Letters to Obama

Today I found that Diane Ravitch and Anthony Cody have sent the 400 or so letters to Obama that they collected this month.  We of course had hoped there would be many many more. They were accompanied by the petition to Dump Duncan which I think has 6000 signatures.   While some may feel this is not a good time to approach and reproach Obama since he is running a seemingly close race against Romney, others feel that in fact he needs to know how teachers feel betrayed by him and the class he seems to represent.  He has furthered the cause of privatization of our schools, high-stakes testing, value added assessment of teachers, and more.  He and Duncan are destroying our public schools and of course, leading to the destruction of our unions.

I was also honored to find that my favorite blogger, Fred Klonsky, published my letter on his blog today.   He is so thoughtful, humorous, artistic, talented, intelligent, and more.

The letters can be accessed here.

Here is my letter:

Letter 1
October 17, 2012
President Barack Obama Dear Mr. Obama:
I am a retired teacher and teacher librarian, a mother, and a grandmother. I have worked in education for forty years. I attended all public schools in Los Angeles and went on to a fine public university for both undergraduate and graduate school. I have seen our schools go from places of nurture and caring that provided every subject a child needs, to essentially institutions that teach to the test and discourage creativity. As a teacher I chose to work in the areas of Los Angeles that were considered most dangerous and poverty-stricken. I felt that I was needed there more and I could do the most good.
So far you and your education secretary Arne Duncan act as if most teachers are lazy and unable to teach our students. I find this shocking and outright treasonous. You are judging something about which you know not. Neither you nor Arne Duncan have any idea what it is like to teach in most of our inner city schools. Neither you nor Arne Duncan attended any of these schools, much less rubbed shoulders with the students who are struggling just to get through the day. And, therefore, you haven’t seen what teachers do to keep our students in school, to try to reach them, help them with problems that are beyond monstrous in some cases. We encounter children who are homeless, victims of physical and sexual abuse, victims of neglect, and more. Our children are in neighborhoods where they encounter drive-by shootings and murder. Getting from home to school and back again is a torture.
We are lucky if our students can read by third grade. We are really fortunate if their parents taught them well in their first language so that learning a second language is much easier. Most of the time our students don’t have time to read a book, don’t have parents who can take time off from their two or three jobs to take their children to the library. And they certainly don’t have enough money for a home library.
Do you look at the statistics? Do you see who does well in school and who doesn’t and WHY? It isn’t because we can’t teach. The same teachers teaching the high scoring students are teaching the ones who score the lowest. And often these are the best and most caring teachers. Otherwise they would have gone to a private school at LOWER PAY to get away from the poverty belt.
More high stakes testing, more teaching to the test, and more stunted classrooms with 45 students in them, no art, music, PE or libraries – these conditions will not raise the level of our students. They will do the opposite.

Listen to the experts in Finland. Look at what they do and how they value their teachers. And begin to implement some of THEIR policies and see if our children don’t do better.
But first of all, address the need for decent jobs for our students’ parents, and the need to adequately fund our schools and libraries. Speak to the real pressing needs of our country; stop waging wars in other lands and sending drones to kill innocents. Stop giving money to bail out the banks and start hiring people to rebuild our bridges, roads, schools and parks. Put the money where it is going to benefit the majority and not the 1%.
AND MOST OF ALL, LISTEN TO REAL EXPERTS IN EDUCATION!
They will tell you what I am telling you in this letter, only more eloquently.
Joan Kramer
40- year educator
Haven’t stopped fighting yet 

I hope other teachers will write the President and keep up the fight for our schools, our students, our unions, our communities, and our future.

Sleazy Deasy's Effort to Control LAUSD

May 8th - attended a LAUSD Board Meeting to protest cuts to libraries, nurses, counselors, psychologist, etc. etc. etc.  Sat through two and a half hours of a staged presentation by so-called Dr. Sleasy Deasy.  He literally hired a local group to come and support him in cutting the hours and credits and teachers required for graduating from high school.  He also required that students earn a "C" average whereas formerly a "D" would do.  Only La Motte and Kayser argued against him.  The community group was the scariest of all because they were voting against their own children.  Clearly Dr. Sleaze wants to cut out kids who are failing so that the LAUSD scores will go up.  He wants to cut teachers and destroy the union so he can hire all Teach For America idiots.  This has to be the most destructive person who has hit LAUSD.  And this is because Monica Garcia and other board members took money when asked to make Deasy the sleaze ball head of the district.  DUMP MONICA is our first task to fight this.  We must change the forces on the Board and get people such as Kayser and La Motte -- the only ones who vote for teachers and students.  Here is a link to my speech that got caught on TV somehow.  I was just expressing my outrage at Deasy and the news picked it up.  Tokofsky said it best:  Deasy does a "fire, ready, aim" rather than studying what is really needed.

The Inquisition Begins Again 2012

Last time I wrote it was June 2011 after the inquisition of my Teacher Librarian colleagues by the LAUSD lawyers.  Starting this Monday, April 23, my friend will once again be interrogated by the lawyers in a hearing to defend their right to keep their jobs, or any job for that matter.  The district has decide not to fund:  any Libraries, any Adult Education, any Pre-K programs, and much much more. 11,000 teachers apparently received the notorious "pink-slip".

The scary part this time is that our new Superintendent John Deasy is such a bully that no one has planned any actions, no one is sending letters, no one is speaking out except for a few isolated demonstrations on behalf of Adult Educ. or Pre-K.  This is not a way to win.  But Deasy et al have threatened to use any action or writing or speaking out against an employee.  He has already proven what a bully he is when he entered the classroom of a substitute teacher and didn't like what she was doing and said so. She politely asked him to leave.  He fired her immediately.  Substitutes have little protection.  Outrageously Deasy had the nerve to show up at the free screening of the movie "Bully" shown to 6000 LAUSD students.  I guess being top bully he should have had a lot to say.  He constantly lies and changes direction to suit his needs. After all, he purchased his PhD.  What does that say about him or about Monica Garcia who chose him along with her Gates/Eli Broad lackey friends.  Recall Monica Garcia is in full swing right now.  We need to elect at least one more decent educator to help Bennett Kayser and Marguerite LaMotte defeat the forces of privatization.

Elena is starting kindergarten Monday Sept. 13th

Elena is starting kindergarten on Monday and I don't have enough words to express how worried I am about her and the fate of education in general. There is a sinister force at work on the land and unfortunately some of the "best" minds are in charge. Bill Gates with his gazillions is funding the effort to privatize education, destroy teacher and classified unions, and generally dumb down education to a teach-to-the-test mode. I write about this a great deal and think about it every day. I do believe it's the reason our libraries are going away -- libraries help create critical thinkers and life-long learners. Gates and his ilk don't want people who can really critique a society that is now so inequitable that children are going to sleep hungry, families are losing their homes, and people who have worked all their lives are no longer employed or employable. Closer to home what this means is that Sleazy Deasy (Dr. he says), a Gates man, is poised to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District when the current superintendent steps down next June. Cortines was also in the pockets of the rich -- very ambitious for himself and willing to take money that most of us saw as unethical (such as $150,000 a year from Scholastic, a company that makes a huge profit off our schools). But Cortines at least is an educator. Most of the folks now making decisions for our children do not know anything about education. Witness the Los Angeles Times -- the reporters who went into the classrooms to "judge" the teachers only did so because they knew what "value added" score each teacher already had and judged accordingly. They admitted on KPFK radio last week that they really weren't competent (my word) to judge educators. Yet, their story stands, and everyone thinks it will benefit education that these scores are printed in the Times. In my own experience, some of the best, most interesting and inspiring teachers, are not the ones who "teach to the test" so their students' scores may be lower. So what! Will Elena still love to learn, love to investigate, love to sit and pay attention as she does now? I have my doubts. I will do everything I can to continue her love of learning. We need all teachers, parents, education workers to unite and defeat this effort to destroy education. Check out this link to the group California Advocates United to Save Education (CAUSE) and a group that is calling for a Million teacher mark for July 30, 2011. Please get involved!

LA TIMES BLASTS TEACHERS

Today's Los Angeles Times has a feature story that is sure to upset everyone involved: parents, teachers, and school administrators. While purporting to analyze teacher effectiveness, in fact it will simply embarrass many excellent teachers who DON'T TEACH TO THE TEST and continually try to find ways to motivate children to learn. Are there bad teachers? Yes -- just as there are BAD administrators, newspaper columnists, rich men (ELI BROAD) who think they know everything and really know very little, doctors, nurses, etc. Are any of these others being graded, IN PUBLIC, and in such a demeaning and hurtful way? No! Are workers in private industry really paid according to their productivity? Not really. The goal of this article as well as Bill Gates, Antonio Villaraigosa, Secretary of Education Duncan, and many other rich and powerful people is to bring down the unions, make hiring and firing of teachers an arbitrary and punitive process. It has already begun without visible success.

And yesterday I heard an interview on KPFK with the CEO of Green Dot about their work at Locke High School, one of the worst schools in Los Angeles. What have they done? Spent millions, ejected the worst kids (something regular public schools CANNOT do), and still have not made obvious strides in "student achievement". The saddest part of this to me is that student achievement ONLY means test scores and nothing else. This is not the world of schooling that I want my granddaughter to face, yet she will be starting in September at a presumably high-scoring school in our neighborhood. I only hope that she does not get completely turned off of learning.

SAVE CALIFORNIA SCHOOL LIBRARIES

I've been back from Costa Rica for two months. So far it has been non-stop trying to restore central funding for library aides (paraprofessionals) in LAUSD elementary schools, and Teacher Librarians in the middle schools. It has been an uphill battle. Our district does not value libraries, does not mention libraries in any literature about cuts to our schools. From the superintendent, board members, to the teachers' and aides' unions, there is no concern that our children will not have equal access to books and computer literacy in our vast, and multicultural district. Our students have few books at home if any, and little access to bookstores. In addition, our public libraries are cutting hours. This is a crime! We have written and advocated all over Los Angeles. We have collected over 1700 letters in support from the public. What will happen to our students who are already behind in their educational level? No access to books means no access to developing a love of reading and becoming life long learners.