Andy, Sandy and Friends

Behind every sociopath is a bad cook.

Just how much money did New York Governor Andrew Cuomo accept from a giant media company? 

News Corporation CEO and Walking Dead extra Rupert Murdoch must know, since the crustaceous oligarch reportedly paid Cuomo $700,000 to publish a book read by less people than this blog.  

Curiously, Murdoch and his Fox News Channel have also been kind to the governor’s live-in girlfriend, smiling TV chef Sandra Lee. Lee’s frequent appearances on Fox and Friends—semi-homemade advertising time for her books and brand—are also brought to you by News Corporation. Cuomo likely has less indigestion these days with Fox Cash lining the cupboards of the Mount Kisco mansion he shares with Lee.

After all, what’s good for the girlfriend is good for the governor.  
 

Sandy Lee: A Friend to Fox (and Andy C.) 

What exactly has Murdoch received from the state in return for his kindness to Cuomo and Lee?

Tax breaks, of course.

One of Cuomo's first acts as governor was to exempt News Corporation subsidiary HarperCollins from sales tax for e-books and online-only publications. While HarperCollins made $53 million in profits last year, the move has cost New York State at least $35 million a year since 2011, with the proportion of books now sold through small, independent book stores at less than ten percent nationwide.

Sadly, Murdoch’s money controls the media and many minds.

Speaking of minds, public schools in New York are due a lot more than $420 million, but Cuomo thinks this amount is better invested in Murdoch and tax breaks for the movie industry. Though box-office bombs like Fox’s Won't Back Down are optional nightmares for movie goers, insolvent school districts are not an option for parents, students and teachers throughout the state, thousands of whom have turned out at forums in recent weeks to tell Cuomo that they won't back down against his insidious need to annihilate their schools.    
     
Cuomo’s palms itch around billionaires, but curl into fists near kids. Withholding billions from their schools is no way for Cuomo to cement his self-created legacy as the Lobbyist for the Students, and neither is stripping teachers of their due process rights.  Besides, every principal knows that bad teachers usually fire themselves before submitting to the taunts of unruly students year after year. Those who do otherwise and still spend the majority of their adult lives helping other people’s kids are most often called former teachers. 

Of course, Cuomo’s war on union members is red meat for Murdoch and Fox, with the governor one Koch brother donation shy of sharing a ticket with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in 2016. Walker stood up for Murdoch recently when he promised to protect the elderly Aussie from ISIS, just like he protected other billionaire assholes from union members soon after assuming office.

Rupert Murdoch's Dream Ticket?

Walker stopped short of calling the brave unionists who stormed the Twin Towers on 9/11 terrorists, however. At least some middle-class workers are off limits these days.     

With their governor seeking to subsume public schools on behalf of his benefactors and pass ethics reforms aimed at his enemies only, New Yorkers have no choice but to resist Cuomo's reforms and refuse his tests. Though it's looking more likely by the day, they cannot wait for the U.S. Attorney to cart Cuomo away in cuffs; civil disobedience is a more direct path to democracy anyway.
         
Let Andy and Sandy know they are not your friends.

Don't take their tests, buy their books, or multiply Murdoch's money.      
      

Divide and Conquer—Cuomo Style

Part-time progressive Bill DeBlasio and full-time douchebag Andrew Cuomo are hearing it from unions these days in New York. Members of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association (PBA) turned their backs on DeBlasio in Brooklyn, while leaders of New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) called Cuomo “clueless” and challenged him to a series of education shit shows town halls across the state. 

Cuomo, ever eager to bask in DeBlasio’s political fallout, has auditioned for peacemaker between the cops and the mayor, especially after PBA President Pat Lynch used the phrases “educate our children” and “blood on the steps of city hall” in back-to-back breaths following the recent murders of two uniformed cops.

In an interview before the shootings, Cuomo called Lynch a “friend” who was only doing his job as union president in moving to bar DeBlasio from police funerals:

"He was venting that emotion. He is standing up for the police, which is his job, and making the point that police need protection, too, in situations like this, and need respect and consideration in situations like this,” Cuomo told public radio’s “Capitol Pressroom” program.

 

On the other hand, Cuomo was outraged when NYSUT President Karen Magee vented her emotion and accused the governor of “doing the bidding of billionaires” when it comes to public education. The cowardly Cuomo responded through his spokeswoman, denouncing Magee’s statement as “mind-boggling” and “hostile.”

 

What would Cuomo have said if Magee had accused him of having the blood of public schools on his hands? 

The metaphor works in this case, since Andrew Cuomo has done more to destroy public education in New York State than Bill DeBlasio will ever do to destroy the New York Police Department.

Cuomo will never call for the same “respect and consideration” for teachers as he does the police. While public schools are a “monopoly” he’d like to “break”, the cops are the only ones blocking the barbarians from breaking down Cuomo’s gates.  

One can only imagine what Pat Lynch would say, for instance, if Cuomo threatened to break the PBA’s monopoly on law enforcement in New York City.    

It should surprise no one that the governor—who visited a whopping two public schools during his first term—was outraged more by comments aimed at hedge funders and their dystopian visions for public education than comments aimed at a fellow democrat and mayor of the nation’s largest city.
DeBlasio has at least attempted to stem the privatization of public education, and that alone quickly earned him a spot on the governor’s enemies list. 

A vindictive sociopath, Cuomo governs on personal vendettas, caressing his donors while plotting revenge against those who refuse to caress his fragile ego.      

Cuomo recently bemoaned being able to control education only through the state budget, even calling requests for more school aid “political correctness.”  With schools across the state slipping toward insolvency, Cuomo’s only objective is to repay his donors with more privately-run charter schools and pink slips for teachers.  

As this blog has urged again and again, NYSUT must move beyond strongly-worded faxes and petitions and take the battle for public education to Cuomo directly. 

It remains to be seen if the Lobbyist for the Students will show up and share his pernicious bloviations about public education at the NYSUT town halls. Though Cuomo apparently has no difficulty speaking to billionaires about education, he’s apt to retreat to his cave at the whiff of educators and parents who actually know what they’re talking about. It seems Cuomo is comfortable talking about education only with those who have more money and less expertise than he does.    

Though Cuomo will likely ignore NYSUT’s invitation to the town halls, Magee must push for this and other specific actions, calling out Cuomo in the press and trailing the governor and his slimy associates across the state. NYSUT spokesman Carl Korn recently offered a speck of hope this might happen: 

What worked for the anti-frackers will work for NYSUT, since public education and our environment each face existential threats.  

Teachers have an opportunity to answer Cuomo’s questions about education in-person this New Year’s Eve at his mansion in Albany. Though Cuomo will likely filter public employees from the visitors list—a driver’s license number is required to register—teachers could take a big step toward Cuomo in 2015 by stepping through his door on the final day of 2014.

Like the anti-frackers did, New York’s teachers must get in Cuomo’s face—even if he tries to hide behind the police. After all, when Cuomo calls for us to protect the police, he’s really calling for the police to protect him and his wealthy donors. 

And as long as the police are on their side, Cuomo and others will keep attacking labor. For as both Cuomo and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker understand, workers must be divided before they can be conquered:

With Liberty and Charter Schools for All

Where can 12 billionaires turn if they want education laws changed?

That’s right, their checkbooks.

Between late September and Election Day, a dozen hedge funders donated a combined $4.4 million to New York State politics, mainly to ensure that Governor Andrew Cuomo and his slimy associates will help publicly-funded, privately-run charter schools seep deeper into the state.

Led by the likes Paul Tudor Jones II, who recently hosted an education “summit” featuring Cuomo and other corpses, the billionaires see charters as investment windfalls. After all, those pesky teachers unions and their due process rights won’t be around to challenge every test and technology tonic sold to New York’s taxpayers once the metastasis of charters quickens.     

With minimal overhead and oversight, charters and their plutocratic backers can finally corner an elusive market in New York State—public education. In words reminiscent of showman P.T. Barnum, “there’s a sucker born every minute”, and the billionaires see no bigger sucker than New York’s working families, with snake-oil salesmen peddling toxic Common Core tests and standards as the panacea for underfunded public schools.

The billionaires would rather subsume these schools than fix them, however, and their sycophantic public servants are lining up to comply. Cuomo has said he wants to “break” public schools in his second term, and lest we forget what Secretary of Education Arne Dunked-on said just last year:

“…he [Duncan] found it “fascinating” that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards has come from “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

In a recent interview, Jeremiah Kittredge, founder of Families for Excellent Charter Schools (an anti-labor, pro-douchebag super PAC which spent $9 million on the New York election) continued efforts to slime our schools. Kittredge’s organization is calling for an “epic infusion of excellent schools” to rescue 249,000 children supposedly “trapped” in public schools statewide. Kittredge wants parents to believe their local schools face a “crisis of epic proportions” for which charters apparently hold the cure. 

Kittredge says charters are “outperforming” public schools, but it doesn’t require a close-reading of Kittredge’s claims to reveal his simplistic and savage suggestion: charter school students are just better test-takers.

Yet even if their scores are higher—and study after study prove otherwise—most parents would rather raise compassionate, well-rounded human beings instead of test-taking cyborgs programmed by flawed standards. 

Look no further than Pink Floyd’s classic “Another Brick in the Wall” for an allegory of corporate charters and their subservient students. Note how the children in the video react after too many trips through the meat grinder of educational malfeasance: 

The rebellious students in the video throw their teacher on a bonfire, while the New York State Education Department (NYSED) throws teachers on the scrapheap in real life.

With allies like Kittredge doing their bidding—who in the same interview calls public school teachers the “worst servers” of special education and ESL students— Education Commissioner John King and Chancellor Merryl Tisch are paradoxically demanding more accountability for unionized teachers and less for charter chains, from the “board of trustees” down to the lowly teachers.

A glance at NYSED’s handy-dandy “Guide to Charter Schools in New York State”, for example, tells us that 30% of the teachers in a charter don’t need to be certified.

At least the important parts are in color

Meanwhile, Tisch seeks an “aggressive” proliferation of charters as her department makes it more difficult for those who would rather teach in unionized public schools to become certified—the majority of job seekers throughout the state. More and more of these applicants might soon find a home in New York’s charters, however, who will entice them with a logo only a hedge funder could love:

Sadly, the day when billionaires like Merryl Tisch control who gets to work in schools has finally arrived. Up-and-coming teachers are not far from signing contracts with corporate boards instead of boards of education, one bad test score away from working at Walmart.      

It was industrious journalism and not NYSED which exposed the fraudulent resume of “Dr.” Ted Morris, Jr., whose Greater Works Charter was revoked by the state after it was revealed Morris lacked both a doctorate and a high school diploma. Both Tisch and King disavowed responsibility for this gross oversight, with Tisch blaming her unnamed underlings and Director of Charter Schools Bill Clarke in hiding since the scandal broke.

With their schools tumbling toward insolvency and privatization, where can members of New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) turn to preserve their profession?

From Manhattan to Massena, the state's teachers union is only as strong as its weakest links.

Though not yet an existential threat, non-urban locals should fight charters as much as urban locals should fight non-urban threats like the Tax Cap and Gap Elimination Adjustment (GEA).

No teacher outside of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), for instance, would be offended if UFT President Michael Mulgrew suddenly spoke out against the Tax Cap, just like Mulgrew should not take umbrage if a teacher in Westchester spoke out against New York City charter schools.

Things might be different for NYSUT if Mulgrew had threatened to punch someone other than teachers who opposed the Common Core, or if American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten’s next arrest is outside the offices of Cuomo or NYSED.   

The privatization of public education is a many-headed hydra, fed by a handful of plutocrats.

This should be no match, however, for an organization fed by 600,000 workers instead of 12 billionaires.

NYSUT must lead this fight before public education starves to death.            

100 Days into NYSUT's Future

As its first-ever contested election fades into NYSUT's past, uncertainty and optimism churn within New York's largest teachers union. Many members worry if the new leadership—led by President Karen Magee—will do anything to stifle the onslaught of Governor Cuomo's tax cap or his love affair with charter schools. While Magee has talked of the tax cap, her first walk may be towards renegotiating the state's teacher evaluation plan (APPR), aiming for a one-size-fits-all system that stretches from Montauk to Massena. Considering the unwieldy plans some of Magee's biggest supporters negotiated within their own districts, a revised APPR could pollute hundreds of other districts throughout the state.

Laced with Common Core tests and modules, APPR is an insidious way to evaluate teachers. However, NYSUT has a more urgent issue to combat than an evaluation system which last year rated 92% of its members as either "effective" or "highly effective." 

Economic inequality remains the greatest threat to public schools and our democracy.

Because of unjust budget cuts, 35,000 teachers in New York have lost their jobs since 2009. It will require the efforts of many to close this wound.  Just as democracy demands many faces, so does justice. Unions must be a face of justice, and if NYSUT and other organizations can't stare the plutocrats down, who will? With 600,000 members, NYSUT possesses the power to confront inequality across the state and nation. Magee and other leaders must address this issue at every turn, and through every medium. After all, it is a leader's job to inspire and educate the masses, and it will require many hands to exterminate the vermin of inequality.

Will Magee meet the task? Like all presidents, her first 100 days may answer this question. This August, NYSUT will decide who to endorse in the state's gubernatorial election. The oligarchical Cuomo needs NYSUT if he wants the support of the AFL-CIO. Cuomo has talked and acted as anything but an education proponent, threatening the "death penalty" for public schools while shaking hands at rallies for privately-run charters.  NYSUT need look no further than Cuomo for a connection to the privatization of public education. The organization only feeds this beast by supporting candidates so beholden to wealthy donors. Though logic calls on people far and wide to rally outside of Cuomo's doors daily, Magee recently said, "the field is open as to who [NYSUT] endorses." Such words do little to spur members against the pernicious policies of Cuomo, as raccoons require only a crack to gain entry.

Thanks to the Supreme Court's decision in McCutcheon vs. FEC, billionaires have permission to burn even more of their money on our withering democracy, which cries out for campaign finance reform.  Oxymoronic justices continue to equate spending with speech. As a result, those with the most cash continue to have the most say in our elections. A few people possess too much power, and power grows corrupt in the hands of the few. Educators throughout the nation can thank this imbalanced system for laws ending collective bargaining and tenure, tilting the pendulum further in favor of plutocrats. 

Workers could be dealt an even greater blow this June, when the Supreme Court may rule on Harris v. Quinn. Should the court rule in favor of Harris, public unions across the nation would begin bleeding members, lured away by the sirens of a few extra dollars saved in their paychecks. In addition to a diminishing voice at the ballot box, workers would also be silenced at their workplaces, and likely blame their listless unions for the collapse of their livelihoods under the dictatorial demands of bosses. 

With many districts careening toward insolvency, NYSUT must start chopping at the roots of inequality before it grows too dense. For example, the next time Magee talks to Cuomo, she should ask him about his duplicitous campaign finance law, meant only to encourage a challenger against Tom DiNapoli in this year's comptroller race. DiNapoli, who opted out of the law, has been a friend to public education, with many urging him to challenge Cuomo in a democratic primary, something DiNapoli has resisted. It’s likely Cuomo’s $33 million war chest has something to do with this; yet another voice silenced by money.

Magee should also ask Cuomo why he decided to disband his Moreland Commission, which had been tasked with investigating corruption throughout the state.  Was Cuomo's commission nothing more than a tool to prod legislators into passing his budget? Did Cuomo fear his own commission would soon start eating its host?    

The next 100 days will determine much about the future of NYSUT and other unions around the country. More people must begin asking and answering the right questions if we wish to salvage our schools and democracy.

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Something's Rotting in the State of New York

Something’s rotting in the state of New York, and it’s not the apples.

Due to a property tax cap passed in 2011—which requires localities and school districts to raise taxes no more than 2 percent or the rate of inflation—funding for schools withers in the meadow, as tests and class sizes grow all around it.  With the stench of decay thickening in the midst of a NYSUT lawsuit over the tax cap, the state recently argued in court that education is “not a fundamental right.”  This should surprise President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who’ve called education the “civil rights issue of our time”, even awarding New York $700 million as part of the Race to the Top (RTTT) contest.  Are “civil” rights “fundamental” rights? If so, shouldn’t the federal government ask for its money back from a state which passes laws to undermine this civil right?

New York has outpaced most states in the implementation of Common Core testing and a more rigid teacher evaluation system (APPR), two key requirements of RTTT. While these programs have been controversial because of their emotional and monetary costs, the tax cap has been largely ignored as an issue, with many New Yorkers against Common Core, APPR, and InBloom but in favor of the tax cap. In the coming years, thanks to the tax cap, many districts will attempt to implement these programs and other unfunded mandates with fewer teachers and fewer resources, as they watch their RTTT and reserve funds dry up, with or without the reforms.  With funding for education in New York already at a 20-year low, the tax cap has the potential to damage New York’s rural and suburban schools more than testing, APPR, and InBloom COMBINED.  You can’t reform insolvency.

Albany claims that the tax cap is not a state dictate. After all, local voters can override it. Yet a school district seeking to surpass the cap must receive approval from a 60-percent supermajority of voters.  The law therefore undermines the essence of democracy—simple majority rule. In New York, one person now equals less than one vote, and a minority of voters can determine how much money schools receive. In the face of this, what district would risk having its budget voted down? Out of only 28 districts that attempted an override in 2012, 21 failed. However, 14 of the 21 that failed received more than 50 percent approval.  Our kids deserve no less than a majority of minds determining what goes into and comes out of their schools. After all, how can we call public education a democratic institution if a mere minority of citizens determines its funding?

Hatched in an inequitable egg, the tax cap breeds even more inequality once unleashed across the state. Rich communities who stay under the cap have more money (for now) to play with than poor communities, as spending is limited to two percent of the previous year’s budget.  According to a NYSUT affidavit, “The chasm between [rich and poor districts] will only widen if lower performing districts continue to be deprived of local control over budgeting, particularly in light of the state’s failure to meet its funding obligations.” For example, in 2012-2013, the wealthiest districts were able to raise their tax levy per pupil over $500 dollars more than the poorest districts. Though test scores are hardly an indicator of academic superiority, it should come as no surprise that students in wealthier districts also outperform their poorer counterparts on state exams.  Poverty at home conjoins with poverty at school, spawning a preternatural beast set on devouring our kids’ futures.   

With the idiot wind of the tax cap at his back, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to withhold even more money from schools. His Tax Relief Commission, led by former governor George Pataki, recently recommended rebates over the next two years for homeowners in districts which do not override the tax cap. In essence, districts will be awarded for spending less money on education, while Cuomo cuts corporate taxes and pushes casino construction throughout the state.  The self-proclaimed “lobbyist for the students” suddenly cares more about gambling than education. This proposal, along with the tax cap, only exacerbates the economic divide throughout the state, as residents in more affluent districts will bite the better half of the apple. Oddly, much like Arne Duncan, the only money Cuomo can find for schools is through gimmicky competitions, not realizing that education is not “bowling for dollars”, as one Long Island superintendent quipped. 

Opponents of New York’s tax cap are not pro-taxes, but pro-democracy. A democracy depends on an educated populace. Ironically, many of those first to slash education budgets equate education with our “global economic competitiveness.”  Regardless of whether it helps or hinders our economy, education is weakened when citizens are incentivized to underfund it.  Public education feeds on fair and equitable funding, not worm-infested refuse.  Let the simple majority determine how much our kids should get before there’s nothing left.