Saturday, May 12, 2012

Something Scary Happened Last Night « Diane Ravitch's blog

Something Scary Happened Last Night « Diane Ravitch's blog:


Something Scary Happened Last Night

I got an email last night from Leo Casey at the United Federation of Teachers, informing me that the UFT had just received a dump of emails from the New York City Department of Education, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Leo noticed that Deborah Meier and I were mentioned several times in the emails and so he shared the trove with us.

Pretty ugly stuff. Read it here, in two parts, if you can open a google document:

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1Ghj5xYLG5Ka0c2RUJLWHhNSmM

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1Ghj5xYLG5KcjZTem95WjZnUUU

The first thing I noticed was the chummy exchanges between the public officials in change of the New York City public school system and the top dogs of the charter leadership–the Wall Street hedge fund managers, the leader of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the leader of the New York City Charter Center, and various others. It comes clear that there is a strong and concerted effort to hand over as much public space as possible to the charters. The charter leaders are not the poor and oppressed of New York City; they are the powerful and monied, and the public officials who are paid to protect and support the PUBLIC schools of New York City are