Letitia James: a new national star in educational justice takes the stage

There were many great speeches last night at the Panel for Education Policy, protesting the awful
long list of co-locations that will damage our schools and hurt NYC children, pushed through by a lame duck administration to give away maximum space to   their cronies among the charter school operators. Council Members Chin, Fidler, Recchia and Greenfield were all eloquent, incisive and compelling, as were the parents, teachers and students of Murry Bergtraum HS, Seth Low, and Roy Mann, and so many others. 

There was one electrifying moment in which CM Letitia James, our future Public Advocate, spoke against charter co-locations, showing how these proposals would create "separate and unequal" conditions that were ruled unconstitutional in Brown Vs. Board of Education.  In case you are wondering about her comments that they shouldn't dare delete their emails, see this DNA info article about how the DOE is considering erasing all its communications before Bloomberg leaves office; James has tried to forestall this by FOILing them.

But watch this awe-inspiring speech below in which Leticia James, in which I predict a new national star for educational justice is born.

Video of massive rally in Albany today and my speech

The rally in Albany was massive today; with estimates of 25,000.  You can get a sense of the size from the video below.  I was honored and
excited to be a part of it.  Let's hope it is just the beginning of a real movement to rescue public education, led by teachers, parents, administrators and students, to take back our schools.  Here is my speech:

We are here today to call upon the Governor and the Legislature to do what is right for the children of New York. 

Children need good schools. Children need small class sizes.  Children need experienced and caring teachers…But instead of giving New York's children what they need, the Governor, the Legislature and the Regents are intent on giving our kids more tests.

Parents are outraged as to how our public schools are being undermined by policymakers who do not seem to realize how their decisions are hurting New York State’s children. 

From the testing obsession, to budget cuts, class size increases, and rampant sharing of private data, the needs of our students and the priorities of parents are ignored, and our trust in government is eroding every day. 

Rather than give our children the smaller classes they need, the corporate reformers claim that personalized instruction will be provided through software and data analysis.

So the state is providing all our children’s most sensitive personal information to a corporation called inBloom Inc. funded by Bill Gates – which in turn plans to give this information to for-profit vendors w/o parental consent. 

Because of protests from parents, four states have announced they are pulling out of inBloom –– but the arrogant and reckless bureaucrats in the NYS Ed Department are still intent on going ahead no matter what. 

NYS is now the only inBloom client willing to risk the privacy and the future of more than 3 million public schoolchildren of the entire state by putting their names, test scores, disability status, health records & disciplinary records on a vulnerable cloud -- managed by Amazon.com with an operating system by Wireless, run by Joel Klein and owned by Rupert Murdoch.

And not only parents should be worried – inBloom is also collecting personal teacher information, including your social security number and the longitude & latitude of your home address, as though they wanted to send a drone missile to your home.  They are putting this data together with your students’ test scores, and the reason you were let go from your last job – so that there can be a national black list of teachers based upon unreliable value-added formulas.

Collecting data and providing it to for-profit companies run by people like Rupert Murdoch can never substitute for the personal interaction a child has with his or her teacher.  You cannot be replaced by a machine.  

Today we come together to say, enough of this arrogant dismissal of the voices of parents, children and teachers; enough of the damage being wreaked on our schools.  We will not stand for it any longer.  It must end today.

Bayard Rustin on the importance of class size

Bayard Rustin (1912 –1987) was an American civil rights activist, important largely behind the scenes in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and earlier. He is credited as the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (from Wikipedia)

Rustin also gave a renowned speech in 1964 in Santa Barbara, entitled "Negro revolution in 1965." The whole speech is worth listening to, but one of the topics he spoke about was class size in NYC public schools. He thus is one of many brilliant individuals who realized the importance of this issue, along with Maimonides, John Dewey, and Kurt Vonnegut. Here is an excerpt:

The school system of this country is a bad school system for many reasons, but one of the reasons in our large cities, take Harlem for an example, teachers teach three sessions within the regular period. They become cops, they become babysitters, they become nursemaids.

And yet we look at the unemployed Negroes and we say they are without skills. Well, I am here to say that some of the most skillful people in the world are unemployed Negroes. Because they have reared their own children, they have reared two or three generations of white children. And they are skilled with love and affection for children.

Let us, therefore, elevate them to assistant teachers, the state gives them $4,000 a year, they go into the school, and they take from the teacher all of this police work and babysitting work. And the teacher is, then, if we can get many more schools built, if we can get smaller classrooms, I mean a smaller number of children in classrooms, these people can play a very vital role.