Is The DOE in for a Massive Overhaul After Fariña's Departure?

They were destined to be dismantled. You must understand this.

By the end of his third term,  Mike Bloomberg was so unpopular with  activists, working class families and teachers that many of the structural changes he made to the DOE were destined to be taken apart just because. Whereas Bloomberg was tone deaf to how unpopular some of his education initiatives were, BDB and Fariña have been over sensitive to concerns of public scrutiny and are known to respond to criticism, and to public outcries, very quickly and in manner that satisfies whichever 'squeaky wheel' activists who are speaking out at any given moment. So many policies were just destined to be ended not because the ideas were bad but because of the natural ebb and flow of politics.

That's right. Politics. This dismantling didn't come from any study and wasn't based on much merit. What really happened was this: The political pendulum -which for twelve years in this city had swung in the favor of highly skilled technocrats and away from stakeholding community groups- had swung, in 2013, back the other way. It is just that simple.

Put more specifically: Each of the following Bloomberg initiatives were reversed under de Blasio and Fariña in 2014 and were reversed because the politics of that time demanded that they be reversed.

• Full rating on all 22 Danielson Components 
• City-wide Networks not grounded in any geographic based communities
• Full court press on classroom teachers
• Mass "School Closings"based on state and city metrics
• A war against the teachers' union (which eventually turned into a war against teachers)
• Strict marriage to clear accountability
• Blank checks for prinicpals
• A "plan-pilot-institute" process for new initiatives that, though successful, was always very costly
• More (a lot more) standardized tests for city students

(In addition to this,  it's important to remember that Carmen Fariña was "retired" by Joel Klein and his henchmen (many of whom went on to create the superstructure that was the DOE in by the beginning of 2014). So her return was a clear signal that a few things were going to change back to the way they were. )

And none of this is indictivate of whether these initiatives were gone forever. City-wide Networks were controversial because they had just as many advocates as they did detractors. The full 22 Danielson Component ratings were indicative of a mentality of putting the most amount of pressure on teachers as humanly possible. Even school closings and strict, clear standards of accountability for teachers, staff and whole schools have many advocates, even today.  And, don't forget, the war against teachers was very popular in many circles.

These policies are gone. They are not, however, dead. So after Fariña goes, we should all expect a fresh look at some old ideas. This too is destined to happen.

Update: 

So now that the mayor has no more election hopes in the city and now that Fariña will be on her way, will the pendulum swing back toward the technocrats? Or will communities and political groups continue to influence the makeup of the city schools. Here are a few earmarks:

If the technocrats take over again, look for the DOE to:

• Move away from its current superintendent structure. Technocrats aren't a big fan of geographic communities and prefer city wide edifices. Look for some type of return to the city-wide Support Networks of yore.
• Give greater freedom for principals.  Believe it or not, principals have been on something of a leash as of late. Look for a return of the time when principals were free to create their own, unique amazing school-based programs and were also free to use whatever means necessary to push a teacher out the door for whichever capricious reason there was. 
• Put greater pressure on ATRs.  That small amount of money (several million out of an annual  budget worth tens of billions) has been a sticking point for technocrats intent on getting the most value from every dollar. If ATRs weren't hired by an empowered principal, then the 'new' DoE would want them gone. 
• Increase the amount of standardized tests. I don't know what it is with technocrats and tests but these assessments are used as measuring sticks by Educrats and those measuring sticks are important. And if you haven't been keeping up, assessments have greatly changed over the past four years and now require many more teacher hours of assessing and record keeping. 
• Close more schools. This approach is a human resource thing, as much as a rebranding approach. The simple fact of the matter is, "closing" (the term we give for changing the name, organization and identification markings of a New York City school) a school allows the department to dump up to half of the teachers and bring in some new blood. It also give the DoE a chance to present something new and undamaged to the community. Closing schools is  a tried and true Educrat approach.
• Embrace the goods and the bads behind School Choice. For folks on the community spectrum, social justice occurs when a school or district improves its practices to address concerns. For technocrats, school is the vehicle for social justice. Nowhere is this more obvious than in school choice. Choice, of course, as its dark sides. The only thing that happens when 500 children apply for a terrific school that is offering only 50 seats is that the school in question winds up with the best performing students. This process cascades down until we have a system with whole schools or top performers and whole schools of struggling students. Technocrats have never learned the lessons of the dangers of school choice in an urban landscape. Look for a return of this and an abandonment of any idea efforts toward bringing both high and low performers together in a school and for ameliorating the disease of school segregation. Look for all that to go away and look for us to go back to the good old days on that one.
• More writing from this blog.

If the members of several communities continue to influence City Hall look Tweed to:

• Present an alternative to the Fair Student Funding policy This has always been a thorn in the sides of underserved communities. 
• An increase in the staffing and influence of superintendents and a reduction in the borough support centers. The pendulum will continue to swing toward communities and that means it will continue to swing toward superintendents. 
• Replace many current superintendents and Deputy Chancellors. According to her own description in 2014, many of the DCs and Supes were appointed by the chancellor as the chancellor's agents. If the chancellor is changing, the agents will change. (Full disclosure: I have met and had discussions with at least two Fariña's Deputy Chancellors and she picked those well. So those departures will represent a net loss for the city).
• A UFT with continued greater influence. The UFT is like an octopus. It's everywhere; in every community, behind every effort it can get behind and in every cocktail party. An embrace of communities and political groups means a continued embrace of the UFT. (Pro tip: Look for a crappy contract. As the union prefers greater influence over policy than greater raises for its members, it will try to influence the next both the next chancellor and that chancellor's decisions).
• Less writing from this blog.  I like democracy. I like community based democracy. I like activists. I like all this voice. I won't need to be here at this keyboard and can continue playing this amazing XBox I bought after de Blasio was elected. 

It's No Fun Being the Ugly Guy at a Bar

It isn't any fun being the ugly guy at a bar. While all of your friends are out making new friends, getting the smiles and being dragged onto the dance floor, you're just sort of there -with nothing to do- standing around with a glass of booze in your hand.

After a while, you invent things to do just to keep yourself occupied. You make suggestions to the playlist, or start thinking of better ways the stools could have been organized. You make double sure your glass is handed into the bartender when you go to get another drink and if the place is low minded enough, you may even start to play some darts or a game of pool. But all of those occupations are just examples of what the ugly guy at the bar does because, well, he's ugly and at a bar.

Most fellas fall into the trap of thinking that if they invite their friends to the bar, each as ugly as they,  that the state of affairs will be ameliorated.

Let me tell you, it does nothing to improve things. At the end of the night, it winds being just a group of ugly guys making suggestions to the playlist or thinking out loud of ways the barstools could have been better arranged. The group winds up giving extra work to the bartender because they're all bringing their empty glasses to the bar at the same time and are all asking for quarters for the pool table or for a few extra darts for the dart board. I know bars. And I know ugly. That's a potential train wreck.

Now there are tons of things that go into making a guy  ugly. It's not like someone just snapped their fingers. No one is born ugly. Consider, for a second,  this guy could be overworked. He may have stopped paying attention to his outward appearance. Fewer trips to the clothing store and the barber eventually makes a guy less attractive, don't you agree? And when you're less attractive than you otherwise would have been, well ... yeah.

But all of those "causes" of ugly just melt away when you actually open the door and enter the bar. Think about that moment. The instant you swing open the door to the bar and everyone looks up at you. W'eve all been there. Do you think they're thinking "wow. His kid must have been sick this whole week." or ""Poor guy! He must not have had time to keep up with the latest fashion trends!" or "Eh, he's shopping at the wrong store". Of course not! They're looking at you thinking only about the image you've been able to craft for yourself leading up to that one singular moment.. And if you've had time to keep up with trends and make sure your appearance is presentable, then maybe they're thinking good things when that door swings open and you'll catch a few smiles and make some friends.

And, if you're me, they're thinking only one thing: "Ugly guy" and they turn away. At this point my life, I just look around them for a pool table.



Now every once in a while, you get some bar dude who needs to remind you, or your group that you haven't paid enough attention yourself or to the world to be outwardly presentable in quiet some time. This guy knows the score. He knows you and your group may have been busy and may have missed one or two image related innovations over the past few months or even years. He knows you're there trying to get your groove back but, for whatever reason, he just doesn't care. This guy will literally stop his entire night just to make you feel worse about yourself. He'll follow you everywhere to remind you that you're out of place. He'll go to that pool table, or stand in the way of your dart board or even stand next to YOU and make suggestions to YOU as YOU make suggestions to that playlist. Guys like this are like Ahab. Here's how much Ahab hated Moby Dick:

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it

That's how much this guy has it in for you. And you've got to be there, at the bar, trying desperately to function, despite him. Many of my nights have been ruined by guys like this. They are not fair and they're not right and they make matters worse.



There is no truth with malice in this post! I am so proud that my union, the UFT, is Mobilizing [its] Members for Battle To Get Paid Parental Leave (paywall) I could burst.  I would give back -lots- of what I and those like me have currently earned if it meant that no one in the future would ever be damned to the first 12 weeks of a child's life that my wife and I, and thousands like us, endured when our child was born.  That's not just the big picture. That's the only picture.  I've read the Facebook posts and Twitter feeds and blogs making nonsensical assertions assertions like 'no givebacks' and "Whereas ..." "it should be .. ." and they're all wrong. I've lived through the education wars and have gone ten years without a real raise just like other folks. I have the same scars as other people with keyboards and big mouths. (Actually, my scars are worse). They don't make any sense in any context.  We can come together behind Unity and help right this one wrong for mothers and fathers and children and families all across this city with none of the usual need to be recognized  and without any of the competition or anger or petulance or drama. It's time for anyone who isn't Unity to stop what they're doing, to simply support the efforts being made and, like the line from Legally Blonde,  try not to look so constipated.  https://thoughtcatalog.com/nico-lang/2013/06/30-quotes-that-will-make-you-want-to-watch-legally-blonde-right-now/

Mermaid Man: Preface

One of the craziest things I had to do during the education wars was stop to document workplace abuses and contract violations with and for other teachers. Whenever anyone is under any real kind of abuse that violates a rule, agreement or law, the best tools they have are a cool, clear head (so as not to become emotional) and a good notebook to document the incidents in anecdotal form as they go. Knowledge of your rights is important but these two tools are actually the best you've to work with on a day to day basis   It is tough work. I would sit with a teacher at a coffee shop or bar or even in a park or over the phone and just walk them through the process of creating a log of the sometimes many incidents involved in the pattern of abuse since it began.

I didn't do it often, but when I did, it would take hours. That's a lot of tome to give up for a person you barely know. But I remembered being alone in a similar environment, so I spent those hours helping, as best as I could, those teachers to find at least that sense of empowerment.

Sometimes these patterns had gone on for months before the teacher found their way to me. So the discussion also involved the person having to relive some painful memories as we went along.

Imagine being a teacher, spending all of your time on lesson plans or telephone calls or grading -or all of these- then having to put up with patterns of abuse from your (usually Bloomberg appointed) supervisor. All of your discretion, all of your freedom, your creativity and motivation to do to the job is taken from you when the environment becomes difficult beyond what is acceptable by contract or law.

You go through stages of mourning when this happens. There is a denial stage, where you just can't accept that these things are actually happening to you. There is an anger stage when it becomes clear that any future hopes you had have been taken from you, probably forever, by this abuser (or by the person or persons who sent the abuser to perform their duties). There are stages for bargaining, anger and depression as well. Each of them are painful. Each of them bring their own separate pain. Eventually, it becomes difficult to even wake up and go to work.

And then the teacher reaches a moment of realization; an awareness that these things aren't things, but a thing -a singular thing- that is defined as a pattern of abusive workplace behavior and only then, only at that moment, is he or she is ready to reach out for some help.

Now, after months of this new reality, and after finally reaching out to someone, imagine being told that the best -the very best- you can do is to change your mentality, to document each and every incident in a cold, clear writing tone of voice and that you have to start from the very beginning of the pattern, re-experiencing all of those painful memories, so as to log them one by one --now. Right now -in this coffee shop or in this bar or on this park bench or classroom or over the phone. That's tough work.  That's crazy (actually, it's nuts). But it happens. And it happens to good teachers.

For capricious and for arbitrary reasons.

But don't sweat it! Workplace abusers are often hilarious! These are typically people of an incredibly low intellect and even lower sense of self esteem.  Think Mermaid Man: That superhero who is still around long after any reasonable time that he should have been. The guy who never hung up his tights but is still around because he knows no other way. This person who is after you. You're going to let that guy ruin your days?


Almost every teacher I spoke with came to realize that the person who was on them was a little person trying -desperately- to feel big. Some people are hurt by those folks. But other people know how to have fun with them. Be that other guy.


Sure, you'll have to go about a way of bringing the ol' junkyard dog to heel but that's why they make unions and lawyers (mine is Bryan D Glass and, although I haven't been in trouble at work in many years,  it's good to know he's there and I still have him on speed dial). So, as you are patiently pursuing those options, just chill out and have a little fun ;).


And if you're not sure where to start and you're in the city and a UFT member, those dissenting caucus' can serve as a good resource. I belong to MORE. But ICE, Solidarity and New Action Caucus are also made up of strong, experienced, union minded people who will literally stop what they are doing to help you start a process to end it. Don't discount the ruling the Unity Caucus, of the UFT either. They get a lot of bad press but they too are made up of people who are paid to help teachers help students.


And if you're going to read the blogs only read the funny ones. They ones who take their work seriously but keep their jobs in check.




Chapter 1: Mermaid Man has an idea

The Menu at the UFT Executive Board

This is what passes for food :(

The food at the UFT's Executive Board meetings used to be much better than it is now. I remember dropping by there a few years ago and dining on roast beef and turkey with awesome gravy. I dropped by again this past September and was a bit disappointed to find something claiming to be a corn beef sandwich wrapped up in some tin foil.

I come from a southern Italian household. In a household like mine, the type of food your serve to your guests says something about how much you value their presence in your home.

Under these rules,  if your guests are esteemed and you know their presence will add value to your family, then you prepare a special gravy for their arrival (Italian-Americans way of referring to that tomato sauce we're famous for). You make sure the bread is perfect and fresh and you take your time selecting the wine.

The process is very fair. My family never makes these decisions based on how rich or fancy our guests are. We always rate our guests on how they conducted themselves the last time we saw them and and on what value we think they will actually bring to our table.

And in our house, that value is measured by conversation. If we know a guest is going to bring good, worthy, engaging conversation to our home, then we prepare a fine, home cooked meal.

If, however, we are afraid our guests are  going to waste our time, then we whip up some sandwiches.

The food all depends on the guests.

I'm not, of course, sure this if this how the UFT does things. I am just noticing the differences in food.

Oh, also this week, the UFT Executive Board happens to have a very good guest coming over. Emily James is a NYC public school teacher and a parent. She is responsible for a petition advocating for paid maternity leave that has garnered just under 80,000 signatures of both activists and non-activists, teachers and non teachers and politicians and average residents. The petition, including the public scrutiny that is has brought to the issue of paid maternity leave for teachers, has been described as nothing short of miraculous. This lady figuratively came out of nowhere. Armed only with her own experiences of a wrong that she had to endure and with her ability to communicate (via keyboard) using the written word, she has brought together tens of thousands of people in an effort that much of the city has taken notice of. That effort will eventually change NYC policy toward paying its school teachers for family care forever. Whoever this lady is, she's amazing. She is not a unionist, but she will be speaking to the UFT's Executive Board on 9/25 where she will present her petition (with exactly 78,119 supporting it) to UFT leadership.

Upon learning this, the MORE/NA caucus of the UFT decided it would be a good time to also present its own petition from last year advocating for paid maternity leave. The petition has raised roughly 3,000 signatures of support.

No word on what type of food the UFT will serve on Monday.

Mayoral Control is History (Again)

According to the Post, it is all but official. Mayoral control of city schools will expire in eight days.

But almost everyone failed to remember that this isn't new, that Mayoral Control ended once and that it came right back, stronger than before by the first day of school.

In 2009, the IDC created a major crisis by locking the doors of the NY Senate and grinding all business to a halt. There were many victims of that crisis and Mayoral Control was one of them. It expired at the end of the legislative session.

Like now, there were many reservations about the mayor controlling public schools and the crisis gave an opportunity to address those issues. It granted more beef to the PEP, including the requirement that the chancellor lead the meeting and be there for the entire time (some may remember the massive protests that sprouted up as a result). It also empowered the CECs throughout the city. Finally, the process was a wake up call to all of the stakeholders of a system that had grown a little too comfortable with itself. So, in the long run, it was a good thing.

I hope that winds up being the case now. I'm a fan of a community control, and community boards are great, but they are in no position to fully run the schools within their community, while mutually controlling the members sent to the Board of Education. Schools will wins yp more segregated, waste will increase, not decrease, and the Byzantine ways of the nation's largest school district will settle right back in.

But schools, even in this enormous system, need to be a reflection of their local community, not some huge overgrown city. In the end, the expiration will allow am opportunity for the to allow more community say over things like school placement and curriculum.

So gasp, hold your hands over your mouth and think about the NYC Edu version of Brexit & Trump. But also understand that the school governance structure will be exactly the same on September 7th as it is today, that charters will expand and that  (which is really what this impasse is about) and we'll all forget about this for roughly eight years.

Thoughts On Father's Day

"Best advice I can give you is what I tell everyone; get out while you can."

So says my kid's gymnastics teacher. She's a good kid (the teacher, not my daughter) and is a first-year teacher at a pretty good city school in Queens. My kid brought me to her at the end of an event and beamingly said "this is my dad. He's a teacher too."  

I love when my kid  is proud of me. It makes me feel cool.

The response, quoted above, was what I got. She went on to say she had just landed a job at one of the fancy districts out here on Long Islandnand was really lookong forward to it.

My kid wasn't beaming as much at the end of the exchange.

Time seems to stand still out here in the suburbs. On Long Island, folks seem to be caught in some strange 1970s  loop that they just can't break out of. Many listen to Classic Rock on the same circa 1970s radio station, they all wear Lee Jeans, drive pickup trucks and have hairstyles that seem to be 20 or more years old.

And they all think their schools are still superior to those im the city.

As much as this young person has heard about the city is probably what she learned from her own parents, who grew up in the 70s. New York was once a dirty, dangerous place filled with drugs and prostitutes and crime. And the schools once sucked. They really, really sucked.

Of course, the schools don't suck in New York anymore. They haven't for a long time now. Unlike schools in the suburbs, NYC has long since banned nepotism, implemented a system of merit and has, by in large, professionalized the job of teaching. The results have been clear. Many of US News & World Report's Best High Schools are now in the city, not the suburbs.

The same cannot be said for districts out here and things like it cannot be said for their teachers, either. Many of them still land a teaching gig because they grew up in the community and their cousin or uncle is on the board or is employed by the district in some way. In one district, a Phys-Ed teacher actually lived with his parents and raised his kids on a grocery store salary until his local school district finally offered him a job. He was over 40 by the time they did and now, at 44,  he is just nearing his tenure.

In the bigger picture, Long Island has become a place gripped by a harmful heroin epidemic, gang murders which have grabbed national attention and flat property values that have crippled the local economy. All of this has happened at the same time that NYC is ridding itself of the same crime and drug statistics and has expereince soaring property values in even the most notoriously difficult of communities like East New York. Clearlt, times habe changed.

But there is this stigma, fueled partly by bad information and partly by rank ignorance, that the city schools are a cesspool. With that stigma comes the implication that city teachers work there because they don't quite measure up (after all, if you were good you'd be out here, right?).

I have to hear this crap from time to time. Most times I try to explain to the person that he or she has their thinking all wrong before I shrug my shoulders and give in to their stupidity.

Thing is, I usually don't have my daughter with me when it happens.

I love her (my daughter, not this teacher) and I don't want her growing up thinking her dad is somehow less of an anything because I don't teach 'out here'. There is no way to explain to her that I like teaching students who speak 177 different languages and hold the same ethnicities. I like seeing the Manhattan skyline through my classroom window. I like $4 Indian Food from the local mom and pop joint and $6 cups of coffee from the fancy coffee shop. (Also, I like free full medical for life and, say it with me, seven-and-a-half-percent-compounded-interest-on-my-TDA). Most of all, I like not being in the suburbs during the day. The city is just a much better place.

But trying to explain that to my kid is near impossible. And so, despite being part of the strongest teaching corps in the US, I woke up on Father's Day actually wondering what my kid thought of her dad.

Nuts.

Because Brooklyn

It should be mentioned that every photo that has thus far been displayed on the login page of the DOE's new outlook service is of, or has been taken from, Brooklyn. I asked someone in the know why this was the case and he simply responded "Because. Brooklyn."





Well played, DOE. Well played. Keep those beautiful Brooklyn pictures coming.

When the System Breaks Down

On his worst day, when he yielded more post 9-11 power than any other police leader in the nation and knew how to use it,  Raymond Kelly, the long serving NYPD Commissioner under Michael Bloomberg, would never have allowed the head of one of his precincts to speak to members of a community in the way one principal spoke to parents at CPE1 on Thursday.

Finally, parent and SLT member K.A. Dilday read a letter signed by many other members of the SLT, asking her to resign. Garg said she refused to resign and that she answers only to her superiors, the Superintendent Alexander Estrella and Chancellor Farina.

There were so many people crowding the room that the meeting they had to move it to the auditorium. 

No city official who represents the City of New York should speak to any member of a community, let alone a school community, in this manner. I can't believe I had to write such a ridiculously obvious fact.  Each of the precinct heads under Ray Kelly knew this. How does a school leader not know this?

These are the school community members that came to
  support the chapter leader who had been thrown into a hearing
for disagreeing with the principal. No teacher has ever garnered
this much support at a hearing before and that should have been
flag flag for the DoE that this leader wasn't going to work

Anyone following the sordid tale of this school knows that the crisis has been growing there for months. But folks should probably understand that the tale itself changed on Thursday night.

That's when dozens of parents attended an SLT meeting, asked the principal to resign and received the response that she answers only to her superiors, to her superintendent and to the chancellor.




The response to the sit-in that followed the meeting (parents refused to leave until she resigned and spent the night in the auditorium) was the height of disappointment, not in a person who is leading school,  but in a system that is supposed to be run by the city yet remains answerable to stakeholders.



The school closed the lights and turned off the heat. Parents remained in the auditorium throughout the night as 'temperatures dropped into the 30s'. The police were waiting outside too. Whether you sympathize with the principal here (and I'm sure there are folks who do) or sympathize with the stakeholders who want her out, scenes like this are nothing short of outrageous.



It is best to understand the conflict in this school as one where a community of stakeholders who have clearly rejected the person who has been assigned to lead the school, as well as her policies and leadership style. This is an obvious rejection. For better or worse, the parents don't want the person leading this school because she pushes out beloved teachers and ignores parents concerns. Note to Tweed:  It's just not working.

Cops for parents. A screen grab from Norm Scott's Facebook account

And when parents take the extreme measures that were taken on Thursday, going so far as to call in the media,  present a petition demanding the leader leave then occupy a room in the school, things have to be seen as bad. Really bad. I mean probably beyond reparation bad. This isn't what schools are about.

It's almost normal for tensions within a school community to occur. But the system is set up in such a way for those tensions to be resolved within the school community. Outside of the city, when parents go to such extreme measures as to demand the removal of a principal, it is generally understood that the relationship isn't working and the principal is replaced.

But when the response from the principal is that he or she doesn't answer to parents, and when every onlooker knows that the DoE will come to the principal's defense over the parents and other members of the school community, then it's fair to say that we're looking at important parts of an entire system breaking down up there at 106th & Park. Any responsible person would see the need for action.

Now I admit, it isn't easy to follow the story of Central Park East 1. Not many people are interested in clicking yet another a link that talks about yet another school principal who has been up to no good. It gets boring after a while, doesn't it? If readers aren't reading about principals posing for saucy pictures or not buying basic school supplies and skipping out of work, they're reading about principals who use school resources to install their own private showers or  about principals who tear down the culture of a successful high achieving school.  Readers get bored and don't want to click anymore. The news media doesn't report it because, with no clicks,  they know it can't make a profit. And as a result, it becomes more and more difficult to follow the story. I get it. It's not difficult ot understand.

SO does Norm Scott:

There was some press there this morning - NBC, CBS, NY Times - Kate Taylor was there last night too. There was muttering by some over the disappointing reporting she has done on education in general and on her previous report on CPE1 - like having a link to the website of a principal supporter but not the savecpe1 site. So they don't expect much -- like if 20 people speak against Garg and 5 for she will include a quote from one on each side, thus inferring an equal split.

(He was right, by the way. I was only able to find a piece from Daily News' local outlet,  DNAInfo (not even enough interest for the main paper). The only person intrepid enough to document the whole thing is, once again, Norm (OK. And the WSJ ... )

The problem is that a free press is supposed to serve as an important safeguard against a system breaking down in this manner. So by not reporting that police were lined up down the street, ostensibly to arrest parents who were outraged at the leadership of their child's school, the press allowed further breakdown to occur. That's not difficult to understand either.

And that's why it's almost an entire system breaking down. Here is a city official saying something that not even Ray Kelly would allow to be said. Here is a media who just do not see the angle to sell a lot of papers by reporting it. And so city officials will continue to get away with this mistake much longer they should.

The next logical step is for these parents come to realize that no change will come by inviting the press to their events. They may well realize that there are no muckrakers left in the world.

But mayoral control is itself a political manifestation. It is gifted to NYC from Albany on a year by year basis. That's Albany's way of saying that Mayoral Control of the city schools is renewed based on BDB's good political behavior. Truth is, the Republicans in the NY Senate despise BDB for working hard to unseat them a few years back and a few phone calls by the members of this school community, will lead to some meetings with state legislatures, who will probably have enough ammunition to give the de Blasio administration a difficult back here in the city as a mayoral control extension is debated later this year. This is how politics work in the state.

The next logical step is for parents to realize that getting out from under the foot of a monster sometimes means aiming as high as the head. They'll see that mayoral control is an achilles heel of the same city that shut off the heat last Thursday. They'll reach out to pols in the upstate area who will give the city more headaches during the extension debate and they will, eventually, have their voices heard in spades.

Schools may be run by the city government. This much is true. But they belong to their communities. That's just the natural order of things. I think the city has hit a fault line here that it is going to come to regret sometime in the future.



Here's some stuff from Ednotes ...

http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2017/03/historic-3020a-massive-parent-turn-out.html 
http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2017/03/video-of-cpe-1-parents-hammering-farina.html

"I come from a country where Democracy has failed ..."

Another picture of parents and teachers supporting. Again, this has never
happened before and that should be an obvious sign to ease back

Choice, Vampires, Swedish Fish, Jane Jacobs and Diane Ravitch

When I was a boy, my mother took me to the candy store to pick out a few Swedish Fish. Those candies used to be in a box that sat on the counters of delis and corner stores all over the place. For a penny, you could grab one out of the box and get a quick little sugar rush while you were waiting for the man  to finish ringing you up.  On this day, mom gave me two cents, enough for me to pick two from the box. She gave me specific instructions to pick out one for myself and one for her. When I asked which one she wanted, she said it was my choice. She didn't really care.

While all Swedish Fish are the same, the question I asked her, 'which one', had a very specific reference in 1980s Long Island. You see, no one much liked grabbing the "Fish" from the top of the box.  Those were sort of hard and other people had probably touched them. We always liked the ones just under the surface. They were softer and tasted, I don't know, fresher than the ones on the top. They were better.

That said, it was considered rude to 'go digging' into the box. You know, you don't just go digging into someone's Swedish Fish box. That was a 'no no'. During the Regan Era, doing something that was considered, in polite company, to be a 'no no' meant only one thing: You had to be sneaky about it.

As a ten year old, I thought I had mastered this art of sneakiness. I proceeded to drop my two pennies on the counter and, while the clerk was pulling them both toward him to put in the cash register, I quickly picked out one for my mom from the top layer of the box, and then one just beneath, in the softer, fresher layer, for me. Pleased with myself, I held up my hand and offered mom her fish.

She immediately snatched both and gulped them down.

Astonished, I looked at her as if to ask what had just happened. She just shrugged and said, 'You made abad choice!'.

Whenever I read something about school choice vouchers, I am astonished about how popular they are. It's shocking to learn that roughly 40% of  voters support a process that essentially opts out from the one staple of community that has bee around since the Northwest Ordinance (namely a school for each community). It is difficult to understand why so many Americans don't see this as a threat to community until I realize that, sadly, too many Americans have lost faith in the idea of community.

But I wonder if these people have ever thought it through. I mean, do they understand the ramifications of an entire society left to the concepts of universal choice?

The best Vampire movie ever, Nosferatu, features this scene with a mischief of rats desperately trying to make their way through a hole just large enough for one or two. That's the vision I get with universal choice; desperate stakeholders, who have lost faith in their local school, clamoring to get a job, or their child or themselves in the 15 or 20 percent of schools that everyone considers 'good'. The only thing is, those schools only have so many seats available and those same parents would have to clamor for the second tier schools.

And then the third.

And for some, the fourth.

And, perhaps, the fifth.

Choice isn't choice for those parents and it isn't choice for the schools either. It certainly isn't choice for the teachers who would, of course, clamor to go teach at those top tier schools opting only to "settle" for school communities that weren't seen as top tier.

This is choice's dirty little secret. It's not that anyone wouldn't be concerned about the second or third or fourth (or fifth) tier schools or the children who learned there. It's that they would fail to care for them because all eyes, and I mean all of eyes in this system, would be on the top tier schools.

A failure to care is the very definition of neglect.  And, as one teacher once put it, a neglect in resources [always] follow the neglect of attention.  The fact that universal choice would create near universal neglect just isn't something that these 40 percent of folks have thought through. And yet, the sheer math behind an idea that will allow every single parent to just walk away from the American version of the Social Contract is impossible to ignore. We can't all fit through the hole when we're all trying to go through it.

And no. We're not rats. Not nearly. But we are people who can either simultaneously jump a ship because we've been told it is sinking or work to try to make it better.

In her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs wrote that, "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody."

School communities are no different. They can only provide something for everybody in their community when they are created by everybody within that school community. That takes leadership, hard work and commitment, not an ticket to exit the community.

Ravitch made this same point almost 50 years later in The Death and Life of the Great American School System. "Neighborhood schools are often the anchors of their communities, a steady presence that helps to cement the bond of community among neighbors".

Schools and communities share one important aspect: They both require an all-in commitment from their members or they will both fail. They are also two sides of the same coin: To walk away from a school is to walk away from a community.

This public school thing of ours isn't like a Swedish Fish box where you can pull out the nicer, tastier one below. That path destabilizes the entire system and parents, leaders and teachers would likely soon find themselves scrambling for the one or two openings that they can find.

It's just astounding how more than one third of Americans haven't thought that through.