Tuesday, December 20, 2016

#Townsend Harris Update: Audio of Jahoda Throwing F-Bomb

The source continued that the “subject of the meeting was benign—how to improve school climate. Principal Jahoda’s vulgar remarks were uncharacteristic to the positive nature of this meeting.” They also disputed the claim that the comments were not “directed at anyone” and that Ms. Jahoda was “talking about [herself], no one else.” They explained that Principal Jahoda’s vulgar language was in direct response to a comment made by a subordinate and that the manner in which Ms. Jahoda responded reflected her behavior when dealing with colleagues..... sophomore Marsad Kabir expressed that, “It seems as if you’ve lied to our newspaper. How do you then respond to the reports of harassment that have happened in the past? If those accusations [the incident with the inappropriate language] were true, what about the rest?”  ...thhsclassic.com
OMG- I love these student journalists, Mehrose Ahmad and Sumaita Hasan, at THHS - The NY Times ought to hire them right now. Also thanks to Jonathan Halabi who has been on the case and has send me info and links to videos. And also his work at the UFT EB meeting last night in raising the issue.

This is our 2nd report of the day on THHS. Here are my reports in reverse order.

The THHS issue was raised at the UFT Ex Bd meeting by Jonathan Halabi of New Action - where Rona Freiser of the Queens office claimed the UFT was on the case all along -- though no one seems to know that -- that they protested to the DOE when Jahoda was put in. Fact is that given Jahoda's history of going after Peter Lamphere when he was CL at Bronx HS of Sci- a direct attack on the union, there are times for lines in the sand to be drawn.  I'll have more on the abusive principal issue we raised at the EB meeting and the response. Actually I have so much to report on that meeting I may do 5 posts today -- but it's cold out, what else do you have to do but read Ed Notes?
 
Let's get right to the audio where Jahoda says she won't be like the previous principal who was so popular. I heard from a parent who wrote:

Townsend Harris Update: Jahoda Mocks Students in her Class at Stuyvesant, THHS Report on Jahoda Actions

[Stuyvesant] Freshman Audrey Hatch was participating in GLASS's annual Day of Silence on April 14 when.... her math teacher, Rosemarie Jahoda, made jesting comments about her and other students in class for their refusal to speak.....
"I found Ms. Jahoda and told her that I thought she was being rude and I wished she'd apologize," said Goldin. According to Goldin, things escalated from there, and disciplinary measures are now being taken against Goldin for his actions while confronting a faculty member.
.....May 15, 2003, http://stuyspectator.com/spectator/display.cgi?id=1224
“Change is always welcomed if the outcome is to improve things. Townsend Harris is a well-oiled machine. It has always been a well-oiled machine and that does not mean some things might need to be changed. There are directives that have to be adjusted to, but if all the plumbing in your house is working and maybe one faucet is leaking, you would just change the washer in the sink, you wouldn’t rip out all the pipes.” ...... THHS Chapter leader
One of our ace correspondents (who likes to remain anon) dug up this 2003 gem from the Stuy Spectator from Jahoda's past when she taught at Stuyvesant, pointing to her consistent disrespect for students.

And below that is a report from the current students at Townsend Harris chronicling the kinds of changes made by Jahoda that has caused the reaction there.

As the evidence piles up, we must not just demand that Jahoda be removed from Townsend Harris but not allowed to supervise or manage anyone in the DOE. I can just see them making her an ATR supervisor, where she will fit in quite comfortably with the other slugs. Note that Jahoda seems to have spent her career from teacher to AP to temp principal only in the top schools. No working at schools with struggling students for Jahoda because they would have slaughtered her.

I'll be back with another post with audio of Jahoda throwing the f-bomb despite denials, thus having students catch her in a blatant lie. Jonathan Halabi from New Action raised issues about the school at the UFT Ex Bd meeting last night and also called for actions against the Supt and deputy supt.
Student's Feelings Hurt by Teacher for Silent Protest During Class

Monday, December 19, 2016

It's a Wonderful Life Radio Show


We'll be using this calendar in 2017. Also have the 2016

I've written about one of my favorite movies before, most recently when we were in Seneca Falls in the Finger Lakes a few months ago -- (VA-CA Report: A Tour of the Finger Lakes).  We bought a bunch of movie memorabilia at the museum dedicated to the movie, a museum supported by the actress who played the little girl Zu Zu. I think they were even selling her petals. We thought of going back up a few weeks ago for the 75th anniversary at the museum but didn't make it.
check out Chaintheatre

Instead we went to a radio broadcast of the movie yesterday at a performance space in Long Island City by Chain Theatre Co (http://www.chaintheatre.org) and it was a wonderful experience. I love radio-type broadcasts, like Prairie Home Companion. Yesterday they had 8 actors playing all the roles.

On the Today Show, the 3 actors who played the kids were on and Matt Lauer talked about the values in the movie, but of course they didn't go near the epic battle between uber capitalist slumlord Potter and the semi-socialist views of George Bailey. That It's a Wonderful Life has a lot of lefty in it is ignored and the religious aspects are pushed. Many assume Frank Capra was a Roosevelt lefty but this NY Times review of a Capra bio says otherwise:
The film critic for London's Daily Express thought that Capra's political influence was potentially as great as Franklin D. Roosevelt's. And Capra was one of those rare Americans whose name became not only a household word but an adjective as well.

Audiences flocked to see "Capraesque" movies like "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and "Meet John Doe" -- parables of ordinary people forced to stand up against the greed and corruption of the rich and powerful. Those dramatic comedies, with their depictions of hardship, their "common man" heroes (usually Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper) and their celebrations of small-town virtues, gave expression to a country struggling to climb out of the Depression; they have, ever since their release, been identified with Roosevelt and the New Deal. Yet it is one of the great surprises of Joseph McBride's masterly, comprehensive and frequently surprising biography, "Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success," that the man who seemed to put the spirit of the New Deal on the screen was, in reality, a closet reactionary and a dogged Roosevelt hater.

Frank Capra managed to fool just about everyone; even his wife was unsure of his political affiliations. Longtime co-workers who were Democrats assumed he shared their political convictions. Katharine Hepburn, who starred in his 1948 picture "State of the Union," thought him "quite liberal"; others applied the term "radical" to him. And why shouldn't they have, when Variety was calling a sympathetic character in "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" "quasi-communistic" and The Saturday Evening Post was reporting that in the Soviet Union Capra was "hailed as a comrade"? But as Mr. McBride, the author of previous books on Howard Hawks, John Ford and Orson Welles, tells us, Capra was a lifelong Republican who never once voted for Roosevelt. He was an admirer of Franco and Mussolini. In later years, during the McCarthy period, he served as a secret F.B.I. informer.

In part, the misperception was due to Capra's writers, who generally ranged from New Deal Democrats to card-carrying Communists. One of Capra's great strengths as a director in the 1930's was his ability to work with anyone who had something to contribute to his pictures, even those who were far to his left. He was also enough of a popular entertainer to cater to his audiences; he understood that during the Depression the most hissable villains were grasping bankers and businessmen.

But ultimately the misunderstanding over Capra's politics seems to be a case of people seeing what they wanted to see. In his analysis of "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," Mr. McBride points out that the Gary Cooper character, far from being some sort of socialist or New Deal liberal, was, if anything, an "enlightened plutocrat" whose philosophy of voluntary giving was little different from that of Republican businessmen opposed to the New Deal; and he shrewdly notes that while Deeds got into trouble for trying to distribute most of the $20 million he inherited to desperate farmers, he was still planning to keep $2 million for himself.
 Here are links to some of my previous posts on the movie.

Not a Wonderful Life: Education Writer's Block
Dec 27, 2013 ... Well, the good news is that I can spend 3 hours tonight watching “It's a Wonderful Life” for the hundredth time,

The Hottest Love Scene in Film History - 
Dec 6, 2014 ... I'm a sucker for "It's a Wonderful Life" -

The Subprime Mortgage Crisis: It Was All George Bailey's Fault

Update on The Baileys and Potter
Can't resist today's cat photo.
Dec 25, 2008 ... As an adjunct to last night's post on It's A Wonderful Life, there is this item in today's business section of the NY Times. Jeffrey Goldfarb writes in ...


Beware Tainted Research from Brookings Institute - report on school integration has limited utility

"because most forms of school choice further segregation, the report's recommendation will likely only further segregation and inequality for students."... Great Lakes Review
Yes, Brookings Inst has a dog in the race -- to continuously try to prove school choice is the answer. The Great Lakes Reports say "wait just a minute."

Recent report on school integration has limited utility for policymakers, review finds

EAST LANSING, Mich. (Dec. 19, 2016) - An October report from the Center on Children and Families at Brookings attempted to compare various research findings on school segregation with a focus on expanding urban charter schools. The report argued that school quality is the primary determinant of student achievement, and that instead of addressing school segregation, policy should focus on improving the schools that students of color and low-income students attend. However, an academic review of the report finds the report has limited use for policymakers.
Erica Frankenberg, Penn State University College of Education, reviewed the report, Segregation, Race, and Charter Schools: What Do We Know?, for the Think Twice think tank review project. Think Twice, a project of the National Education Policy Center, is funded in part by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. Dr. Frankenberg's research has examined how the design of school choice policy affects racial and economic student stratification. This has included examining the segregation trends in charter schools as well as analyzing state and federal policy to understand why such patterns of segregation exist in charter schools.
Overall, Frankenberg says, "This report is more a distraction than a contribution." Despite its claimed attempt to investigate research findings on school segregation, the report suggests that policy attend to school quality via school choice.
In her review, Frankenberg finds that the report presents a false choice between school integration and creating high-quality urban charter schools. She indicates that the report is limited because of its selective review and interpretation of the literature on race and poverty, and its questionable conclusions that are not reflective of the research consensus.
Frankenberg concludes, "because most forms of school choice further segregation, the report's recommendation will likely only further segregation and inequality for students."
Find the full review on the web:
http://www.greatlakescenter.org
You can find the original report from Brookings on the web at:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/segregation-race-and-charter-schools-what-do-we-know/
Think Twice, a project of the National Education Policy Center, provides the public, policymakers and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
The review can also be found on the NEPC website:
http://nepc.colorado.edu

Saturday, December 17, 2016

Townsend Harris Protest Update: NY Times Joins in as PTA Calls for Jahoda's Endgame

Student reduced to tears after meeting with Principal Jahoda following an incident in November....

The co-presidents, Sangida Akter and Tahiya Choudhury, were meeting with Ms. Jahoda with the hope of having the administration draft a letter to the community that would reassure them that such incidents are not tolerated, but the meeting left them them feeling “uncomfortable” and with the impression that Ms. Jahoda showed more interest in protecting the school’s image than addressing their concerns. One of the two left the meeting crying.... Student report
NY Times
Townsend Harris High School is one of New York City’s most prestigious public schools, where 100 percent of students graduate on time and all of them are prepared for college, according to city metrics.  But in recent weeks, the academic powerhouse in Queens has felt a ripple of protest, as students, alumni and teachers have battled with the interim acting principal, agitating for her ouster. On Thursday, parents piled on....
A follow-up to my earlier post: Townsend Harris Students, Parents and Teachers Expose Acting Principal Rosemarie Jahoda and Dept Supt Leticia Pineiro

Soon after posting I opened up the NY Times and found this:

At Elite Queens High School, PTA Calls Embattled Principal ‘Rude’

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/nyregion/townsend-harris-high-school-principal-jahoda.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

I loved this part the best:
The resolution demanded that [Dep Supe] Ms. Pineiro and the city’s Education Department apologize to Townsend Harris students, and asked that Ms. Pineiro and the district’s superintendent [Elaine Lindsey] no longer oversee the school.
Note that the reporter doesn't ignore Jahoda's past:
This is not Ms. Jahoda’s first brush with controversy. In 2010, when she was an assistant principal at the Bronx High School of Science, another of the city’s elite schools, 20 of the 22 math teachers she oversaw filed complaints against her. In an official “fact-finding” report, an arbiter painted a jarring portrait of her dealings with teachers. The report said Ms. Jahoda had referred to one teacher as a “disgusting person,” and that teacher had called Ms. Jahoda a “dictator.” The head of labor relations for the Education Department at the time rejected the conclusions of the report.
How about naming the head of labor relations at the time and shaming for poor judgement? I'm sure if it was a negative report on a teacher, it wouldn't have been ignored.

Then there are these reports from students:

http://www.thhsclassic.com/2016/12/16/parent-teacher-association-calls-on-chancellor-farina-to-remove-ia-principal-jahoda-immediately-from-thhs/

http://www.thhsclassic.com/2016/12/15/student-reduced-to-tears-after-meeting-with-principal-jahoda-following-an-incident-in-november/

Townsend Harris Students, Parents and Teachers Expose Acting Principal Rosemarie Jahoda and Dept Supt Leticia Pineiro

Deputy Superintendent Leticia Pineiro talks down to students
I’m not [Former Principal] Anthony [Barbetta] and I’m not standing in the f*****g hallway.... Rosemarie Jahoda, acting principal Townsend Harris HS... Report from student web site ...
(http://www.thhsclassic.com/) --

Jahoda joins Pineiro
I am a parent of a student at Townsend. This is so disturbing to me and many other parents. I can tell you… the principal doesn’t leave a warm feeling like Barbetta did. There are definitely big shoes to fill. I heard from another parent that the position for a permanent principal is not listed on DOE, leaving us to believe that she has already been given the position. I signed the petition, but how effective would this be? What else can we the parents do to make this go away????
Help!... Parent email to Ed Notes.
UPDATED COMMENT:
this past thursday there was a PTA meeting at Townsend Harris HS and all the parents signed a resolution to demand that Jahoda not get appointed principal of THHS. Check out The Classic's Facebook page its all documented https://www.facebook.com/thhsclassic/
[Student made VIDEO  excerpts  below]
 
Another Farina outrageous appointment. And it's not just Jahoda but Dept Supt Pineiro and Supt Elaine Lindsey (who was supposed to show but didn't have the guts), both of whom were despised when they were in the Bronx.

We know the Farina method - to put people like Jahoda, who wiped out the entire math dept at Bronx HS of Science when she was an AP there, into schools to go after staff. Why else put someone with her history in charge of what many people thinks is the best high school in the city?

Funny thing is, that it is not a case of Jahoda's past coming back to bite her but of her consistent behavior since the got there in September --- showing she has learned nothing - and that the DOE coddles people like her, as does the CSA along with, sadly, the UFT. [See Eterno on ICE this morning -

The UFT must choose between supporting its members and playing political football - and it always chooses the latter. Bottom line to DeB - stop the mayhem of Jahoda-like appointments.

I wrote this on Ed Notes which I handed out at the DA on Weds:
Townsend HS Students, Parents Protest Rosemarie Jahoda Permanent Appointment as Principal

Carmen Farina has appointed yet another slug principal with a reputation for going after teachers, especially chapter leaders, this time to one of the city’s most prestigious schools.

Students held an in school protest last week – see FB video http://tinyurl.com/gmakjzu and a petition opposing the Jahoda appointment has 3500 signatures.
https://www.change.org/p/chancellor-farina-stop-rosemarie-jahoda-from-being-appointed-the-permanent-principal-of-townsend-harris-hs?recruiter=646940072&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink

What Does It Take To Get Promoted to Principal in NYC?
MORE’s Peter Lamphere as a math teacher and chapter leader at Bronx HS of Science, came under attack by Jahoda when he stood up to her when she went after almost the entire department, leading to most of the BHS math teachers leaving.

Peter ended up with 2-U ratings under Jahoda and BHS principal Valerie Reidy. He fought one off successfully and had to hire a private lawyer for the other. The UFT "solution" was to parachute Peter out of the school, not to engage in a hand to hand combat with Reidy and Jahoda. Peter was the chapter leader and these two engaged in a direct assault on the union for him doing what he was elected to do.

Read Peter’s entire piece at: http://nyceducator.com/2016/08/what-does-it-take-to-get-promoted-to.html#disqus_thread

UFT cow tows to the CSA
A UFT with guts would be picketing over the appointment of Jahoda as principal. And should contact the parents to protest. She is in the same vein of Monika Garg at CPEI -- a prototypical Farina rewarding people with a history of bad behavior and anti-unionism toward teachers and especially chapter leaders.

Today, the UFT should be picketing Farina for this appointment.

Jahoda is an education criminal for destroying the careers of so many teachers and harming so many students in the process. The UFT must stand up to stop people with a history of abuse and use media to expose them.
Isn't that what was done with Monika Garg at Central Park East 1? And she did the same at LaGuardia HS - in essence a vocational school for talented kids in the arts looking for careers - where the principal, who came from Townsend Harris - is trying to turn the school more towards academics -- which will turn kids and teachers away.
  
Townsend tudents have a web site  http://www.thhsclassic.com/  and here is a report from them:

Sources provide accounts of interim acting principal’s behavior

December 9, 2016

By Mehrose Ahmad and Sumaita Hasan, Managing Editor and Editor-In-Chief

In the recent sit-in that occurred at Townsend Harris High School, Deputy Superintendent Leticia Pineiro asked for evidence to support the claim that Interim Acting Principal Rosemarie Jahoda has harassed members of her staff. The Classic has confirmed evidence of such behavior.

We have obtained irrefutable evidence of a conversation in which the principal speaks in the following manner in response to a suggestion from a colleague that she be more present in the school’s halls: “Standing in the hallway is not gonna make a difference… I’m not [Former Principal] Anthony [Barbetta] and I’m not standing in the f*****g hallway. I’m not gonna do what Anthony did… I’m not gonna stand and hold the door open.”

In reference to this statement, Ms. Jahoda responded, “Let me explain something to you: I don’t talk like that. I don’t speak to people in that manner.”

Other sources, however, confirmed that “such language is not unusual.” Another said, that this type of discussion is “characteristic of their interactions,” explaining that the dismissive tone has led to a negative culture in the school, where ideas are disregarded and individuals feel harassed for expressing themselves.

In a wide range of conversations, we have heard specific examples of people in the building being spoken to in a manner that has been described as “rude and condescending.”

One source described interactions with the principal that were similarly dismissive and inappropriate as above and left the source in tears following the meeting. We confirmed that multiple individuals witnessed this source’s emotional response to the interaction.

Of the aforementioned example, Principal Jahoda stated, “I don’t recall that.”

Beyond the source that provided the evidence of the quotation about standing in the hallway, our sources were unwilling to consent to us providing specific quotations of their interactions with Principal Jahoda due to fear of retribution, but we can confirm that other such evidence exists. One person we spoke to said, “We believe she [Ms. Jahoda] would retaliate personally against us. I fear retaliation.”

Another person, when asked if they refrained from allowing us to provide specific quotations on the record due to fear of retribution said, “100%” and added, “I have heard clear indication [from the principal] that if you cross [her] path, you’ll get it. I’ve heard from many people about fear of retaliation.”
Look at the video: https://youtu.be/-Nnyf4Y7GIg

Published on Dec 10, 2016
Townsend Harris students held a sit-in on Thursday, 12/8 in protest of the potential appointment of Rosemarie Jahoda as the new principal of the school. Deputy Superintendent Pineiro interviewed students about their reasons for protesting; these interactions have since become controversial within the school community. Here are some clips from the event.



Ed Notes received this report from a Bronx teacher who has dealt with Pineiro and Lindsey re: the video:
That is Jahoda next to her. Pineiro  seems to browbeat the kids and to speak down to them. She puts words in their mouth's. She accuses the meek boy of being physically aggressive towards her. And that's bizarre because she's pushing a nasty [finger?] towards him.

The interactions with the kids or inappropriate beginning to end. If this were a classroom demeanor I would read it unacceptable – forget ineffective.

Near the end she tries to force a kid to clarify what the complaint is – and the kid says I don't feel comfortable saying it in front of Jahoda, and the supe keeps pushing her anyway

But from my point of you, the most of noxious part, is when the Boy says please speak with our teachers, let them explain how they're being harassed. And she says no you tell us how they're being harassed, and then accuses the boy of trying to represent the teachers. She says very clearly that she's focused not on what teachers have to say but on what students say.
====
https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20161209/flushing/townsend-harris-high-school-principal
QUEENS — Students and educators at Townsend Harris High School are outraged over the possibility that their interim principal might soon be installed permanently at the elite school on the Queens College campus in Flushing.

Students staged a sit-in on Thursday, live-streaming their protest on Facebook against Rosemarie Jahoda. Also, a change.org petition demanding Jahoda's ouster garnered more than 3,000 signatures in a few days.

“The principal of Townsend Harris High School should have a high respect for the humanities tradition, preferably with a background in the liberal arts and/or the classics,” the petition states. “Like Townsend Harris himself, the principal should be a first-rate diplomat, someone with an open-door policy who is approachable and serves as a natural magnet for students, teachers and parents.”
In three months that Jahoda has been interim acting principal, however, she has been a bad “fit,” many said.

“This semester, there have been rumors of numerous instances of faculty harassment, significant changes to programs and course offerings without input from the faculty and [Student Leadership Team], and as time has passed, less parent engagement,” the petition said. “Our children have not been insulated from this. Several have complained about her being aloof or even combative.”

In their dealings with Jahoda, teachers and students expressed frustrations over things like field trip procedures, creating uniform grading policies regardless of the level of coursework difficulty and lacking sufficient time when scheduling certain assignments, according to an article in the school newspaper, the Classic.

“Change is always welcomed if the outcome is to improve things,” Social Studies teacher and UFT Chapter Leader Franco Scardino told the Classic. “Townsend Harris is a well-oiled machine. It has always been a well-oiled machine and that does not mean some things might need to be changed. There are directives that have to be adjusted to, but if all the plumbing in your house is working and maybe one faucet is leaking, you would just change the washer in the sink, you wouldn’t rip out all the pipes.”

Jahoda did not immediately respond to request for comment.
DOE officials noted that the official principal hiring process, known as C-30, has yet to begin.

“Principal hiring and assignment decisions are made by the superintendent in accordance with the Chancellor’s Regulations, and based on consultations with members of the school community,” DOE spokesman Will Mantell said. “We listen closely to the feedback and concerns of all school communities, and engage them as part of the C-30 process.”

Friday, December 16, 2016

Mulgrew Pulls Scare Tactics Card on Opt Out Over Loss of Funding as Parents/Educators Point Out Untruths

Leonie Haimson:
No school or district lost funds last year when 95% of districts didn't make 95% participation rate. I guarantee they won't this year either. You can only cry wolf so many times. There is nothing about withholding funds; and it looks like John King’s ESSA regs will be junked anyway. See http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2016/12/gop_essa_accountability_teacher_prep_hit_list.html
Mulgrew slammed the opt out movement as threatening funding at the Delegate Assembly on Weds as reported here and here. 
But we knew that from the Unity Caucus leaflet from last June which led to a leading parent group, NYSAPE, to chastise Mulgrew, Parent Opt-Out Group Slams Mulgrew Over Unity
Caucus leaflet.


For decades I and others have maintained that our union leaders often function as agents of ed deform - the facilitators, the handmaidens of teacher evaluation systems, common core, charters, here. A complicated dance, trying to convince people to shove castor oil down their throats no matter how revolting?
testing, etc., while at the same time speaking out of the other side of their mouths in trying to convince the members they are opposing ed deform but at the same time arguing for some aspects of ed deform. Read about Mulgrew's passionate defense of the evaluation system

Does the UFT/AFT have a dog in the race? Opt out has scared the shit out of the deformers, yet our union leaders react like it is a plague. Why?

The Mulgrew quotes were put to a parent dominated listserve:
Q Will opt out put funds in danger? A Opt out is now dangerous. If 95% in a district don't participate in tests, ESSA law says funding can be withheld.
Q—Portability—Can they do that without ESSA, and will opt-out movement hinder us?

Opt-out now really dangerous, they will enforce 5% provision. They want to defund us. If we give them a reason….ESSA says we still must give standardized test and info must be public. Said civil rights community was very strong on that. Says feds have right to withhold Title one funding.
Here are some responses so far from a variety of people.

Sounds like the words of a sell-out and a coward.... NYC Principal
Another NYC Principal"
Based on what I know regarding ESSA, the withholding of funds is not on the table. Even Elia at this week's board of regent meeting did not mention the withholding of funds. She mentioned students receiving a score of not proficient. Which Betty and the regents were pushing back on.

Jia Lee, Chapter Leader:
He gets his direction from Randi. It's how she keeps local 1 (NYC/UFT), the largest voting block statewide and then nationally in the AFT, in line with whatever agreement that's been made with corporate bureaucrats. I smell desperation.  Meanwhile Randi values her connections to those very people, and perhaps it's because she knows the imminent threat to our union; at the same time, her own fears put us into ever more compromising positions. What we need is a resolve that goes beyond any fear tactics.

Teachers Is it true that Randi took a poll of UFT members last week and is ready to announce the union's re-election endorsement of deBlasio and Cuomo?  I understand she's holding off declaring support of Elizabeth Warren for Prez in 2020. Thinks that would be premature and not sure which way the wind is blowing.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Norm in The Wave: The Fallacies of School Choice Marketing Campaign, Part 1

The Fallacies of School Choice Marketing Campaign, Part 1
By Norm Scott

Published Dec. 16, 2016
In last week’s column (http://www.rockawave.com/news/2016-12-09/School_News/School_Scope.html)
I posted a letter from an anonymous Rockaway parent who disagreed with my stand on charter schools, vouchers, and Trump’s proposed education secretary, and school privatizer, Betsy DeVos. He feels that school choice is the answer to the problems our public school system faces. I will use the next batch of columns to try to elucidate why I oppose charter schools, vouchers, and any tax
credit for people sending their children to private and religious schools and why even a flawed public schools system is worth fighting for, while trying to fix the flaws. Balkanizing the schools and putting them under thousands of different management organizations, many of them out for a profit, will only
end up degrading all schools. (See Detroit where Betsy DeVos pushed through a system of totally unregulated schools that has lead to chaos.)

The parent contacted me through my blog and asked this
question. “Are you satisfied with the current state of public education (outside of the charter system) in NYC? If not, how would you improve the system?” Oy! This may take 10 years of columns. Let me say right up front. From almost the day I began teaching in Sept. 1967, it was clear the public school
system needed reform. By my 3rd year I also realized that the
teacher union, the UFT, often a partner with the then Board of Education in managing the schools, also needed reform and that if we wanted change we would have to address both. By 1970 I had become an educational activist which continues to this day. What to change the system to and how to do that has been up for discussion seemingly forever.

Now that I know there is at least one person who reads this column, I will address a bunch of the issues raised in future columns. But this time I want to explore the concept of public institutions.

Pretty much every part of the nation and every neighborhood in most urban areas have had an assumption over the past 150 years or more that there will be certain guaranteed public institutions. A police and fire station (though sometimes these are volunteers). A post office. Access to a hospital. Some sanitation services. Certainly, this has been true in New York City. These
institutions were built and managed by entities that were,
theoretically at least, under the control of a public process – people elected by us who were subject to some level of accountability. Both political parties pretty much signed up to support this concept.

Theorists like conservative economist Milton Friedman and the libertarian movement opposed many of these concepts of public services run by government. The idea of a public school system was one of the first institutions to come under attack (as has the postal service). After Regan’s election in 1980, privatizing interests began to see the trillion dollars spent on public schools as an enormous source of revenue. Thus was born the school choice movement. I will drill down a bit next time. Meanwhile, I urge my one reader (and any others) to check out these two recent articles in the NY Times.

New York Charters
Enroll Fewer Homeless Pupils Than City Schools
(http://tinyurl.com/z5uv8ya)
“…in at least 21 of
the 29 geographic school districts in the city that have charters, every charter had a lower percentage of students in temporary housing last year than the average among the traditional public schools in the same district.”

Here is an excerpt of Dec. 12, 2016 NY Times article, How Trump’s Education Nominee Bent Detroit
to Her Will on Charter Schools
(http://tinyurl.com/zpc2vlq):
“Detroit Public Schools, [DeVos] argued, should simply be shut down and the system turned over to charters, or the tax dollars given to parents in the form of vouchers to attend private schools. ‘She is committed to an ideological stance that is solely about the free market, at the expense of practicality and the basic needs of students in the most destabilized environment in the country,’ said
Tonya Allen, the president of the Skillman Foundation…. Most charters have failed to improve on the dismal performance of the traditional public schools. High-performing national charter networks have stayed away because of the instability of the market. that will mean shutting down mostly traditional public schools, which in Detroit serve the neediest students, and further desert students in neighborhoods where charters have largely declined to go. “My complaint around this is not that you disagree,” said Ms. Allen, “but that you never could come up with another solution to deal with the practical issues of poor public policy that is not only eroding a traditional school system, but eroding all schools.”

Norms keep searching for answers and finding few at
ednotesonline.com

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

American History: Interfere in Elections Everywhere

What a hoot about the outrage regarding interference in elections for a guy who majored in history. The CIA was built on interfering in election everywhere in the world, even using assassination where necessary. Chile and helping put in brutal dictatorships is just one example -- and the role our own AFT played in helping undermine left unions, as George Schmidt exposed in his pamphlet.

So let's calm down here. They may have done it and if we could do it in Russia to overthrow Putin we would in a heartbeat. I just heard Stephen F. Cohen on Brian Lehrer -- Cohen has taken the other side on the Putin issue, as have many on the left who see American aggressive imperialism at work. https://www.thenation.com/authors/stephen-f-cohen/ and read this piece: Neo-Mcarthyism and the New Cold War.

As with anything, we need to hear all sides of an issue to make rational decisions. Fred Klonsky touched on America's history of intervention.

The United States does have a well-documented history of interfering and sometimes interrupting the workings of democracies elsewhere. It has occupied and intervened militarily in a whole swath of countries in the Caribbean and Latin America and fomented coups against democratically elected populists.
The most infamous episodes include the ousting of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 — whose government was replaced by an authoritarian monarchy favorable to Washington — the removal and assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961, and the violent toppling of socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende, whose government was swept aside in 1973 by a military coup led by the ruthless Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The Washington Post... Fred Klonsky,  Sunday’s hard rain.

Monday, December 12, 2016

An underappreciated fact about the 2016 election: The massive generation gap

Obama carried the under-30 vote by 34 percentage points in 2008 and by 23 points in 2012, according to the national exit polls. Hillary Clinton may have lacked Obama’s (and Bernie Sanders’s) personal appeal among younger voters, but she still carried the under-30 vote by an 18-point margin over Trump, according to the 2016 exit polls.
....Now that it is the Democratic Party that is becoming more Sun Belt than Rust Belt, that is the favored party of revitalized urban metropolises and centers of innovation such as the high-tech sector, and that is more attuned to the millennial-generation cultural zeitgeist, older conservatives exhibit a shaken faith in the wisdom of popular majorities....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/12/10/an-under-appreciated-fact-about-the-2016-election-the-massive-generation-gap/?postshare=4621481490312381&tid=ss_fb&utm_term=.537d558bd78a


Here's a piece offering some hopes to the Democrats sent to my by my pal Harris. I'm not so sure about this analysis. The focus on the youth vote has a few holes.
2008- Obama wins by 34%
2012- Obama wins by 23%
2016 - Hillary wins by 18%

What will 2020 show? and what about the yutes that age out? As people age a chunk often shifts right.

And this piece doesn't answer why Bernie got the support of more young people than Hillary did - and don't forget the numbers of young who did not even vote. Enthusiasm counts and so does the message. Think of it - Bernie is older than Hillary and male. Duh! One would think that given the choice.... so why not analyze why.

Now I believe people who voted for Trump or 3rd party to spite the Democrats or over Hillary hatred will come to regret it. Dems may suck too but if you don't think that there is a difference between ruth Bader Ginsberg and  the slugs to come or the slugs like Clarence Thomas or the late Scalia -- or that the cabinet people this time are the same as under Obama you are living in a dream - soon to turn into a nightmare --

An underappreciated fact about the 2016 election: The massive generation gap https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/12/10/an-under-appreciated-fact-about-the-2016-election-the-massive-generation-gap/?postshare=4621481490312381&tid=ss_fb&utm_term=.537d558bd78a

 
Since the election last month, we have seen a parade of analyses examining how Clinton supporters differ from Trump supporters by race, education and geographic residence. The persistence of partisan differences by age in American elections, however, has received somewhat less attention.

Younger voters, who first demonstrated a notable relative preference for the Democratic Party in the 2004 presidential election, swung even further toward the Democrats in the two Obama elections. Obama carried the under-30 vote by 34 percentage points in 2008 and by 23 points in 2012, according to the national exit polls. At the same time, voters over the age of 50 collectively preferred Republican nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney to Obama in both of his successful national campaigns.
Hillary Clinton may have lacked Obama’s (and Bernie Sanders’s) personal appeal among younger voters, but she still carried the under-30 vote by an 18-point margin over Trump, according to the 2016 exit polls, while voters over the age of 45 opted for Trump by nine points — confirming that the contemporary political generation gap will outlast the Obama era.

This is a significant divide by historical standards. None of the 1960s-era elections produced a comparable partisan difference, despite the decade’s prominent youth-led protest movements and memorable “don’t trust anyone over 30″ rhetoric. According to Gallup data, Hubert Humphrey led Richard Nixon in 1968 among voters under 30 by only nine points, 47 percent to 38 percent, while voters over the age of 50 preferred Nixon by just six points (47 percent to 41 percent). So Trump performed about as well among young voters in a two-person contest as Nixon did in a three-way race.

Many of the most prominent political issues of our time include a generational dimension separating the left-leaning young from their more conservative elders. Social issues such as gay rights and drug legalization divide Americans sharply by age. The Affordable Care Act drew its fiercest opposition from the elderly — who already enjoyed Medicare benefits and thus perceived little collective benefit in expanding health-care access to younger citizens. Climate change is of greater concern to those who stand to inherit the planet than to those who rule it today. Democratic candidates frequently tout their plans for enhancing college affordability and access to child care; Republicans seldom discuss these topics. Conservative efforts to lower federal tax rates on high incomes also stand to primarily benefit older — and disproportionately wealthier — voters.
 More broadly, the 2016 election exposed a key divide in the American electorate between nationalism and internationalism, between a preference for traditional social hierarchies and an attraction to new social norms. The themes of cultural nostalgia and alienation adopted by the Trump campaign were particularly primed to appeal to older generations feeling increasingly out of place in contemporary society and preferring a bygone past of perceived American “greatness” defined by a rejection of “political correctness” at home and an adherence to military and economic unilateralism abroad.

Just as the Brexit referendum in Britain passed over the opposition of a younger generation of Britons much more at ease with European integration than their parents and grandparents, the oldest incoming president in American history assembled a narrow electoral coalition that is heavily weighted toward his own age cohort. There’s no particular reason to believe that he will govern in a manner that increases his appeal to those who did not support his candidacy. A Pew survey released this week found Trump with a favorable rating of just 24 percent among respondents aged 18-29 and 25 percent among those aged 30-49, compared with 47 percent among 50-to-64-year-olds and 54 percent among the 65-and-over population.

Ronald Reagan’s famous “optimism” was to some degree an assured belief that the future belonged to conservatives. A more extensive elucidation of this view, complete with accompanying data, can be found in any number of the essays written by Michael Barone in the 1980s for the Almanac of American Politics. Barone viewed Reagan’s electoral success as proof that a majority of American voters had come to recognize the fundamental flaws of liberalism and were acting together to push their country in a rightward direction. The Democrats, according to Barone, were the party of declining central cities, out-of-fashion hippie relics, and Rust Belt anachronism; the Republicans were the party of burgeoning suburbs, private-sector innovators, and Sun Belt futurism.

Importantly, in Barone’s view, conservatives were winning the hearts and minds of younger Americans, who could be expected to take up Reagan’s torch and advance it still further through subsequent decades. As Barone and Grant Ujifusa wrote in the 1990 edition of the Almanac, “[t]he young voters of the 1980s, Republican strategists hope, and Democratic strategists fear, will carry their sunny Republicanism into the 2030s and 2040s.”
Young people may still be sunny these days, but Republicanism is decidedly not. The victories of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama damaged conservatives’ confidence that they spoke for an enduring popular majority, and the main conservative objectives of shrinking the size and scope of government, establishing American military supremacy abroad, and promoting morally traditionalist attitudes among the American public have all, to varying degrees and for varying reasons, remained unfulfilled in the years since Reagan departed the national stage.

When combined with the continuing leftward evolution of American culture in the realms of race, gender, religion and sexuality, these developments have left many conservatives — including the current president-elect — warning darkly of the imminent destruction of the United States as we know it, which in turn justifies increasingly aggressive challenges from the right to established political norms and institutions.

Now that it is the Democratic Party that is becoming more Sun Belt than Rust Belt, that is the favored party of revitalized urban metropolises and centers of innovation such as the high-tech sector, and that is more attuned to the millennial-generation cultural zeitgeist, older conservatives exhibit a shaken faith in the wisdom of popular majorities. Barone himself has taken to explicitly arguing in favor of the electoral college precisely because it might act — as it did in 2016 — to thwart the will of a national plurality that he finds ideologically and demographically uncongenial. Other Republicans have responded to social change by advocating restrictions on access to the ballot that disproportionately affect young and nonwhite citizens, to further tilt the electoral system away from their political opponents.

As the Republican victories of 2014 and 2016 confirm, there is no youth-led “permanent Democratic majority,” in part because our electoral rules and institutions tend to provide Republicans with a built-in advantage in close elections. Plus, there are simply lots and lots of baby boomers and pre-boomers, and they vote more reliably than their children and grandchildren.

But if the young will respond to Trump’s ascendance by resenting the disproportionate political and economic power of the right-leaning old, the old will continue to resent the increasing cultural power of the left-leaning young. The power of the presidency simply does not extend to authority over the national culture, and the institutions that do exert substantial cultural influence — the news media, entertainment industry, educational system, and so forth — can be expected to serve as centers of resistance to Trump and Trumpism.

Cultural backlash can be a powerful tool for winning elections, but it’s very hard to actually deliver on promises to move an entire society back in time.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About Identity Politics - NY Mag

...racial justice and gender equality cannot be achieved without confronting economic inequality — not when people of color and women are overrepresented among the financially disadvantaged. And it’s difficult to see how the Democratic Party will ever take aggressive action to combat inequality, unless its downscale wing becomes both larger and more class conscious.   Any discourse that encourages working-class voters to see social democratic
policies as irrelevant to their struggles does more to protect economic privilege than to promote social justice....
NY Mag, What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About Identity Politics

This NY Mag piece is one of the better ones I've read in analyzing the Bernie vs Hillary campaign vis a vis identity and class politics. (I included 2 graphics that represent both sides of the constant battle.) Under the guise of the Clinton allies criticizing Bernie for not paying attention to identity politics - and he was not artful in addressing this issue - the real undercurrent was his calls for income distribution, which given the number of Dem Party wealthy supporters, was a no-no. We can't ignore race -- I've asked white guys time and again - some who have racist ideas -- if you and Obama were walking down a street - and you are holding a bazooka - and Obama carries a briefcase - who gets stopped by cops? They just don't answer -- but this article also points out that the higher economic status black people reach, the less contact they have with the criminal justice system -- though obviously there will always be Sandra Blands whose story has been used as a battering ram. But Bernie offered a unifying economic theme and Trump walked in and stole the thunder with a divisive theme.

This captures some of the essence of the article below:
....in Reed’s framing, Sanders’s calls for expanding the social welfare state and taking a more adversarial approach to financial regulation are less relevant to the average black family than the way the senator’s plan for free state college would undermine private, historically black colleges and universities; even though only 2 percent of black college students attend such institutions, and Sanders expressed openness to amending his proposal to accommodate such schools..... Sanders was rarely eloquent in connecting his economic message to the lived experience of black voters.
Less concerning than Clinton’s attempt to exploit this weakness, was the way her narrative was internalized and amplified by some advocates of social justice — and has, thus, outlived her campaign.
And this:
The problem with class-blind identity politics.
At a debate in February, Sanders was asked if he thought race relations would improve under his administration.
“Absolutely,” the senator replied. “Because what we will do is say, instead of giving tax breaks to millionaires, we’re going to create millions of jobs for low-income kids.”
Legal analyst and racial-justice advocate Imani Gandy derided Sanders’s answer, tweeting, “Sandra Bland HAD a goddamn job. She still ended up dead. Jobs is not the solution.”...
But her specific critique is unsatisfying for a few reasons. For one, it’s not clear why criminal-justice reform is considered a “racial issue,” while expanding federal employment or the social safety net is not: None of these reforms target racial disadvantage explicitly, but all would disproportionately benefit people of color.... And “Sandra Bland had a job” remains a favorite slogan among some advocates for racial justice. (As does the considerably more asinine “Goldman Sachs didn’t shoot Michael Brown.”)
ASIDE: [By the way -- to show you the ties between our UFT/AFT leaders and the Hillary wing of the party -- anytime the left-leaning opposition bring up income or class issues - the leadership red flags go up - literally - they redbait - there go those socialists - or maybe Bolsheviks - again - class warfare. But Bernie was about class unity and he tried to talk past an often divisive identity political argument.]

Here are some highlights I extracted but read the whole article.
[Clinton] framed Sanders’s emphasis on the importance of economic redistribution as an affront to the causes of racial, gender, and LGBT equality. “Not everything is about an economic theory, right?” Clinton asked a crowd in Nevada this past February. “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism?” Clinton went on to ask whether forcing Wall Street’s largest firms to separate their commercial and investment banking wings would “end sexism” and “discrimination against the LGBT community” or “make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”
Her supporters didn’t think so.
----
Clinton’s “single-issue” charge wasn’t grounded in Sanders’s neglect of racial and gender equality in policy terms. Rather, it referred to the greater rhetorical emphasis he placed on issues of redistribution — and the attendant implication that economic justice is a central, unifying concern for Democrats of all colors and genders. It was an objection to the politics of class solidarity.

------

For the left to overcome its infighting and realize the promise of the rainbow coalition, it will need to be on guard against this particular brand of liberalism; because an identity politics that disdains class solidarity is one that will fail the most vulnerable members of the marginalized groups it claims to represent....  the growth of the Democrats’ upscale wing has coincided with a vast increase in economic inequality.... The class divide within the Democratic Party is growing at the same time that the divide between classes in the United States is doing the same..... a Democratic Party increasingly divided between a predominately white professional class, and a largely nonwhite working class, left-wing identity politics

Rahm Emanuel was saying "Fuck the UAW" from his perch at the White House (as Barack Obama's Chief of Staff) long before Donald Trump was Tweeting attacks on the Steelworkers Union head - George Schmidt

I suspect that many people who claim to be "progressives" will have the same kind of self-serving amnesia about the incoming administration as they did in blaming "No Child Left Behind" for the attacks on public education during the first five or six years of the Obama administration.... George Schmidt
George sent out this missive to his email list this morning - for the Obama apologists over, if not open attacks on unions - other than teacher unions - by default. But let's not forget Democrat Rahm Emanuel's FU to Karen Lewis. The neglect of the unions by both the Clinton and Obama admins and Democratic Party in general is part of the equation of the Trump victory. Yet the unions are branded as part of the fabric of the Dem Party, in particular our own AFT/UFT/NYSUT.

Here is George's full comment.
HYPOCRISIES AND IDIOCIES. I can't wait to watch the December 7 Board meeting and to witness myself the stuff I missed. The corruption of Forrest Claypool and Ronald Marmer should remind us that Rahm Emanuel was saying "Fuck the UAW" from his perch at the White House (as Barack Obama's Chief of Staff) long before Donald Trump was Tweeting attacks on the Steelworkers Union head from the President-elect's perch. 

As I read the hyperventilating about the upcoming Trump administration, I'm reminded that it was only eight years ago that Barack Obama sat with Arne Duncan at the "Dodge School of Excellence" (an AUSL "turnaround" school) and announced that Arne would move from the great job he had done as CEO of CPS to the job of U.S. Secretary of Education. I suspect that many people who claim to be "progressives" will have the same kind of self-serving amnesia about the incoming administration as they did in blaming "No Child Left Behind" for the attacks on public education during the first five or six years of the Obama administration. If you're still wondering, you can read BACK ISSUES at Substance or re-watch "Waiting for Superman" as a couple of many reminders.

Friday, December 9, 2016

School Scope: Parent Objects to My Position on School Choice

Published Dec. 9, 2016 in The WAVE, http://www.rockawave.com/news/2016-12-09/School_News/School_Scope.html

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School Scope: Parent Objects to My Position on School Choice
By Norm Scott

The WAVE received a letter commenting on my column (Vouchers are Coming, Vouchers are Coming!)  link - http://www.rockawave.com/news/2016-12-02/School_News/School_Scope.html regarding the privatization agenda of Donald Trump and his proposed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The author, a public school parent, wrote, “If you publish my remarks please omit my name to protect my daughter.” Since The WAVE doesn’t print anonymous letters, I’m using this column to print the letter here. The facts stated in the letter about school performance have not been verified since we do not know what school his daughter attends. I understand the position of a parent who has a negative view of the zoned school his child attends and feels vouchers and charters and religious schools are better options and calls for the oft-misused “choice” as an answer. The letter also touches on a number of other issues, including my attack on Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos – too many to respond in one column. So I will do a series of responses over the next few columns.

For today I’ll just say there is a direct correlation between student performance and family economic means, no matter what the school. Thus a school with high numbers of students with high poverty levels will look bad statistically even if per student spending looks high on paper. The average is often bumped up by the high costs of addressing special needs students. Here is a quick breakdown of average costs per student in the NYC schools.

District Name: New York City Department Of Education
Instructional Costs per Student: $16,177, 80%
Instructional Salaries per Student:$8,677, 43%
Instructional Employee Benefits per Student:$4,792, 24%
Other Instructional per Student: $2,708, 13%
Support Services Costs per Student: $4,099, 20%
Total Instructional & Support Costs per Student: $20,276
- See more at: http://www.cbcny.org/sites/default/files/InstructionalAndSupportMap.html#sthash.LVcneTy2.dpuf

The ultimate aim of putting schools in the hands of privatizers is to lower the costs of the teaching staff. In one public school in Brooklyn co-occupied by Eva Moskowitz’  Success Academy charter chain, which has 40 schools in the city only one teacher remains after 3 years. How good an idea is it to have massive teacher churn with inexperienced and often non-certified and untrained teachers? Taking money out of public schools to give vouchers to people to go to religious schools on a national level would be a massive violation of the separation of church and state that was one of the basics of the establishment of this nation, where many settlers were running away from religious persecution and didn’t want to see the state playing any official role.
Check out a piece written by Howard Schwach, former WAVE editor and founder of this School Scope column, published at his On Rockaway web site where he touches on democracy and public schools. “I have often written that public education is the touchstone of our democracy. If kids or all races and religions are not brought together for their school years, they will never understand each other and democracy will suffer. There is a broad consensus in America that public schools must be protected, despite the fact that many are struggling to fulfill their core mission of educating all children.” Howie also delves into Betsy DeVos’ path of destruction which has left Michigan schools in disarray: https://onrockaway.com/commentary-trumps-education-commissioner-pick-wants-to-destroy-public-education-and-thats-not-hyperbole/.

Here is the parent’s letter – I hope to have some more dialogue with him and he’s welcome to contact me for a chat.

Let's Try School Choice
“Mr. Scott’s recent editorial objected to school vouchers because he believes it will create a withering away of our public education and our democracy.  I hate to break this to him, but our public education is already broken and our representative republic is in danger.  New York City spends over $23,000 per student per year, and yet my daughter’s zoned school has a passing rate of 11% in English and 7% in math on the statewide exams.  At our nearest high school, only 11% of the students graduate college-ready.  I have concluded that too often the education bureaucracy is more interested in the needs of the people that work for the institution than helping children.  This is a cruel disservice to the taxpayer, country, and most importantly to our children.

Too often quality public education in our country is dependent on the ability to live in affluent communities.  I see too many parents take on too much debt to live near a quality school.  I see too many working poor parents spend too much precious money on prep programs hoping to get their children into quality schools.  Every child in the United States deserves an opportunity to be educated to their abilities regardless of their parent’s income.

Ad Hominem attacks on the Secretary of Education nominee, attacking people’s motives for their votes, attacking private schools, or attacking religious schools does not help your argument.  The harsh reality is our current education system is failing and major changes are needed. I can only conclude that this systematic failure requires a complete overhaul of our education system.  Expanding school choice is best way to reach children of all socio-economic levels and is the most efficient way to realign our education system to the needs of the actual students.  Charter schools and vouchers need to be tried and, where successful, should be built upon and expanded.”

Norm spews ad Hominem attacks daily at ednotesonline.org.