News for Educational Workers

The Board of Trustees of The City University of New York (CUNY) made total fools of themselves in May when they voted against the offer of an honorary degree to Tony Kushner by John Jay College of Criminal Law, one of the CUNY campuses. Led by Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who called Kushner a “Jewish-anti-Semite” for Kushner’s position on Israel, the CUNY Board caved in, with one member even admitting that he had never heard of the Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and Emmy Awards winner (The Nation, May 30, 2011). For an understanding of Wiesenfeld’s objections to Kushner, see The New York Times, May 5, 2011, and for a detailed description of the Board’s decision and Kushner’s response to the Board, see www.thejewishweek.com (May 3 and 4, 2011).

Academic and public protest quickly made the CUNY Board reconsider, but not before bringing up memories of Roy Cohn and the McCarthy era, as well as current polarities over the Israel/Palestine conflict and issues of free speech (truthdig, May 10, 2011). For an extensive summary of the Kushner/ CUNY affair, see CUNY’s union paper, Clarion, for June 2011.

K-12

Governor Jerry Brown of California signed the FAIR Education Act which mandates inclusion of the achievements of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in social science courses, making California the first state to adopt such a measure (Democracy Now and Truthout, July 15, 2011). The research group Equality California hails the law, saying it will lead to greater student safety and lower rates of bullying. Various studies show that bullies in school are at least 4 times more likely to be violent with their adult partners (www.care2.com, June 10, 2011).

Charter schools are being scrutinized from several new angles: being built by foreign companies and being forced upon affluent suburb schools. Texas charter schools are being built by the Cosmos Foundation, a charter school operator founded a decade ago by Turkish professors and businessmen. Using the name Harmony Schools, Cosmos has quickly become the largest charter school operator in Texas, “with 33 schools receiving more than $100 million a year in taxpayer funds” (The New York Times, June 8, 2011). In New Jersey, a group called Millburn Parents Against Charter Schools are fighting the introduction of charter schools into affluent suburbs, saying their schools already do an excellent job educating their children and that charter schools “would siphon money from its children’s education for unnecessarily specialized programs” (The New York Times, July 17, 2011).

In May 2011, Scholastic, the world’s largest educational publisher, announced it would immediately stop distributing a controversial fourth grade curriculum paid for by the American Coal Foundation. The announcement came just two days after the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Rethinking Schools launched a campaign demanding that Scholastic stop pushing coal in elementary schools. For more information on commercial-free schools, go to www.commercialfreeschools.org.

California Governor Jerry Brown is taking some first steps to reduce the nation’s testing mania. He is proposing to “suspend funding for CALPADS, the state student longitudinal data system, and to stop further planning for CALTIDES, the teacher data base that was to be joined to the hip with CALPADS” (Thoughts on Public Education blog, May 17, 2011). Brown’s defunding proposal states, “Testing takes huge amounts of time from classroom instruction. Data collection requirements are cumbersome and do not provide timely—and therefore usable—information back to schools. Teachers are forced to curb their own creativity and engagement with students as they focus on teaching to the test. State and federal administrators continue to centralize teaching authority far from the classroom.” Even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan seems to be shifting policy a bit by waiving the No Child Left Behind requirement that 100 percent of all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014 (The New York Times, August 9, 2011).

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