GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Bret Schundler got off easy. There’s multiple rumors that Chris Christie eats people. It doesn’t seem so far fetched.

Boy, every time I read about RttT it strikes me how the competition and doling out of money is simply political and fixed. The people who win are simply propaganda tools given “good boy” pats on the head, while those who don’t are shamed towards “see what happens when you don’t do what we say”. With rewards for failed educational policies, anyone who loses ought to be proud of themselves.

No bogus press conferences or shill-written editorials can pretty up this rape and pillaging of public education.

Doesn’t anyone hire proofreaders anymore? A proofreader would have caught that error.

It’s a good thing, Paul, because Bill Gates says it is. Don’t you understand how politics work?

Our union is classic in these cases. We suck up to our enemies. Make no mistake but nearly everyone pushing the testing craze down our throats and the throats of children are the enemy. Nearly everyone promoting charter schools controlled by the private sector is our enemy. Nearly everyone who wants to fire teachers based largely on test scores is our enemy (note that test scores, when available, should be a factor on the order of perhaps 20%, but is hardly the end all and be all of determining whether someone is, or is capable of, growing into their career and test scores covering less than 3 years worth of students is statistically meaningless and even then, only useful at the fringes — say the top or bottom 10% over 3 years).

We should be at war with our enemy so that when the war is over, the compromise falls at or near the 50% mark. If we try to negotiate without a protracted refusal to compromise over a number of years, we will end up settling nowhere near the middle.

And finally, it is time to make the politicians understand that we cannot be taken for granted. The Democrats are taking us for granted and perhaps we might be better off with some Republican ideas if they’ll take the damn high stakes testing and put it back into its properly context.

6,200,000 teachers in the U.S. and another few million spouses represent quite a voting block that we simply haven’t effectively used for a decade. Politicians on both sides are prostitutes and you’d be amazed at how much the Republicans would compromise to break the Democratic stranglehold on our votes and in turn, how a worried Democratic party would rethink its positions.

Sarah Palin is deemed unqualified for the position by 60% of the electorate (God help us regarding the common sense of the other 40% but that’s a separate issue). However not all those who think she could do the job would ever actually vote for her so I’m not particularly concerned about her. I’m still of the opinion that it’s better to be torn up by those who admitted detest us than by those who claim to be our buddies.