Showing posts with label Substance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Substance. Show all posts

Sunday, August 2, 2015

Substance celebrates its 41st year, Influence on Ed Notes, 1994 EdWeek Article











With the publication of the August Home Page here at substancenews.net, Substance begins our 41st year of publication. Substance began as a mimeographed newsletter, produced on a Gestetner mimeograph machine, in August 1975.
August 1 was an historic day for Chicago-based George Schmidt and Substance, the model for the print edition of Ed Notes. One of the things I find very funny about the accounts of the Chicago union miracle from many groups, including MORE during its "Lessons if  Chicago" summer series over the past few years, is how the role of a monthly well-read newspaper played in capturing the union by the CORE caucus is ignored. (Substance also played a role in the victory of the opposition led by Debbie Lynch in 2001.)

Substance influence on Ed Notes

My groups in the 70s had been getting Substance but then lost track. At an ed tech convention in Chicago in 2000 I ran into George at an anti-testing workshop where Substance, by that time a full 20-30 page monthly tabloid, was distributed. We connected and I subscribed.

I began Ed Notes in 1997 as a UFT delegate assembly only monthly that grew from 1page to 16 letter size pages by the time I retired in 2002. I was
producing up to 1500 copies for the DA since people asked me for copies for their schools. It was clear that I couldn't continue growing a newspaper that had to be hand printed on any machine I could borrow and then stapled by me. George's model of a cheaper to produce in bulk tabloid began to make sense. One of the reasons I retired in July 2002 was to give me the time to turn Ed Notes into a tabloid that could reach tens of thousands of teachers. It would cost me a couple of thousand dollars a year but that seemed like the biggest bang for the buck. (And people did want to contribute.)

That July 2002 George was in NY and I invited him out to my house in
Rockaway to meet with some people who were Ed Notes supporters - a group that over a year later turned into part of the nucleus that formed ICE in October 2003. He wowed us with his stories and inspired us in ways to spark activism. I had already started writing and soliciting articles and laying out the tabloid ed notes and the first issue with a print run of 12,000 copies came out in September 2002. The lead article was:

Coming Soon to a School Near You: Mayoral Control 

Ed Notes was the first to go after the concept, which the UFT supported and also go after Joel Klein from day 1.

Below is an embedded but poor copy for you to peruse. You can read a clearer version at scribd: https://www.scribd.com/doc/273300755/Ed-Notes-Fall-02-ID




Here is a report from George on the anniversary:
Consider the story below, that we will be reporting on August 1. It is an example of how the owners of Chicago's media, the same corporate plutocrats who have imposed "school reform", choke off the history that we need to know -- and that the working class needs to know. As we've discussed, the ruling class has blacklisted Substance (and George Schmidt) for a long time. Think about it...

3. AUGUST ANNIVERSARY AND THE ED WEEK ARTICLE. "...Substance is a throwback to the in-your-face underground newspapers of the late '60s and early '70s..." The article below was published in Education Week -- more than 20 years ago! Since then, the blacklist has expanded to the point where reporters from Chicago's corporate media are forced to deny the existence of Substance -- even as they read and utilize the materials we publish. Read below what the national weekly Education Week reported long long ago:

The Muckrakers (Originally published in Education Week)
August 1, 1994

http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/1994/08/01/9sub.h05.html


Saturday, January 24, 2015

40th Anniversary of Substance and Memories of George Schmidt, Test Resister

TESTOCRACY? Yesterday we read from Diane Ravitch that one of the many Harvard mavens worshipped by some people is using the term "testocracy." We invented that term, but good ideas should not be copyrighted. Let's remind people, though, who should be remembered for having built the Resistance 20 and 15 years ago. The recent joiners to our ranks are, of course, welcome. Except when they write a self-serving history that puts their arrival at the onset of The Resistance. More about that when we review some new books or three.... George Schmidt
George Schmidt lost his career as a teacher in Chicago when Substance published the CASE tests and exposed just how error-laden, useless and indeed, harmful they were. So a well deserved kudo to George as Substance celebrates its 40th anniversary. We were getting copies of Substance here in NYC in the late 70s and also George's exposure of the ties between Al Shanker, the UFT/AFT and the CIA (The American Federation of Teachers and the CIA).

Then we lost touch with George  - until I attended an ed-tech convention in Chicago around 2000 and wandered into a session on how to battle testing and saw Substance on the seats and George on the panel. One of the spurs to me retiring in July 2002 was to expand was a Delegate Assembly only Ed Notes into a tabloid like Substance.

George and his son came out to my house that summer and I invited a bunch of people to meet with him. That group eventually became the basis of ICE (Independent Community of Educators). And of course ICE morphed into GEM in 2009 - inspired by some of the work going on in Chicago that we knew about through George and Substance and of course ICE and GEM and others formed MORE in 2012, inspired by the work of CORE in Chicago which took over the union in 2010. And Change the Stakes was also an offshoot of GEM.

It was through George that I met Susan Ohanian and other test resisters and Ed Notes was the first -- and only publication to take a stand against high stakes testing 15 years ago. I was presenting resolutions against high stakes testing in the late 90s - and based on the work George and Susan were doing, pretty much predicting exactly what has come to pass.

So George has not only impacted Chicago, but his work has had a major influence on the work here in NYC.

George and Substance aren't often cited by some of the revisionists writing the history of CORE which discount the impact of the outreach of a 35 year old network that George had created and maintained.

I am about to head into the city for the MORE workshops on chapter leader elections and chapter building -- the essence of building a fighting union -- and I'll have more on this later from one of  my correspondents who helped lead a fightback in her school against unfavorable observations.

Here are excerpts of George's Bulletin he sent out today.
Brothers and Sisters:

40TH ANNIVERSARY OF SUBSTANCE BEGINS. 
The year 2015 marks the 40th anniversary of Substance. Our print editions began publishing in mid-1975, following the organizing that led to the formation of S.U.B.S. (Substitutes United for Better Schools) after some of us returned from the Vietnam War (me as an anti war organizer; Larry from the Marines) and elsewhere to discover that for seven years the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union (under Bob Healey and the UPC) had sold out substitute teachers in several contracts. Substitute pay had been frozen at $40 per day from 1968 through 1975. Our original organizing resulted in demonstrations, petitions to the union leadership -- and the beginning of the publication of a newsletter, Substance. By June 1976, Substance had evolved into a tabloid newspaper, and soon we were coming out monthly (and selling both papers and subscriptions). By early1976, S.U.B.S. had more than 300 dues paying members, most of whom were Chicago substitute teachers (although we let militant regular teachers join, too). It was the beginning of a very interesting ride that continues to this day. Some of us are still around. Some (Joe Corker, Dorothy Pearson, Dan Van Zile and others) have died. And a few left teaching because of the ongoing insults and indignities that we had to endure as substitute teachers in Chicago. As 2015 unfolds, we will from time to time be reprinting and sharing historical memories from the pages of Substance and from our archives. Please let us know your memories as well, because history cannot be told accurately by any one person or handful of people.

NO 'JE SUIS SUBSTANCE' FROM CHICAGO'S CORPORATE NEWSPAPERS WHEN VALLAS AND CPS SUED US FOR A MILLION DOLLARS.
The first historical documents we are sharing this morning are attached. On January 28, 2015, the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune decided, both together and of course coincidentally, to publish editorials denouncing Substance and me for publishing some of the Pilot CASE tests that had been given earlier that month to all Chicago high school students. By that day, we had been sued for a million dollars and I had been taken out of my classroom at Bowen High School pending a kangaroo court trial before suspending me without pay. When Substance published the CASE tests, I originally believed that the press had the right to publish government documents of an important public nature. The court, with the support of the Sun-Times and Tribune, held that "copyright trumps First Amendment," a dubious ruling that is still being upheld. The complexities of the events that followed are matters of fact and history, which I will be sharing as the year goes on. Let's just say for now that the willingness of Chicago's media leaders, as you can read from the attached, to go along with power was as corrupt than in 1999 as it has been many times since. But when recently the American media did their "Je Suis Charlie" stuff after the murders in Paris, I had to go back and remember just how much hypocrisy has gone into creating the brainwashings that still today have many people trapped inside the ruling class's thinking. Let me know what you think of the two attached documents.






Solidarity forever,

George N. Schmidt, Editor

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Chicago: Rahm sends police to protect crew sent to destroy historic community center... Rahm, Barbara Byrd Bennett order destruction of 'La Casita'

Norm, Lisa, Gloria, George Schmidt with La Casita Occupier, July 2011 (Thnks to Gloria)

Reports all day coming in from Substance on this open warfare by the ed deformer/neo-liberals on the community. You can follow events on the Substance web site.

Two years ago at our last meetings in Chicago we went to La Casita for a few hours to talk to people - George Schmidt gave us a tour. I will hunt down that video and post it tomorrow.

We are at war. It has been declared on us. We are in middle of a field without cover (of our union especially) and they are using every weapon they can throw at us and somehow the real reformers are still standing - and fighting back with pea shooters (and Ravitch) against drones, tanks, mortars, cluster bombs, etc. 

Here are links to reports in reverse order.

THEY TORE IT DOWN BEFORE OUR EYES!' CPS contractor begins to destroy La Casita despite library treasures and supposed 'asbestos danger'

LA CASITA IS NO MORE. By a little after ten o'clock in the morning, Board of Education contractors had leveled the library that had been created by the demands of a community that did not . . .

La Casita protests continue through the night of August 16 - August 17, 2013 after police arrest three people... Chicago Public Schools blocked trying to demolish iconic 'La Casita' community center

It all started when a 6:45 dance class at La Casita was about to start. At 6:30, a community meeting was being held within the building called "La Casita," the "Little House" adjacent to Whittier . . .

Rahm sends police to protect crew sent to destroy historic community center... Rahm, Barbara Byrd Bennett order destruction of 'La Casita'

In a brazen move reminiscent of the midnight destruction of Meigs Field by his predecessor, Richard M. Daley, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his handpicked schools "Chief Executive Officer" Barbara Byrd Bennett dispatched the Chicago . . .

Saturday, July 27, 2013

George Schmidt: Why every Substance reporter should be proud of the work we've done

[We] knew that at the May 22 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education, we were going to witness one of the greatest anti-democratic and racist attacks on public schools since Alabama Governor George Wallace declared "segregation now and segregation forever" while trying to block the integration of the public schools of Alabama more than a decade after the Brown decision. Wallace was there along with several other Southern governors -- from Virginia to Texas -- who  were following the same course, but less flamboyantly. Remember: The attacks on desegregation in the Southern schools were also an attack on public education.  ... George Schmidt
I'm inspired just reading this.

There was a time -- 2001-2004 when I hoped Ed Notes could be like Substance but got sidetracked with the formation of ICE. I wonder if I hadn't gone in that direction and just kept developing Ed Notes as an independent ed news source for NYC teachers if that wouldn't have been more valuable an organizing tool. But I do know myself -- I don't have the patience, the organizational ability, the organizing ability, the reportorial skills, and lots more missing --- including the ability to recruit a staff --- that George has had for the past 40 years. So it was done.

A group of 10 MOREs are heading to Chicago in two weeks for a conference. Very much looking forward to seeing and hanging out with George.
July 27, 2013

Colleagues, comrades, friends, and others...

1. REASONS FOR SUBSTANCE PRIDE... As your proud editor, I spent half the night working editing the two great reporting jobs by Marybeth Foley and Susan Zupan that are now on the top of the Home Page at substancenews.net -- and I'm still not finished because I want to add a dozen more photographs to help our readers understand each in context. 

As the summer of 2013 began, just about everyone who had experienced the 2012 - 2013 school year in Chicago was either tired, exhausted or more than "all of the above." We had all achieved a great deal, from the Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012 through the fights against the school closings. But after CORE won the great victories in the May 17 Chicago Teachers Union election, it was soon clear that the ruling class was not going to lighten up in their struggle to privatize as many of Chicago's real public schools as possible as soon as possible. Virtually all of us knew that at the May 22 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education, we were going to witness one of the greatest anti-democratic and racist attacks on public schools since Alabama Governor George Wallace declared "segregation now and segregation forever" while trying to block the integration of the public schools of Alabama more than a decade after the Brown decision. Wallace was there along with several other Southern governors -- from Virginia to Texas -- who  were following the same course, but less flamboyantly. Remember: The attacks on desegregation in the Southern schools were also an attack on public education. So the hypocritical votes of the six members of the Chicago Board of Education at the May 22 meeting to close 49 schools and "co-locate," "turnaround," and screw more than a dozen others (while simultaneously adding more to the charter schools) was no surprise. 

At the same time, we began hearing from people in Connecticut after a court there ruled that Paul Vallas didn't have the credentials to be a school superintendent in that state. And that's what I want to remind us of today...

2. SUBSART AS A 'FIRST ROUGH DRAFT OF HISTORY.' One of the reasons why it has become so important for those of us who report for Substance to do our jobs quickly, thoroughly, and with lots of graphics within a day or two of the event we are reporting (or analyzing) is that we are forced to move on quickly. Tomorrow we have new stories to report. We are covering the most important "beat" in the struggle for democracy and public education in the USA today: Chicago. The integrity of our reporting enables people to go "back" and find information they can't get anywhere else. The Vallas situation is one case in point I'd like to share (again). We began out presence on the Web (at the "old" site, substancenews.com) in early 2002 with our special issue, "The Paul Vallas Hoax" at the time Vallas was trying to get the Democratic Party nomination for Governor of Illinois. We were just learning to use the Web, and had to make major revisions in our web site to fully utilize the capacity of the Web to do graphics. We didn't get that capacity until 2007. Since then, we have all learned almost as fast as we need to keep up with the technology. Over time, most of us have mastered digital photography (remember when we used to share those one-use Fuji cameras, and when Kodak was King?) as well as honed our reporting skills. At the same time, I've learned how to edit better, especially how to maximize the "search" tagging for all of our stories. As a result, over time we are contacted more and more as people across the USA (and some from elsewhere on Earth) look for the alternative history of "school reform" in Chicago. The latest is Bridgeport, where the Vallas Hoax is in a new iteration. 

But the key is that every day our reporting, tedious as it may be, brings in the latest chapters. We miss more stories nowadays than we can cover, but that's a tribute to the organizing in Chicago (and elsewhere in some cases). We might have covered more of the dozens of school closing hearings, and recent protests, but we are still covering as much as anyone.

Which brings us to...

3. THE FEDERAL COURT CASE AGAINST SOME OF THE CLOSINGS. The current federal court case against some of the school closings (because they are a violation of the ADA and IDEA) is just the latest in the court cases we have had to cover (or miss) going all the way back to our landmark 1980 case (S.U.B.S. v. Rohter) which established our right to sell Substance in Chicago's public schools. Susan Zupan's coverage of that case was doubtless stressful, but the fact is we are now the only news organization that has complete coverage (to date) of that very very important case. Reading the reporting (and virtually having a front row seat to the testimony, which the reporting "brings alive"), I knew that over time, despite its length, our reports would be central to people's understanding of the case. I had heard from others in addition to Susan that the Board's witnesses were weak and duplicitous, but only after reading the report on Markay Winston's doubletalk did I fully realize what that means. And as you can see from the way I've shared graphics to highlight the history of Winston's ascension to the "cabinet" in Chicago from her Cincinnati roots, we are the only news organization that can tell a story in context as well as with the facts.

4. THE BOARD MEETINGS UNDER RAHM'S REGIME. 
Never underestimate the willingness of tyrants to expand their tyranny. As Marybeth Foley is reporting this month, for the first time I know of, fewer than half the total number of speakers signed up to speak at a monthly meeting of the Chicago Board of Education actually got to speak. As we've reported, almost exclusively, under David Vitale the Board has worked overtime, and sneakily, to undermine every aspect of public participation. At the same time, they rehearse their talking points and smiles proclaiming over and over and over that they want more "transparency." Etc. BlahBlahBlah... 

Thanks for making this a wonderful summer, despite the nastiness we are organizing against and reporting about...

George Schmidt, Editor   

DON'T GET DISCOURAGED.   

Thursday, July 4, 2013

George Schmidt Rakes Over Paul Vallas: Liar, Crook, Racist

It may have been that the truth got shelved for Vallas's lies (and of course the bigger lies of corporate reform that went to Washington with Barack Obama and Arne Duncan) for a time, but the facts don't change over time despite the massive work of the liars.
Vallas had publicly compared himself and his talents to Michael Jordan and then trashed Rahm Emanual. Anyone who wants to know why the ruling class dumped Vallas in Chicago in 2001 can see from this the WHY.
Corporate America then put the Vallas show on the road, and Philadelphia and New Orleans suffered as a result..... George Schmidt 
Due mostly to the work of George Schmidt in Substance, Ed Notes (modeld on Substance) has been reporting on Paul Vallas for well over a decade most recently the other day (Drive-by Superintendent Paul Vallas, YOU'RE OUT!!!!!!!!) .

Vallas fired George, had him banned from teaching in Chicago and sued him for a million dollars for publishing and ridiculing the CASE standardized tests. George beat the law suit but not the banning. Well, he had more time for publishing Substance and organizing groups like CORE.

Substance published an article yesterday on the racist aspects of Vallas' reign in Chicago (followed by Philly, New Orleans and Bridgeport, where he seems to have met his Waterloo.

VALLAS FACTS: Paul Vallas began to purge of Black teachers, administrators, and other staff from Chicago's public schools as part of corporate 'school reform'... The Paul Vallas I knew, by Dr. Grady C. Jordan

This morning George sent out a missive to Substance staff. Here is the section on Vallas.
PAUL VALLAS OPENS THE FLOODGATES. As most veteran Substance staff members know, we have always operated on some of the thinnest threads financially... we had to shift our Web site from www.substancenews.com to www.substancenews.net in 2007.... it has now sustained daily -- yes, DAILY -- news and analysis coverage since June 2007, and as a result we are one of the more sustained placed to get news and analysis about Chicago's public schools and about corporate "school reform" in general.
One result of this, over time and with patience, is that we are often the first in Chicago to be contacted about Chicago-related nonsense taking place across the country. Recently, the ruling by a Connecticut court that Paul G. Vallas was ineligible to serve as a school administrators in Bridgeport has roiled the world of corporate "school reform."
As usual, Vallas's ego splashed in the way of some of the more sober people trying to sustain corporate reform. Within a few days, Vallas had publicly compared himself and his talents to Michael Jordan and then trashed Rahm Emanual. Anyone who wants to know why the ruling class dumped Vallas in Chicago in 2001 can see from this the WHY. By the time Vallas assured Richard M. Daley that Tom Reece and the UPC were a shoo-in for re-election to head the CTU against Debbie Lynch and PACT, Daley already knew that Vallas had been making fun of Daley behind Daley's back. The CTU upheaval (which turned out to be more hope than we should have put into it, given Debbie's version of school reforms) gave the pretext for the end of Vallas. But the following year, he tried to get the nomination for Governor from the Democrats, but thanks to Roland Burris failed (Vallas would, like Rahm, have gotten a large part of the "Black Vote" in 2002...). Corporate America then put the Vallas show on the road, and Philadelphia and New Orleans suffered as a result.

At each point where Vallas was caught lying, while his friends were caught stealing, someone surfed the Web carefully enough to get in touch with Substance. We were there, thanks to being on the Web, publishing accurate criticism, and indexing extensively, for people to locate and read the truth about the various miracle workers who were oozing out of Chicago and into the bloodstream of American public schools. Philadelphia officials contacted us when they realized Vallas was a fraud, and Grady and I spent a great deal of time briefing them on the details of how the Vallas frauds operated. After Philadelphia got rid of Vallas, he landed in New Orleans, where he helped destroy the largest and most powerful Black union (UTNO) in the USA and create the largest expansion of charter schools in any major city. Before "Race To The Top."

The past couple of years, as Chicago administrators have taken the Vallas road and gotten out of town, we have heard from people in school boards and unions across the USA who wanted to know the details about CPS bureaucrats who were vying for big jobs, usually based on their version of the "Chicago Miracle." With Arne Duncan in D.C., it was hard for the facts to get out, and a lot of districts (Broward County and Sarasota Florida; Glochester Massachusetts; Madison Wisconsin) are now suffering the penalty of believing the corporate reform hype and hiring one of those Chicago "rock star" administrators who've been bailing out from Chicago quickly of late.

Vallas was also called a "Rock Star" by some Board of Education people in Bridgeport when they were hiring him.

What this means about out responsibility is simple: Substance published the facts first, and we report clearly and with sources. As a result, when someone looks for an alternative analysis about Bob Runcie, Rick Mills, Hosannah Mahaly, Steve Zrike, Jennifer Cheatham -- or Paul G. Vallas -- the best place to get information is at substancenews.net. 
2002 AND SUBSTANCE TODAY. As you have noticed, we are re-printing in 2013 Substance articles about Paul Vallas and Chicago's version of "School Reform" from 2002. As the Vallas story gives people a renewed interest in the lies that have been pushed across the USA for the past 20 or 30 years, our reporting has always had an edge. But I was rarely so proud as I was after someone asked us about what we have on Vallas before he left Chicago, and I could resurrect what we reported the month (March 2002) when we first went on the Web. It may have been that the truth got shelved for Vallas's lies (and of course the bigger lies of corporate reform that went to Washington with Barack Obama and Arne Duncan) for a time, but the facts don't change over time despite the massive work of the liars. I am proud that we can be reprinting the stories we first published about Vallas's frauds and lies a decade ago, and look forward to continuing updating them in the age of Barbara Byrd Bennett and Rahm Emanuel, Arne Duncan and Barack Obama.
Afterburn
Is there a better lesson than Substance, publishing since the 70s, for staying the course and being persistent? George is one of the founders of CORE, works for the Chicago Teachers Union and has been a force in Chicago teacher union politics for almost 4 decades.  So every day when I feel like calling it quits I think of George, who I beg to set me free to laze around on a beach chair.

Sunday, September 9, 2012

With Strike Looming, Substance Needs Your Support

DONATE TO SUBSTANCE
SUBSCRIBE TO SUBSTANCE
George Schmidt writes:
As of Friday, we had $900 in the Substance checking account, owed about $5,000 in federal taxes, and faced a $4,000 cost for printing and mailing the September 2012 print edition after we print it Wednesday (September 12). We decided last week to defer the publication of the September issue because had we gone to press on September 4, the headline would have been

STRIKE?

But when we go to the printer on September 11th or 12th (depending upon how things go tomorrow) the headline will be

STRIKE!

Everyone here will be "broke" in one sense over the next few months. After all, you can't take on the Empire and expect to come out without casualties.

When all heck breaks loose after midnight tonight, we will be devoting all of our time (instead of just 90 percent of it) to publishing every story we can get, and all the analysis we can provide.
Substance has been the major source of information for Chicago teachers for over 40 years. With full monthly print editions, in addition to having a well-read web presence, the work of publisher/editor George Schmidt and his wife Sharron has played a major role in the growth of CORE from its founding days in 2008 (George was one of the founders) to taking over the Chicago Teachers Union just two years later. Substance spread the word about CORE to every school in the city.

DONATE TO SUBSTANCE
SUBSCRIBE TO SUBSTANCE

Don't think print is dead and its all about the web. During the 2001 union elections in Chicago, George delivered copies of Substance to the school mailbox of every teacher 3 times during the election period. That election was won by Debbie Lynch over the Unity style leadership, an election that was a precursor in many ways to the 2010 CORE victory (Debbie's caucus got over 15% of the vote in '10 and she threw her support to CORE in the runoff which helped them get 60%).

DONATE TO SUBSTANCE
SUBSCRIBE TO SUBSTANCE


In many ways, Substance was the inspiration for Ed Notes' expansion from a newsletter at Delegate Assemblies to a full-fledged tabloid which led to the founding of ICE which led to the founding of GEM and both groups have played a major role in the founding of MORE. (See: My Path from Ed Notes to MORE Through ICE and GEM and MORE).

DONATE TO SUBSTANCE
SUBSCRIBE TO SUBSTANCE 


 Really, if you want to know what is going on in Chicago education read articles like this:

Press conference shows community support for CTU strike as contract talks stall because of CPS

and here is the kind of nugget you cannot get anywhere:

BOARDWATCH: Rahm's going to replace Jean-Claude Brizard with Barbara Byrd Bennett... One FNG outsider is as good as another, as long as she's been vetted by the Broad Foundation and checks off that 'diversity' box in the billionaire's check list



LET'S CALL THIS: "WHO WAS ON THAT ELEVATOR?" Yesterday as I covered the quickie exit of the CPS negotiating team from CTU headquarters for Substance, I was struck by the fact that our quarter million dollar "Chief Executive Officer", Jean-Claude Brizard, was again AWOL from the bargaining. That's nothing new. After all, the negotiations have been going on, through more than 55 sessions, since November 2011, and Brizard has managed to get away with that particular truancy the whole time.
Above, the latest "Chief Education Officer" of Chicago Public Schools, Barbara Byrd Bennett, tries to cover her face while reporters ask questions and TV cameras film the quickie exit of the Chicago Public Schools bargaining team from the Chicago Teachers Union's Merchandise Mart headquarters on September 7, 2012. Byrd Bennett six months ago was working in Detroit, where the project of destroying the city's real public schools had advanced much further than Chicago's. Then the abrupt (and still unexplained) departure of "Chief Education Officer" Noemi Donoso (in office for less than one year as part of the Rahm Emanuel education reform team at CPS) required a new Chief Ed Officer. As the Emanuel administration knows there is not one person in Chicago qualified for the top executive posts at CPS, the Board of Education once again turned to the Broad Foundation and located the most talented person out in Detroit. Rumor now is that Byrd-Bennett is being groomed, with almost embarrassing speed, to take over from Jean-Claude Brizard when the mayor decides to blame Brizard for the catastrophe that he has engineered. Behind Byrd-Bettet above is Emanuel's education liaison, Beth Swanson, who less than five years ago was a CPS budget chief and telling the world that CPS finances were so good CPS didn't need a property tax increase. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.
But there was a group of six people — the CPS "bargaining team" of September 7, 2012 — desperately waiting for that elevator door to close, and it's worth sharing a "Who's Who" of who was in that groups. This is especially important since most of the current crop of talking heads and pretty faces in the "news" business in Chicago are as clueless as some metaphor that might today escape me (well, I'll let someone with a more politically correct mind come up with the metaphor for that level of journalistic degeneration in the Second City; all the ones that come to my mind this morning fall into traditional Chicago historical figures like Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John and their side businesses...).

No Brizard at the Mart on September 7, 2012. And to most reporters in this town, the six people who were there are unknowns because, like the fifth season of "The Wire", Chicago's news persons are less than informed about the stories they have to cover. ("Beats" are where you learn the ins and outs, but beats are not "cost effective" in a business that provides "content" but no longer context or accuracy).

A major fact of the Board of Education's latest "team" at the CTU is that the FNG from Detroit — ("Chief Education Officer" Barbara Byrd Bennett) — was part of the six people who ducked quickly into the elevator at the Merchandise Mart and did the bugout boogie as reporters tried to get questions answered. If this were New York, where there are still some reporters who know the beats, somebody besides Substance this morning would be asking how an FNG administrator who just arrived from destabilizing and privatizing Detroit could become, overnight, one of the six most important educational executives in the nation's third largest school district on the verge of the first massive teacher strike in a quarter century.
As late as six months ago, no one in the world would have guessed that on day soon "Barbara Byrd-Bennet" would be one of the six most important people in Chicago in deciding whether Chicago's kids (including my two littlest ones) would be in school on Monday or helping Mom and Dad on the picket line.

READ MORE of this insightful reporting by George:

And yes, don't forget to either
DONATE TO SUBSTANCE or
SUBSCRIBE TO SUBSTANCE 

OR BETTER, DO BOTH

AFTERBURN
In a follow-up I will make available to you George's short book "The AFT and the CIA" a blockbuster he wrote on the late 70s. We have an exclusive reprint the first one in over 20 years.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Substance Web Site Under Cyber Attack, Needs Assistance

Those of you following the Chicago union story know that George Schmidt's Substance, in the midst of a media blackout, is our major source of information. But if you try to get into the site it is like watching grass grow. Here is a request from George:

6/15/10

I've spent the better part of the day monitoring the attack on SubstanceNews and on the phone with Network Solutions about it. I've learned some very interesting things, and was wondering if you could ask ICE people, when they have the time, to do the following:

Please go to the Substance website at


Every eight to twelve hours and e-mail me a copy of what happens

My email for this is


I am beginning to document this third time we were sabotaged by Network Solutions since January, and how this always happens at a mission critical time. In January they were supposedly "sweeping for hackers" and had our site stats down a total of four full days (January February 2010). In April, they let another site basically piggy back on Substance, and CPS blocked us for a week from local Chicago schools access. This time, within 24 hours after our announcing the CORE victory, there have been a half dozen different Network Solutions explanations about why nobody can get to Substance.

So I need to document each iteration, and from different places. We're at this point working with lawyers. Needless to say, these problems haven't hit all (or even most of) the site hosted by Network Solutions. While it's an honor in a way, we can't let them continue to disrupt us every time we're in the middle of some large scale political activity here in Chicago or elsewhere, and that is precisely what they have been doing and are continuing to do as I write this.

Thanks for your help,

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

Sunday, August 2, 2009

AMAZING, MUST SEE Video as Chicago's George Schmidt and CORE Shred Arne Duncan and the Chicago Corporate Model

CORE (Caucus of Rank and File Educators) has only been around for about a year and is capturing the imagination of Chicago teachers, parents and students. And George Schmidt has been doing his Substance thing forever. Teaming up Substance and CORE will shake the pillars of the ed deformers in Chicago.

Obama got Arne got out of town just in time. Maybe Obama decided to rescue his basketball buddy from what is coming. Obama will not escape unscathed as the Chicago model of corporate/ed deformation is examined and protests grow. CORE is expected to challenge the Randi-like CTU leadership in union elections next May.

It is probably no accident that Chicago, the city with the longest history of mayoral control (since 1995), and with a collaborative union leadership (sound familiar, kiddies?) is facing the biggest pushback from the rank and file. Having just spent a bunch of time in LA with some of the leaders of this resistance movement, I am enlightened and encouraged. My guess is New York is a few years behind Chicago in building this movement, though I'll write more about these remarkable people as the weeks go by as we look for ways to support each other and activists in other cities.

Spend 28 minutes watching this Labor Beat video of Chicago-based Substance editor George Schmidt and my new best friends from CORE (Caucus of Rank and File Educators) challenge Arne Duncan and the Chicago model being imposed on the entire nation. Watch Arne gulp and break into a rash when a black student rakes him over the coals. George's comments are featured throughout and CORE members are prominent. CORE gave me a dvd which can be reproduced if you want to show it to people in your school. Or just watch it together online.

The best PD you can do to inform your colleagues as to what is coming down and the corporate rationale behind and demonstrate a model of how resistance can form in the absence of teacher unions. Let me amend that. Not the absence. The UFT/AFT is very present – on the wrong side. (See Schmidt's comments on CTU President Marilyn Stewart applauding Duncan as he outlines the plans to decimate the teachers in her union and the children they teach.)

The video is titled: Secretary of Education Duncan: Pushing the Chicago Plan

Here is the Labor Beat intro:
Before President Obama appointed Arne Duncan Secretary of Education, Duncan was the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. Under his control there, Chicago Public Schools endured a relentless wave of privatization, school closings, militarization, union busting and blaming teachers for the problems of urban schools. Now, the war on public education pursued during the Bush administration will only continue and intensify under the new Secretary of Education Duncan. His Chicago Plan, as former teacher and editor of Substance News George Schmidt explains, is the template for a national strategy to dismantle public education. Through revealing footage and comments from Chicago teachers, this video shows the resistance that has been growing among teachers and community organizations.

Here is a national alert for everyone who cares about the future of public schools, threatened now by Arne Duncan and his corporate vision for the nation's school systems.

The video is hosted on blip.tv: http://blip.tv/file/2428857

Photo: Labor Beat

Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators try to talk to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at his recent Chicago speech at the Hyatt, but are turned back [ED NOTE: also threatened with arrest if they enter the hall.]


Thursday, May 28, 2009

New Yorkers Contesting Push by Bloomberg and Klein to Privatize Public Schools

Susan Ohanian sends us this comment and link to an article written by ICE/GEM NYC teacher John Lawhead for George Schmidt's Substance.

Susan said:
If you want to see the future of education, read this thorough, well-documented article about how corporate school reform is working from a common plan to privatize public education, create charter schools to destroy existing public schools, and undermine the 200 year tradition of free and democratic public schools in the USA.

Published by Substance: http://www.substancenews.net/ and linked at Susan's site.
http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=8586

Kudos to John for a wonderful job. This is such an important piece Ed Notes is publishing the entire thing, with the permission of Substance. Subscribe to the print edition of Substance and share it with your colleagues to support the important work they do in Chicago and nationally.

New Yorkers Contesting Push by Bloomberg and Klein to Privatize Public Schools

"The immediate problem facing upper District 3 and students attending Harlem schools is that the [New York City Department of Education], without the input and participation of the community, is closing down our community schools and replacing them with others that serve only a narrow group of children. Students in the schools they are shutting down are being dispersed without regard for them or their families."

New York public schools are facing the same 'phase out' privatization lies as Chicago's. Substance photo by John Lawhead.So declared a letter from parents, elected parent representatives and community organizations to Chancellor Joel Klein following an announcement in March that three schools, two in Harlem and one in Brooklyn would be closed and replaced by schools run by two chains of charter school operators.


The move was just one part of an ongoing, wholesale closing of neighborhood schools that has become central in a battle over the direction of public education in New York City. Over the winter nearly a dozen school closings were announced by the NYC DOE. The unilateral decision making was met with a surge of protests unlike any time since mayoral control was begun in 2002.


Recent protest at P.S. 72 in New York. Substance photo by John Lawhead. Not every threatened school community rallied to defend its school but many did, including M.S. 399 in Bronx, I.S./P.S. 72 in East New York, P.S. 150 in Brownsville, P.S. 144 and P.S. 241 in Harlem and Louis D. Brandeis High School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The local daily newspapers and most of the broadcast media ignored the ruckus. Participants and supporters shared video clips of rallies on Youtube and the education blogs.


In late March a conference was held, entitled "Defend Public Education," by a coalition of grassroots teacher groups and several United Federation of Teachers caucuses that brought together teachers, students and parents from several of the affected schools. This event, attended by about eighty people, was the first such gathering to compare first-hand notes about the school closings, high-stakes testing for students and the long-term excessing of teachers across the city. Joel Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg made an effort in 2008 to raise their national profiles as "school reformers," often hitching this self-promotion to a campaign for increasing charter schools.


However, the decision to directly replace zoned schools with charters at the city level was something of a provocation. It threatened to antagonize erstwhile supporters of the Mayor's "school reform" agenda and unsettle some key alliances in a year when the legal framework for mayoral control is being reconsidered by the New York state legislature. A lawsuit was filed to stop the plan by the UFT and the New York Civil Liberties Union. The suit claimed that the changes required approval by the local Community Education Councils (weak successors to local community school boards). “Zoning laws are the one small area of oversight that parents were allowed to keep under mayoral control," declared Executive Director Donna Lieberman in an NYCLU press release. The DOE quickly reversed itself and said that the schools could remain open but would share space with the charters. Klein wrote letters to parents in the schools previously targeted for phase-out, stating as much and urging them to transfer their children immediately, naming adjacent zoned schools and pointedly giving them both names and contact information for area charter schools to apply to.

Brooklyn students protest privatization of public schools. Substance photo by John Lawhead.


This shrinking of neighborhood schools and forcing them to share space with new charters is a familiar arrangement for the poor and largely African-American areas of the city where the charters have proliferated. The more than eighty charter schools in New York City are nearly all confined to the Bronx, Harlem and north Brooklyn. Although the charter operators receive millions in corporate and foundation largesse, they are given space by the city without cost to them. As the website of the Harlem Success Academy gloats: "We could raise millions and build a gorgeous new facility with all of the bells and whistles... [but] we take a different approach..."


The tens of millions received from private sources that are not used for bells, whistles or new buildings allow the schools to cap class sizes at levels well below that of the city's neighborhood schools, some as low as 18 students, and offer arts, music and technology programs not seen in zoned schools. It also goes to pay salaries like the $371,000 collected by Eva Moskowitz in 2007. Moskowitz is a former member of the New York City Council who is now the CEO of the Harlem Success Academies. Teachers at Harlem Success work longer hours and like all but a handful across the city are without union representation. They typically quit in droves at the end of the year and have to be replaced. One quarter of the teachers in Moskowitz's first academy were gone in a year. Reliance upon the patronage of Bloomberg and Klein (whose city education department is commonly called "Tweed" in reference to its headquarters which are housed in a restored landmark building, the old New York County Courthouse, built by William M. "Boss" Tweed at phenomenal expense, bloated by embezzlement, during the 1860s and 1870s) goes well beyond sharing space. Figures in the campaign for charter school expansion have played key roles in helping to set up political organizations to promote Klein's "reform" agenda and mayoral control. For instance, a recently disclosed donation of $500,000 from former schools Chancellor Harold Levy's hedge-fund management firm to Al Sharpton's organization, the National Action Network, was channeled by way of Democrats for Education Reform, a national advocacy group for charters. The money went to Sharpton as he was beginning a propaganda tour with Klein much of which involved the promotion of charters.


Klein often presides at lotteries for places in charter schools which have become media events with Klein extolling the parents' desire for "choice" and their apparent satisfaction with the inherent genius of free enterprise unfettered by regulation. The so-called "choice" the parents seek is never perceived as a flight from Klein's own mismanagement, overregulation, narrow curriculum choices or oversized classes.


The favor and admiration was recently reciprocated as contingents of placard-waving charter school parents appeared at the New York State Assembly Education Committee hearings on mayoral control held in each of the city's five boroughs from January to March. Juan Gonzalez, a columnist for the Daily News called them the mayor's "shock troops." In Brooklyn they carried signs that read "mayoral control = better schools."

Parents, teachers, students and community leaders have joined the New York protests. Substance photo by John Lawhead.


More than a hundred had rallied in the morning but by the afternoon the group had thinned out. Gonzalez also reported that "disgruntled charter school parents" told him their principals require them to attend."


The show of support might perhaps constitute the groundswell that never materialized for the actual "school reform" initiatives Tweed has planned, implemented and abandoned in favor of new initiatives. For Bloomberg's mayoral control, installed by the legislature and operating in the absence of any direct popular mandate it is no small matter that his regime enjoy some semblance of public enthusiasm. The mayoral-control experiment of the last seven years was shaped at the outset by lessons learned from Edison takeover fiasco of 2001. It no doubt influenced Bloomberg's demand for mayor control and his continuing demand that his power not be divided in any way. It also played a role in his successfully courting and enjoying the support of groups who opposed the Edison takeover plan, including ACORN and the UFT. In 2001 Chancellor Harold O. Levy announced a plan for Edison Schools Inc. to take over the management of five public schools. He selected the schools from the state's SURR list. The regular SURR process (Schools Under Registration Review) included the now-all-but-forgotten concept that the closing of schools should be carried out as a last resort. The state provided schools on the SURR list with increased resources, three years of intensive monitoring and clearly defined goals that would allow the schools to get off the list.


Levy’s plan was to jump the gun and put the schools under private management more quickly by way of getting majority approval from parents, if not the much hoped-for groundswell. At first Edison Schools was entrusted with publicizing the plan. Students were promised computers to take home and the New York daily press joined in with a chorus of approval. However, in response to a lawsuit ACORN and other communities organizations were allowed to distribute less-than-flattering fact sheets about Edison to families involved in the decision. Mail-in ballots were required. After hearing both sides the parents defeated the plan by a four-to-one margin.


The defeat of the plan together with other events souring Edison’s prospects resulted in dramatic losses for investors. In the immediate aftermath of the vote the New York Times attempted to digest the development. A reporter interviewed parents at P.S. 161 in Harlem, one of the schools targeted by the plan. Under the headline “Parents Explain Resounding Rejection of Privatization of 5 Schools" some stark responses were offered. “Some parents said they did not know the schools were in trouble,” the reporter writes and continues, “Nearly all said they were afraid that their children would be used as guinea pigs in a business experiment.”


If Albany lawmakers do nothing by June of this year the legislation providing for the grander business experiment that it began in 2002 will expire. Most elected officials have staked out a “mend it, not end it" position toward mayor control, denouncing much of the mayor's actual record but holding fast to the concept of centralized authority and the "school reform" agenda.


The hearings involved long summaries of an institution brought out of control by a lack of democracy though not always in those words. Speakers denounced the lack of “voice” or "consultation" by parents and their representatives, the privatizing of public policy, the lack of transparency, the extravagant spending on testing and review systems, no-bid contracts, cost overruns, the squandering of money directed by the state to lower class sizes, and the failure of Tweed to follow state education laws. The proposals to "mend" mayoral control with a new law face a disturbing challenge in Tweed's tendency to scoff at laws. For parents and rank-and-file educators who have been focused on school-level educational issues there is frustration with the plans to reform the "reformers," many of which seemed intended merely to widen the circle of those participating in the deal making and preclude direct democracy of the sort that led to the rejection of the Edison plan in 2001.


Randi Weingarten, president of both the AFT and UFT testified before the New York State Assembly Education Committee in early February. She argued that basic decisions about the schools system should be debated more and described how Tweed often left the union with no option but “going to the streets, to sue, to grieve, to embarrass the school system in the public press.” She went on to say, “ultimately, that doesn’t feel like the way to do things when the mission of this institution every day should be to educate the children... We've got a lot of power. When you do it in the streets it makes us really powerful. When you do it inside behind closed doors, where you’re trying to make the best interests of the children paramount, it makes us less powerful.”


Few would disagree that the teachers' union has become less powerful in recent years. It might be attributed both to a preference for closed-doors deal making as well as being politically outmaneuved by Bloomberg. It also stems from Weingarten's tendency to use the same reform rhetoric spouted by Klein and Bloomberg.


Raises for teachers' were a "reform" designed to draw better teachers into the schools. A bargaining agreement in 2005, dubbed a "school reform" contract by the factfinders brought dramatic concessions from the teachers' union, adding time to the school day and taking away transfer rights, school decision making, and the right to grieve letters to file. Tweed also unilaterally changed school financing so that school would be penalized for hiring teachers with higher salaries. With the loss of seniority rights, Klein by closing schools has created a surplus of teachers, called Absent Teacher Reserve teachers or ATRs whose numbers have reach some 1700. Many of these teachers have been in excess for several years. Despite an agreement at the end of 2008 to subsidize schools who hired teachers in excess, only a handful have got positions in the months since while Tweed has continued to recruit and hire hundreds of new teachers.

On the march in New York City. Substance photo by John Lawhead.


The weakening of the position of teachers in the schools had the effect of giving principals more power and diminished collective planning and decision making. Tweed's emphasis on principals as the "instructional leaders" of the school has made them virtually exempt from previous constraints, including the state law requiring consensus and a real role for school leadership teams.


Klein who loves the relatively tiny portion of educating done by charter schools has only infinite disdain for any "gradualism" when it comes to changing the "status quo" of the school in his charge. He is the shock therapist with the incomprehensible priorities: bewildering, breakneck administrative reorganizations, an erratic school grading system, new schemes for bonuses, threats and all manner of school improvement by remote control, the condemnation and abandonment of what he controls, and the school closings. He never shows any interest in what has worked so far and what hasn't, which leads some observers to see a modern-day Lord of Misrule in the proceedings, perhaps something worthy of what the former GE chief and management guru Jack Welch called "creative destruction."


Leonie Haimson, a parent and school advocate, writing on the New York City Public School Parents blog, wrote that the Tweed strategy seemed like an effort to "create such incompetent, dysfunctional government that the public will no longer support the notion that the government can provide useful public services, leading to further privatization and the undermining of the whole notion of the public good." Teachers who never wanted to be part of any lousy schools wonder, who wins from the closings and reorganizations? Concerned about "failing" schools? Poverty schools are like the overmedicated patient that eventually needs a different pill for every function. How will the dizzy, disordered, hysterical, somnolent, depressed school ever get "fixed" when it is such a lucrative prospect for the education companies? Profits are predicated on students and teachers' lack of control over the institutions where they work and learn. How many of the products, the packaged teacher-proof lessons, the training and consulting, interim assessments would be exposed as unnecessary if school communities could find a way to use their own judgment and solve their own problems?


The activists who organized the "Defend Public Education" conference in March have formed a much broader group called the Grassroots Education Movement that is seeking to work with parent and educator groups throughout the city. On May 5 a forum was held to discuss the charter school conundrum and was well was attended by parents and educators.


Mike Fiorillo of the Independent Community of Educators (ICE) described a "corporate-philanthropic-academic complex" that was using civil rights rhetoric to undermine public control of public institutions. Cecilia Blewer of the Independent Commission on Public Education said the word choice is something to be suspicious of. "Some choices cannibalize others."


In the discussion a parent of two children in charter schools discussed an administration's opposition to her forming a parents' association.


A teacher from a "conversion" charter presented a rebuttal to some of the claims that charters exclude students with special needs. Someone else distributed a handout that illustrated as much in a set of graphs. A parent representative from Queens discussed how the folks attending could get beyond preaching to the choir.


There was debate about whether the campaign for scaling up charter schools had hijacked what had once been a grassroots effort or whether charters had racist roots in segregationism. Many agreed that the threat of privatization required redefining the purpose of education. Another speaker Akinlabi Mackall, of Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence spoke about "the unglamorous day to day work" of building a movement to create something different.


This article was originally published in the print edition of Substance, May 2009. Copyright 2009 Substance, Inc. Reprint permissions are hereby granted to not-for-profit and pro public education groups and for teaching purposes. Please give full credit to Substance, www.substancenews.net. Your subscription to Substance helps provide timely and accurate news about the fight to save public education in the face of corporate media lies.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Substance Response to AFT's Janet Bass

Previous posts on AFT censorship here and here.
Read Alexander Russo's take at the Chicago District299 blog.

Watch the sidebar where we will keep a running account of the story.


In a message dated 6/26/08 8:41:40 AM, jbass@aft.org writes:
AFT will not be able to give your organization press credentials. We only provide credentials to legitimate news organizations.

6/28/08

Janet:

The American Federation of Teachers has not been authorized to determine in the United States today what does or does not constitute "legitimate news organizations."

It's been more than two days since you sent me the silly and unprofessional response to my request for Substance press credentials quoted above.

I asked you to tell me how you (or AFT) determines what constitutes a "legitimate news organization" and to date I have not received your response.

Until you provide me with that information, I can't even begin to know how to respond to those two Orwellian sentences you e-mailed to me on June 26 at 8:41 AM. Please do so immediately, so that we can provide you with any information necessary to assuage your prejudices and assure that our staff can cover the upcoming AFT convention in Chicago with the same rights as all other members of the press.

My preference will be to have this matter resolved quickly, so that I could send you the list of the names of the people we will have covering the convention. However, if you have chosen an alternate route (as seems to be the case), we will have to discuss this further, in any number of contexts.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net

Friday, June 27, 2008

Protest AFT Censorship: Tries to Exclude Substance

Is this how Randi Weingarten will allow her stewardship of the AFT to begin?
I'm betting she won't. But I'm not betting a large amount.

To Janet Bass, (jbass@aft.org) AFT:

I was informed of your attempt to keep Substance from covering the AFT convention, claiming it is not legitimate press. You seem to have shifting rules about what constitutes press coverage.

I find that ironic since I was issued press credentials in 2004 for my work for The Wave, a local paper in New York and Education Notes, which is similar to Substance. I sat next to Mike Antonucci from the Educational Intelligence Agency, which the AFT considers legitimate press.

Substance has covered education in Chicago - ask Mayor Daley and CTU chief Marilyn Stewart. Even the White House issued press credentials to Substance when George Bush came to Chicago.

How sad that the AFT is more restrictive than George Bush.

Substance will have a presence at the convention in some way and it will not serve the AFT in a positive manner if the question of how the AFT issues press credentials becomes an issue.

I am CC'ing Randi Weingarten, the next president of the AFT, who despite enormous disagreements with Education Notes, has always been open and supportive of my attempts to cover events in the UFT.

Norman Scott
Editor and Publisher
Education Notes
http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/

Education Editor
The Wave
www.rockawave.com

If you agree that Substance should be given press credentials to the AFT convention, email Janet Bass (
jbass@aft.org) and cc Randi Weingarten.

Read George Schmidt's full explanation and scads of examples on how Substance is legit press at Norms's Notes.

Here is George's email exchanges and more examples of the work Substance does.

Colleagues and Friends:


As I suspected, the bureaucracy of the American Federation of Teachers under president Ed McElroy is trying, again, to exclude Substance from the AFT convention. The last time they did this was at the New Orleans convention in 1999, when Sharon and I went to New Orleans only to be told by Mr. McElroy, personally, that we were not a "legitimate news organization." As I told you when we began working to get press credentials, I suspected they may try to exclude us again, and now they are doing so.

Below is my exchange with Janet Bass, who is handling media set up for the AFT convention (which convenes in Chicago in two weeks). Please protest yourself and utilize any contacts you have -- especially AFT members -- to protest on behalf of Substance as well.

By this morning, we had seven people who were going to be covering the AFT convention, and Danny was working so that we could provide daily Web updates on the convention during the convention. We will not let them get away with this (after all, I'm still carrying that "White House Press Pool" pass Joe, Jackson and I were issued in January; who is AFT to say what a "legitimate news organization" is?), but it would be useful if the outcry causes them to simply
correct this mistake before we have to go to court about it.

Those with a sense of humor might also contact CTU President Marilyn Stewart and ask her to confirm to AFT that we are a "legitimate news organization."

Thanks for taking your time to begin responding to this promptly. Please cc all materials you send to AFT (and any AFT responses) to me here at Substance.

Sincerely,

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

BELOW IS THE EMAIL EXCHANGE THAT IS TAKING PLACE THIS MORNING WITH AFT

In a message dated 6/26/08 8:41:40 AM, jbass@aft.org writes:

<<>>

June 26, 2008

To: Janet Bass, American Federation of Teachers, Washington, D.C.

From: George N. Schmidt, Editor, Substance

Re: AFT attempt to censor coverage of the 2008 AFT convention in Chicago by excluding Substance reporters and videographers.

Dear Ms. Bass:

Before this goes any further, please inform me what a "legitimate news organization" is according -- to the AFT definition. I'm afraid we've been down this road before, and it's time that AFT stopped trying to censor Substance. Now.

Although I had once had a discussion of this matter with Mr. McElroy (years ago, in New Orleans), I thought AFT had matured since then. If you can quickly correct the misinformation under which you are currently laboring, this matter
can be resolved quickly.

Hopefully, the following information will help you in your pursuit of the facts so that your policy and praxis in this matter improves, although my staff and I resent even having to discuss it with you.

Please note the following:

1. Our staff has covered professional events involving members of the teaching profession for decades. During the past five years, we have covered conference and conventions of educators including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the National Council for the Social Studies and others. We have also covered other major political events both for print and new media. For example, last summer I covered "Yearly Kos" here in Chicago and during that time we interviewed or questioned several of the (then) Democratic Party presidential candidates.

2. Locally here in Chicago, we regularly cover the news pertaining to education, including the monthly meetings of the Chicago Board of Education (one of which I covered yesterday). We have also covered labor union news on a regular
basis going back decades.

3. This summer, we will have reporters covering the major conventions, including the National Education Association. We intend to cover AFT in the same manner, albeit with more staff so that we can better serve our growing
readership, both in print and on line.

4. As I've noted to you, our publication appears in print monthly and has been publishing continuously for 33 years. You can locate PDFs of our back issues from 2002 onward at www.substancenews.net (or linked to
www.substancenews.com).

5. We regularly publish Web updates on the Web at www.substancenews.net. We are currently updating and enhancing our web site so that we can provide daily updates from the NEA and AFT conventions. Any attempt by you or others in power at AFT will cause us to suffer loss to our business and will certainly qualify as a violation of our First Amendment rights.

6. Our staff regularly blogs at www.district 299.com.

7. We have covered news in Chicago for more than 30 years (education primarily, also other) and all of our regular staff carry press passes issued by the Chicago Police Department, which issues such passes for those covering regular news and "spot news."

8. In January 2008, we were cleared to cover the White House visit of George W. Bush to celebrate the anniversary of "No Child Left Behind" here in Chicago. Although we were not part of the "Pool" (which only included the regular
traveling pool and four local reporters), we were part of the larger press corps that covered the activities of President George W. Bush during his Chicago visit. This included the landing of Air Force One at O'Hare Field, the external
coverage of the visit of the President to Chicago's Greeley Elementary School, and the President's speech on the economy at the Union League Club.

I could add to this list, but I hope this will suffice to clear up any ambiguity so that we don't have to discuss the misinformation that you are laboring under further. Please RSVP me satisfactorily on this matter so we can proceed
with the arrangements.

Since I have to continue making arrangements for both our coverage of AFT and for our Web presence at various events this summer, I will need to hear from you promptly once you have reconsidered this matter and resolved it to the satisfaction of the Bill of Rights and our mutual interests.

If you have further questions for me, please feel free to call me at 773-725-7502 so that we can resolve this before it goes much further. By your response you have forced me, as you can see, that I now have to take a few additional
steps in defense of our right to cover the news on our beat without censorship from the bureaucrats of AFT or any other entity. We have defended these rights in the past and, I promise you, we will continue to do so into the future.

Thanks for your kind consideration in this matter,

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net


Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Chicago Rules...


.... For Firing Teachers

.....has been circulating on ICE-mail (posted on Norms Notes.) No one knows the scene there better than George Schmidt. He comments here.

Chicago gave up seniority in hiring when the Chicago Teachers Union supported corporate "school reform" (and the original mayoral control model of governance) in 1995 during the debates over the changes in the Illinois School Code that were finally called the "Amendatory Act."

The details morph from year to year, but the drive since 1995 has been to create as large a number of "at will" workers in the school system as possible. This was one of the major dialectical thrusts of mayoral control from the beginning, and still is. With each passing contract (and each "reorganization" of each "failing" -- er, "underperforming" -- school) the pool grows larger.

The collaboration of the unions in the destruction of the bases of unionism here in Chicago is now a matter of history, although only Substance has reported it in detail. The AFT local here (the Chicago Teachers Union) just added a few more nails into the coffin of seniority rights in the new contract. But the nails had been driven in since 1995, under both the "old guard" (United Progressive Caucus) leadership (1995-2001; 2004- present) and the "reform leadership" of Debbie Lynch (2001-2004).

The executive model of governance, at the citywide level via mayoral control and at the school level via dictatorial principals' control, requires as many "at will" workers as possible, and as few true worker rights as possible. It's a mistake, in my opinion, to demonize some jerk like Jack Welch, since the policy he's teaching is being thrust on cities nationally (wherever the majority of children are minority and poor), an attack on teachers, and in most of those places there is no Jack Welch (but instead a committee of anonymous Chicago Boys types) to do the dirty work.

Strumming through some back issues of Substance (www.substancenews.net) can give you some of the details. But I'm going to have to write a book about it (after we reprint "The AFT and the CIA" and make some publication costs back on sales) to give people the full flavor. These people plan carefully and have a thousand bullshit versions of why it's "best" that way. They also exchange PR people to hammer you with "bad teacher" stories. That's one of the reasons why I warn people not to use the enemy's phrases -- like "Rubber Room".

Solidarity,
George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net (archives at www.substancenews.com)

Monday, September 3, 2007

Substance: Chicago teachers challenge Mayor Daley

It's nice to be in the middle of a breaking story.
This is one of the biggest stories out of Chicago this weekend. Share the access far and wide.
On Friday night, the Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates met and after a tumultuous meeting "approved" a tentative contract.

Or didn't.

The complete and amazing story is now on the Substance website
www.substancenews.net

See the anonymous videos from inside the CTU House of Delegates meeting Friday night and Substance's Al Ramirez's two brilliant videos from after the meeting was over.

You can also blog it at http://www.substancenewsblog.blogspot.com/
or see the blog about the CTU activites at www.district299.com

It's been a busy weekend. Happy Labor Day,

George Schmidt
Editor