a principal could hire more than two new teachers for his or her school.

At the time, Robert Gordon who devised the Fair Student Funding system for Joel Klein in 2007 was quoted in the NY Times as saying that the system would allow principals “to retain their most experienced teachers if that is what they want to do.''   This shows that the idea was devised to provide an incentive to schools to get rid of their experienced teachers, through the ATR, the rubber room or otherwise. At the time Randi Weingarten, then head of the UFT warned in the above article that “it will destabilize good schools and give principals a disincentive to hire experienced teachers simply because they cost more.''

Advocates like Noreen Connell of the Educational Priorities Panel was quoted in the same NY Times article that “the funding proposals have the potential to do lasting damage for decades to come.'' More specifically, she warned that by not covering the costs of a particular staffing ratio, the system would lead to sharp class sizes when budgets were cut—and principals would have no choice but to increase class size, get rid of their experienced teachers, or both.

Class sizes have indeed risen sharply since 2007, and nearly ten years after the recession many schools still only receive 87% of the funds that they are owed via the FSF formula. I would argue that the system is inherently misconceived and undermines the quality of schools, since there are only two observable, quantifiable school-based factors that have been shown to lead to more learning – small class size and experienced teachers.

I don't know any other school district in the country that has adopted this version of Fair Student Funding and that demands principals cover the full cost of their staff no matter what their salaries. If you do know of another district that does this, please let me know below. 

Bill de Blasio promised when he was running for office he would re-evaluate the FSF system, but has not done so.  Certainly, no NYC Mayor would impose this sort of rigid funding system on local police precincts or firehouses, and demand that NYPD or fire company captains cover the cost of their staff -- – even if could mean shortages if they had particularly experienced officers.  If any Mayor did try to impose such a system, no doubt he would face mighty resistance from his own Commissioners as well as the police/fire fighter unions.

Just as I am not aware of any other district that has adopted NYC’s version of the FSF system, I don’t know of any district that has given principals the right to hire outside the reserve of teachers already on staff.   When Cami Anderson ran the Newark school system from NYC she adopted the system, but it was later deep-sixed by Chris Cerf when he was appointed as Newark Superintendent – because it was recognized as too expensive and too wasteful.

If teachers are incompetent or have engaged in misconduct, they should be dismissed in the usual way, via a 3020-a disciplinary hearing, rather than put into the Absent Teacher Reserve. I know of several former principals and administrators who say this is time-consuming but eminently doable.  If teachers have not been found to exhibit any of these deficiencies, they should be offered to principals to reduce class size or provide other services at no expense to the school. If there are any teachers left over in the reserve, their contracts should be bought out.   The current system is an absurd waste of money. And NYC’s Fair Student Funding system needs to be re-evaluated in light of its detrimental impact on teacher experience and class size.

AFT’s Randi Weingarten letter about inBloom to Gates & Carnegie Foundations and their reply

Stacey Childress of Gates Foundation

On May 30, 2013, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers and member of the Technical Advisory Group of the Shared Learning Collaborative, the precursor to inBloom Inc., wrote a letter to Michele Cahill and Stacey Childress, expressing her concern about inBloom’s privacy and security provisions.  Cahill is Vice President at the Carnegie Corporation, and Childress is the Deputy Director of the Gates Foundation, and they are both founding members of inBloom’s Board of Directors.  In

Michele Cahill of Carnegie Corporation

particular, inBloom is a creation of the Gates Foundation, and was launched via $100 million of Gates funds.

In her letter, Weingarten asks many questions, such as:

• How is inBloom assuring that there is no unauthorized access to personally identifiable student and teacher data? 
• What are inBloom’s plans to charge vendors for access to student data?
• How secure is its cloud-based storage compared with other methods?

Check out Weingarten’s letter, and the June 5th response from Cahill and Childress below.

InBloom Letter from Randi Weingarten 05/30/13 by Molly

Or download the pdf here: inBloom Letter 

June 5th response:

Letter to Randi Weingarten_06 05 13 by Molly

 Or download the pdf here: Letter to Randi Weingarten