As More Details Emerge About Emanuel's Police's 'Blake Site' WBEZ Story Tries to Dampen Fire

*More scandalous, ugly details emerge about Homan Square 'black site' of the Chicago Police Department

*WBEZ Critiques label 'black site'; Some discussion around why the story has had limited exposure
*Activists now protesting the detention and interrogation site, use hashtag,#Gitmo2Chicago

A detailed description of the conditions at the former Sears Roebuck warehouse, now Chicago Police Department facility, has emerged. That there is such a site in and of itself is disturbing. The arrested and detained are just powerless youths of color, in for accusations of criminal behavior; but they are treated as suspected terrorists. At least one appears to have died at the site, while in detention. From DailyKos, February 24, "(MAJOR UPDATE) Chicago Police Have Their Own Black Site to Disappear People - Homan Square":

UPDATE:  Just read this story in Salon The Atlantic which gives further details regarding the Homan Square site in an interview of Tracy Siska, executive director of the Chicago Justice Project who also wrote a story about this for The Guardian.  Excerpts from the Salon interview follow:

Tanya Basu: Why was Homan Square unknown for so long?Tracy Siska: I think it’s because under the law, people have a right to get counsel when arrested or when held but you’re not provided free counsel like a public defender. Mostly who they take to Homan Square are black and brown and poor kids who can’t afford to hire private counsel while they’re in custody. That’s a little nuance in the law that few know about. [...]
Basu: Why wasn't the press covering it?
Siska: I think that many crime reporters in Chicago have political views that are right in line with the police. They tend to agree about the tactics needed by the police. They tend to have by one extent or the other the same racist views of the police—a lot of urban police (not all of them by any stretch, but a lot of them) embody racism. [...]
Basu: Going back to the Guantanamo interrogation techniques associated with Homan Square, and just to be clear: These warehouses aren’t interrogating suspected terrorists, correct?
Siska: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. 99 percent of the people from this site are involved in some form of street crime: gang activities, drugs—urban violent crime. That’s what makes the site even worse. It takes Guantanamo-style tactics on urban street criminals and shreds the Bill of Rights.
Basu: To clarify: What do “Guantanamo-style” tactics entail?
Siska: Isolation, deprivation of food, other outside contact. It’s meant to be a lot of touchless torture. So they’re not touching you, which in the human-rights field is more powerful and scary because it doesn’t leave marks but leaves huge internal wounds. Most of the time, people aren't physically abused. They’re cut off from society, not allowed phone calls, not fed as much. These are just tactics that are more sophisticated in urban-policing tactics.

Siska claims the Homan square site opened around 2006 - 2007 and there may be other, similar sites in Chicago or elsewhere.  She argues that local media in Chicago failed to cover this story, despite it being common knowledge in the "police accountability community," because most of the people detained there are minorities, African-Americas and Latinos who were picked up by units specializing in street crime, gang and drug related activities.  As always, please go and read the entire interview.  

It seems that none of this would have become a national story except for the fact that three young white males - including Jacob Church who spoke on the record  to Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian - were  were  taken to Homan Square. Undercover cops infiltrated groups planning to protest the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago, and brought a case against Church and two others for terrorism that the defense attorneys of those men claim amounted to entrapment. At trial the defendants were found not guilty of the terrorism charge but convicted of lesser offenses, as noted below.

*******

Unbelievable as it may seem, The Guardian is reporting today that the Chicago Police Department operates its own "Black Site" where people are taken, tortured and held in shackles without notification of family or the ability to have a lawyer present.  One man is alleged to have died there after having been beaten.  Shades of the "Disappeared" from the days a military junta ruled Argentina, but its happening here and now in a major city in the United States, and the place is known as "Homan Square."

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights. [...]
At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

Activities alleged to have occurred there include the following:

1. Detainees are kept out of the official police booking system.
2. Persons in custody are often shackled for long periods of time.
3. Attorneys are denied access to their clients
4. Frequent beatings, causing head injuries
5. Juveniles as young as 15 have been housed there

The facility also houses military-style vehicles.  Defense attorneys, however are well aware of its existence:

Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.
Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.

And just being a protestor can get you arrested and sent there, as Jacob Church, an activist who opposed the NATO Summit in 2012, discovered when he was arrested by police and "disappeared" there:

Jacob Church learned about Homan Square the hard way. On May 16 2012, he and 11 others were taken there after police infiltrated their protest against the Nato summit. Church says officers cuffed him to a bench for an estimated 17 hours, intermittently interrogating him without reading his Miranda rights to remain silent. It would take another three hours – and an unusual lawyer visit through a wire cage – before he was finally charged with terrorism-related offenses at the nearby 11th district station, where he was made to sign papers, fingerprinted and photographed.

Church is now on parole.  He and two other co-defendants were found not guilty of  terrorism charges at their trial, but were convicted on two lesser offenses:   "possessing an incendiary device and the misdemeanor of “mob action”."  Church was the only one of the three willing to talk to the Guardian's reporters. The others refused fearing retaliation from police if they spoke about their experiences at Homan Square.

It is outrageous that the federal government operates such "black sites" around the world.  That one would exist in a major American city, however, run by that City's own police department is more than outrageous to me.  It's downright terrifying.  Who knows if other police departments around the country have their own Homan Squares where anyone of us could be deprived of our constitutional rights with impunity for any reason, or no reason at all.

Please read the Guardian's article about this domestic black site run by the Chicago PD in its entirety.  I assure you, it is well worth the time and effort.  Then ask yourself, if it is happening there, where else in our country might also be operating such sinister and illegal detention sites?

                                                                                    * * *
Just as New York City National Public Radio affiliate WNYC ran slanted education news coverage, sympathetic with the neo-liberal line, pursuing anti-teacher "education reform" (witness this appearance by Merryl Tisch --read the transcript and commentary at "Tisch Blames Adults for Kids' Test Stress"), WBEZ ran enabling cover of the growing scandal with the title, "Chicago Police's so-called 'black site' mischaracterized."
But WBEZ's chastising of the critics puts WBEZ in a very small cohort. It claimed that the site was known to journalists and so it couldn't be considered a secret. But this misses the point: the site has been cited as a place of many violations against the accused. Besides, why would Spencer Ackerman, Guardian reporter, jeopardy his career with a story built on dubious claims? There is commentary in at least the Atlantic article that reporters went easy because many are pro-police. There is another problem: critical reporters run the risk of alienating their police stories should they cover volatile stories. These are problems of principle. If reporters are practicing a cover-up then they are abrogating principles of covering the truth and are suffering from entrapment.
While WBEZ dismissed the story, other outlets acknowledge the story:

Salon - "'I was in a black site': Chicago's policing nightmare -- and assault on people of color: As Rahm Emanuel fights for his political life, let's talk about the detention and abuse of black people in Chicago" 
The Atlantic
Democracy Now
NY Daily News

Coverage of protests over the site:
Chicago Tribune
Guardian
USA Today
WBBM - CBS TV Chicago








IMPORTANT UPDATES, from the Guardian:
As the days progress, more individuals and attorneys come forward about their experience in or knowledge of the facility.

Six people and multiple Chicago attorneys came forward to the Guardian

 this week with detailed accounts of police holding suspects and witnesses for sustained periods of detention inside Homan Square, without public records, access to attorneys or being read their most basic rights – involving what they said included shackling, physical abuse and being “disappeared” from legal counsel and family. The Guardian’s recent investigation into Chicago police brutality began the week before, with a two-part account of the tactics of Detective Richard Zuley, who went from Chicago homicide investigator to Guantánamo Bay torturer.
The Chicago police department, in its only official statement on the swirling allegations, denied the Guardian’s reporting on Tuesday, without giving specifics. In a report on the Guardian’s reporting published on Friday night, the Chicago Tribune characterized local attorneys’ perception of the statement as “laughable”.

Police reform has appeared in Chuy Garcia's campaign to oust Emanuel from office.

Federal legislation has become a loophole through which such abuse has been sanctioned:

Travis McDermott, one of the other lead organizers of Saturday’s protest, spoke about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows for the military detention of persons the government suspects of involvement with terrorism. McDermott said the NDAA was the primary reason sites like Homan Square remained in operation.
“The main issue,” he said, “is that when individuals are empowered by a contract” – the NDAA – “they have no threat of accountability, they can’t be expected to exercise self-restraint. They can deny and then it’s a battle of confidence between the people who have witnessed it and those protecting it.”
McDermott said he wanted real answers to the allegations about Homan Square, not quick dismissals [as mayor Emanuel has done].

Examples of protesters speaking up at Saturday's protest over the Chicago Police Department's black site facility:

Vetress Boyce, a candidate for alderman in Chicago’s 24th ward, said communities in the city had long been aware of the threat of violent treatment by police.
She said she stood “wholeheartedly” with protesters and supported a public investigation into what she called “torture” at Homan Square. “We hear a lot of what goes on in our neighborhood and in some cases we have stopped marching, we have stopped fighting for those that matter,” she said.
Reverend Gregg Greer, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, called on more people who had spent time inside the facility to come forward. “If the Chicago police department hasn’t gotten anything to hide,” he said, “then open up the doors!”

And Brian Jacob Church, one of the NATO 3 that first came forward to the Guardian early last week, spoke by via McDermott:

CPD officer, filming protesters, Feb. 28, 2015

Brian Jacob Church, the first arrestee to come forward to the Guardian regarding his time inside Homan Square, could not attend the protest but requested McDermott read a statement on his behalf. One of the so called “Nato Three” who travelled to the city to protest a 2012 Nato summit, Church says he was arrested and held for 17 hours at Homan Square in 2012, before being charged and convicted and spending two and a half years in prison.

The NATO 3, detained at Homan Square

“Today you are standing here because basic humanity has been disregarded in the grossest fashion,” McDermott read. “We hear about things like this happening in other countries … but we never expect them to hit so close to home.”

Social media and memes, from the Guardian:

On Friday night, campaigners associated with the Occupy and Anonymous collectives took to Twitter, Instagram and other social-media platforms with the hashtag #Gitmo2Chicago to decry allegations of what users alternatively labeled as a “secret prison” and “torture soon coming to a city near you”.

Rahm Emanuel and some establishment media figures are content to let this story die; but activists will not let this happen.

On the Patrick Lynch Danger #2: NYPD Officers & Supporters Must Resist and Reject Racist Rhetoric; Bratton Must Investigate

The statements of Patrick Lynch, Police Benevolent Association (PBA) president of the patrol officers of the New York Police Department are noxious enough.

Additionally noxious are the racist discussions on police message boards, as exposed in Max Blumenthal's Alternet article here: "Emails and Racist Chats Show How Cops and the GOP are Teeming Up to Undermine DeBlasio."

Support the New York Times' Call for the Police Commissioner Bill Bratton to take action against police rebellion actions. 
The Economic Uprising site ["Has the Blue Coup Started? How Can It Be Opposed?"] reports that the New York Post has claimed that rank and file police have followed through on a [Patrick Lynch-instigated slowdown], and that the Post has published figures it alleges back up the claim that they have resisted certain duties. The New York Times has concurred with the figures, and in an editorial yesterday, it called for the police to take action. 
On principle of the authority of the police coming from the mayor, to the commissioner, to the police, not from PBA president Lynch, the Police Commissioner should investigate the actions of the police.

De Blasio - Doesn't Apologize - But did he need to?
As Kareem AbdulJ-abbar wrote in "The Police Aren't Under Attack. Institutionalized Racism Is," one does not necessarily oppose the police when one protests and supports protestors. People have free speech rights. Shame on some police union leaders for goading de Blasio to refrain from supporting people's right to protest,

State conservative groups plan US-wide assault on education, health and tax policies - Guardian report on State Policy Network

State conservative groups plan US-wide assault on education, health and tax

• State Policy Network co-ordinating plans across 34 US states
• Strategy to 'release residents from government dependency'
• Revelations come amid growing scrutiny of tax-exempt charities

• Read key excerpts from the SPN proposals
• Portland Press Herald: group's plan to eliminate taxes
• Texas Observer: the money behind the fight to wreck Medicaid

• Ed Pilkington in New York and Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
• theguardian.com, Thursday 5 December 2013 13.21 EST

Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers' compensation and the environment,documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as "free-market thinktanks", includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. The proposals were co-ordinated by the State Policy Network, an alliance of groups that act as incubators of conservative strategy at state level.

The documents contain 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014. In partnership with the Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is publishing SPN's summary of all the proposals to give readers and news outlets full and fair access to state-by-state conservative plans that could have significant impact throughout the US, and to allow the public to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.

Details of the co-ordinated approach come amid growing federal scrutiny of the political activities of tax-exempt charities. Last week the Obama administration announced a new clampdown on those groups that violate tax rules by engaging in direct political campaigning.

Most of the "thinktanks" involved in the proposals gathered by the State Policy Network are constituted as 501(c)(3) charities that are exempt from tax by the Internal Revenue Service. Though the groups are not involved in election campaigns, they are subject to strict restrictions on the amount of lobbying they are allowed to perform. Several of the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents propose the launch of "media campaigns" aimed at changing state laws and policies, or refer to "advancing model legislation" and "candidate briefings", in ways that arguably cross the line into lobbying.

The documents also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has members in each of the 50 states and an annual warchest of $83m drawn from major corporate donors that include the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, the tobacco company Philip Morris, food giant Kraft and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.

SPN gathered the grant proposals from the 34 states on 29 July. Ranging in size from requests of $25,000 to $65,000, the plans were submitted for funding to the Searle Freedom Trust, a private foundation that in 2011 donated almost $15m to largely rightwing causes.

The trust, founded in 1998, draws on the family fortune of the late Dan Searle of the GD Searle & Company empire – now part of Pfizer – which created NutraSweet. The trust is a major donor to such mainstays of the American right and the Tea Parties as Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Heartland Institute and the State Policy Network itself.

SPN's link to Searle, the Guardian documents show, was Stephen Moore, an editorial writer with the Wall Street Journal. Moore, who advises Searle on its grant-giving activities, was asked by SPN to rank the proposals in two halves – a "top 20" and "bottom 20". It is not known how many of the 40 proposals were approved for funding, nor which may have been successful.

Moore told the Guardian that he is an unpaid adviser to the Searle Foundation, having been a lifetime family friend to Dan Searle. He said the grant decisions were made by Searle's sons and grandsons based upon the late businessman's "commitment to the advancement of free enterprise and individual rights".

The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents go beyond a commitment to free enterprise, however. They include:

• "reforms" to public employee pensions raised by SPN thinktanks in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania;

• tax elimination or reduction schemes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska and New York;

• an education voucher system to promote private and home schooling in Florida;

• campaigns against worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada;

• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.

SPN's president, Tracie Sharp, told the Guardian that "as a pro-freedom network of thinktanks, we focus on issues like workplace freedom, education reform, and individual choice in healthcare: backbone issues of a free people and a free society."

In its grant bid, the Maine Heritage Policy Center asked for $35,000 to support a "research and demonstration project" that would "release residents from extreme government dependency". It would turn the state's poorest area into what the Portland Press Herald describes in its report from Washington County as "a gigantic tax-free zone".

Dubbed "FreeME", the initiative would eliminate state income tax and sale taxes from residents and businesses until the economic conditions in the county rise to the statewide average. The hole in the county's income from lost tax revenues – estimated at $35m a year by the think tank – would be filled through budget cuts.

Medicaid is the target of a grant proposal coming from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an influential thinktank funded largely by rightwing foundations and corporations including the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, tobacco company Altria and the telecoms giant Verizon. The Texas Observer has investigated the contents of the document and points out that in its request for $40,000 from Searle, TPPF claims credit for blocking Medicaid expansion in the state.

"[S]topping Medicaid expansion is just the first step," the proposal says, adding that the "missing piece to complete our message is an economic forecast" showing how block-granting Medicaid would "bring significant savings" to the state. That information would then be used to garner attention from the media.

The Observer describes TPPF as "one of the most influential state-level thinktanks in the nation". One of its former executives was Ted Cruz, now US senator for Texas, who today is the keynote speaker at the national conference in Washington of SPN's sister organisation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec).

Several hundred miles to the north east in Massachusetts, the Beacon Hill Institute requested $38,825 from Searle to weaken or roll back a five-year effort by states in the region to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The institute said it would carry out research into the economic impact of the cap-and-trade system operating in nine states known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

BHI appeared to have already arrived at its conclusions in advance, admitting from the outset that the aim of the research was to arm opponents of cap-and-trade with data for their arguments, and to weaken or destroy the initiative. "Success will take the form of media recognition, dissemination to stakeholders, and legislative activity that will pare back or repeal RGGI," the funding proposal says.

The Beacon Hill Institute, technically an affiliate rather than a full member of the SPN, operates out of the economics department of Suffolk University in Boston. David Tuerck, its executive director, denied the group had engaged in lobbying. "There is never any lobbying," he told the Guardian. "Maybe I need to look up the definition again, but lobbying consists of buttonholing legislators and other policymakers to get a particular result on a particular issue, and we never do that."

But Suffolk University, which hosts the Beacon Hill Institute as a research arm of its economics department, sharply criticised the research proposal to the Searle Foundation. In a statement to the Guardian, the university said the grant bid had not been submitted to the university, as required, and that the university would never have approved the proposal. "The stated research goals, as written, were inconsistent with Suffolk University's mission."

Watchdogs that monitor the work of SPN and other conservative networks in the US said that the centralised coordination of state-level campaigns showed a significant attempt to build local activism into a nationwide movement. Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which issued a recent report on SPN, said that the local identity of the network's members belied a larger purpose. "They appear to be advocating purely local interests but what they are promoting is part of a larger national template to radically remake our government in a way that undermines public institutions and the rights of workers," she said.

The SPN said that its co-ordinating role was justified because local and state issues were increasingly impinging on national politics. "There's no mystery here," Sharp said. "The whole idea of a state policy network is that individual thinktanks can be in communication, share best practices and analysis, and combine their efforts when they see a benefit from doing so."

Some of the grant bids to Searle focus specifically on prominent local politicians the thinktanks hope to influence. The grant bid that emanated from New Jersey, from the Common Sense Institute (CISNJ), another tax-exempt "research and education organization", floats the idea of a campaign to support the efforts of the Republican governor Chris Christie in ending the ability of public employees to claim untaken sick days and vacation leave in their retirement packages.

"Governor Chris Christie has been waging a war to eliminate this practice; and CSINJ would like to provide ammunition," the proposal says. The thinktank plans to produce a "research study" which it would call "Busting the Boat Checks" – an allusion to the phrase Christie uses to denote the watercraft retirees are claimed to buy on the back of sick and holiday leave payments.

The institute conceives a "media campaign" with its aim being the "full elimination of unused sick and vacation leave payouts".

"We believe our study can be used to sway public sentiment further and be used as a brandisher for reform in Trenton," it says.

CSINJ's president, Jerry Cantrell, denied that the grant bid involved any element of lobbying, insisting instead that his group was providing a service that in the past might have been done by the decimated local media.

"CSINJ is an education organization focused on providing the public with facts and the truth. We don't represent any interest besides the folks who are burdened by this practice – the taxpayers," he said.

He said the proposal was focused on the "abusive practice of accumulating sick or vacation day payments over an entire career and using them as retirement bonus. We've seen too many instances of high level individuals working out the door with $500,000-$750,000 claiming to have never missed a day in 30 years of employment."

The proposal from the Illinois Policy Institute for a campaign to deal with Chicago's government worker pensions crisis by switching to 401(k)-style retirement plans similarly focuses on a politician – in this case Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The proposal says that "Mayor Emanuel has privately expressed the need for 401(k)-style changes to truly achieve reform."

The institute plans to "leverage the leadership potential of Mayor Emanuel … as the spark for wider pension changes in Illinois." It adds that "friendly legislators would be welcome to draft legislation modelled on our policy work and work in tandem with Mayor Emanuel to move it forward in the legislative process."

John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, told the Guardian that Emanuel had been "an outspoken proponent of pension reform that includes moving to a 401(k)-style, defined contribution system." He saw no problem with the lobbying that the think tank undertakes.

"We are not allowed to do any campaigning or electioneering, and we don't. We are allowed to spend a significant percentage of our expenditures on lobbying and we are very proactive in lobbying for liberty-based policy, including the urgently needed pension reform. We report our activities accordingly."

Human collateral in testing and firing campaigns against teachers

The collateral damage of job loss or Danielson/VAM-driven job stress

First off we have the stress, burnout and demoralization issues: the 2012 Met Life survey on the American Teacher showed teacher morale to be at its lowest in decades. This survey is cited in Burris at Strauss in Washington Post.  See Met Life study, Teacher job satisfaction continues to decline, page 45 and this earlier blogpost on plummeting teacher morale.

Beyond the general job stress, under corporate education "reform" we have the escalating stress in school districts as teachers cope with the increasingly burdensome conditions, first driven by the No Child Left Behind policies, and then by the Race to the Top policies, with their emphasis on Value Added Modeling teacher evaluation systems (metrics-driven analyses of teacher performance that take no consideration of social conditions, administrator irresponsibility, parental support or student initiative). Incredibly, there is little thorough public discussion of how the people establishing the evaluation protocols have limited or shady teaching credentials. Consider the case of Charlotte Danielson, the architect of the Danielson Frameworks, head of the Danielson Group. She has successfully masked where she taught, at what grades, and for how long. Has anyone asked why she has kept her credentials so secret? Note that these evaluation systems have been rolled out, even though some conscientious education professors and researchers, as in the case of Chicago last year, have questioned their validity and have asked for piloting before mass implementation.

Then we have the matter of greater acute concern to teachers, their families and the economy: Teachers will lose jobs. Those still retaining jobs will endure an ongoing hell, as they pass each day in trepidation that their lessons will be suspected for causing bad scores on high stakes tests (when in many cases these low test scores will happen even with the best of efforts --you can read elsewhere --here and here-- on the external social factors or the poor school administration factors that enable less than ideal school performance).

The profession will take on a menial reputation, impacting individuals, fraying families
It will become more evident that teaching is a menial job demanding pre-Progressive Era 14 hour shifts, whose humiliation and job security make teachers increasingly unattractive as potential partners. Word will soon leak out: teachers under the new conditions cannot "have a life."

Not making the headlines will be the job stress, the broken relationships as partners snap at partners, blow up at kids, make scenes at family gatherings, you can keep imagining the examples. Silently, out of the headlines, the partners and children in these families we compose a generation that has lost the opportunity for a decent, happy family life.

Teacher suicides

Mary Thorson, former Army Reserve; teacher who took her life

Additionally, we should consider that many terminated teachers will find themselves distraught, unsupported and with no options, particularly after experiencing on the job bullying, bullying sanctioned by media rhetoric and politicians' policies. Most tragically, there will be those without strong social supports and take their own lives. Already we have seen teachers commit suicide after harassment (Mary Thorson of suburban Chicago) and termination following shaming in publicly revealed metrics-driven comparison of teachers and their test rankings (Rigoberto Ruelas of Los Angeles).
On Mary Thorson, who took her life, on Thanksgiving, 2011, read this post and this post at Assailed Teacher. Filmmaker and former teacher Mary Richardson, contributing to the Socialist Worker, connected her plight to the larger societal scourge of bullying of teachers.

Rigoberto Ruelas, teacher who took his life

On Rigoberto Ruelas, who scored "average," then took his own life, read Christina Hoag's "Rigoberto Ruelas' Suicide Raises Questions About LA Times Teacher Rankings" at Huffington Post. Yet as his story got attention in the New York Times, "Teacher’s Death Exposes Tensions in Los Angeles," and NBC News, "LA teacher suicide sparks test score pushback: Union says the Los Angeles Times should remove teacher performance ratings from its website," stories such as Hoag's spoke of questions being raised about such stack ranking, sadly the momentum for reconsidering metrics-based evaluation faded from official public discourse.


The downward spiral from the Keynesian multiplier in reverse

We should consider the Keynesian multiplier and the sprawling impacts of a middle class income. Teachers are middle class. The better paid ones have some disposable income. They can take long distance trips with their families, they can pay for sports, camp, dance or music classes for their kids. The ancillary effects of teachers losing their jobs will be weakened local economies that rely on the discretionary spending of those formerly employed teachers, the restaurants, the barbers, hardware stores.

Note that in the industrial Midwest it is often cited that when an auto or auto parts plant closes it is estimated that thousands of jobs are lost beyond the factory gates. This is the Keynesian multiplier in reverse. Remove the economic growth trigger and you decelerate the economy. You can see this from Michigan to the Hudson Valley. The New York City metro region has been less susceptible to the down-turns that much of the rest of the nation, particularly those in which industry has been a large fraction. Yet, with the firings that the consecutive APPR "Ineffectives" there will be a slightly down-ward drag on the economy.

Much as the Vietnam War higher-ups spoke of burning down a village to save it, we have politicians from liberals like New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo (who has called for the "death penalty" for "failing" schools) to conservatives like Wisconsin's Scott Walker that speak of reducing state costs to save the economy. We should not fall for their Frank Luntz-type manipulation of language. "Slashing costs" means cutting jobs; reducing healthcare benefits, slashing pension benefits have very real costs. Lifestyle quality will get downgraded. We should note the aggregate (general, overall, taking all the parts together) economic decline that follows the very specific war on one part of the middle class.

We can add administrators to the mix, as they get thrown out of jobs when schools close. Yet, we will see exceptions to the downsizing of administrators, as we see in frequent columns in Chaz's School Daze, there is a double standard for administrators, as they can be charged with highly unseemly conduct, yet often remain in their positions. Watch administrators in closed schools get rotated over to other schools while teachers take the hit for the bad test scores. While administrators get rotated, many teachers will lose their positions. Watch also for the veteran teachers be in line to take the hit, as school leaders will be eager to replace them with younger, cheaper teachers.

It is particularly easy to get replacement talent. The stagnant economy means that there are limited positions for recent college graduates. There will be eager graduates will and ready to replace the veteran teachers. This is particularly a problem in vibrant cultural magnet cities that attract college graduates around the surrounding region. In our region it is New York City; in the Midwest, it is Chicago; in southern California, Los Angeles and so on.

Therapy: a growth industry
The only people benefiting from the ratcheting up of pressure on teachers will be therapists who will see a boom in the number of clients, until their insurance runs out after termination, and the moving companies that will move families from big suburban homes to downscale apartments or back in with mom and day.

Political expediency of scapegoating and mass bullying
We also have the amoral politicians that do not see the harm in their social policies. Ignoring the social factors that can contribute to less than ideal student test scores, they will scream for the heads of "ineffective" teachers, gaining political capital from these teachers' scarlet I status. Pundits and legislators with no teacher experience demand impossible results from teachers and create evaluation schemes that are increasingly becoming apparent to teachers and even superintendents as inappropriate and untenable. Yet, teacher union leaders, long absent for the classroom, as New York City's United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew endorsed every governmental step that created the evaluation mess that is degrading teaching and stealing administrators from their traditional school leadership duties. See this video on Mulgrew's endorsement of the new evaluation scheme from its 2010 inception roots.

 
(photo from demonstration of the Cranston Teachers' Alliance)
Out of humane empathy, more of the public should speak out against what education policy makers are doing with teachers.

Think of pastor Martin Niemoller's First They Came piece. What profession might be next, to follow teachers, in a broad-reaching political attack campaign? Really, who has spoken up for us, besides Diane Ravitch?


To the contrary, we have Democratic federal education official and president that cheer the mass firing of teachers, as Arne Duncan and Barack Obama in the Central Falls High School, Rhode Island case.



And more recently, we see New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie's becoming unhinged with anger at a teacher Melissa Tomlinson. His "I am tired of you people" outburst and the universal silence on this explosive public verbal abuse among politicians of either major political party, as well as the professional opinion shaping community, the pundits, speaks volumes to the social marginalization of teachers and the apparent legitimacy of the blanket targeting of teachers.

For the sake of the dignity of the profession, for the humanity of their families and their relationships, for the dignity of the national community, the scapegoating and the punishing policies must end.

DOE whistle-blower tells how data and funding have been manipulated

As the UFT's president Michael Mulgrew intimated, a truth commission on the NYC DOE is indeed in order!

http://dianeravitch.net/2013/09/19/nyc-whistle-blower-how-the-doe-is-like-enron/

I know a mole inside the New York City Department of Education. He/she knows how the DOE manipulates data to burnish the mayor’s image. This is a good reason to oppose mayoral control of the schools. He/she says the mayor’s small schools close with regularity; that the data cannot be trusted; that the Department has shown preference to charter schools but they got lower scores on the Common Core tests than the public schools.

Most shocking: the DOE intends to delete all the emails on its computers. 

Quick, someone file a FOIL before it’s too late.

The mole writes:

“A Bad Business: The Bankruptcy of Education Policy”

Mike Bloomberg, in his recent interview with the magazine New York, admitted to following the companies run by his friends as economic barometers of New York City’s conditions. According to his website, “Mike has made education reform the focal point of his agenda,” an agenda dominated by applying business ideas to New York City’s schools. 

Are the profit margins of huge corporations truly “indicators,” as Bloomberg claims, of how the citizens of New York City are doing? Does his application of business ideas actually improve schools for children? Let’s examine the evidence to see how the next mayor can do better.

Day trader versus business owner. Under Bloomberg, the bureaucrats at Tweed see themselves as “portfolio managers.” Just like day traders, they take no responsibility for the success or failure of the shares in their portfolio. They close and open schools, just like a day trader flips stocks. They refuse to take ownership of the schools under their charge and decline to commit to ensuring their success. Of course, in this case, the stock shares are schools with roots in a community and tens of thousands of children. What do the numbers say is the end result all this? The schools opened under Bloomberg are shuttered at the same rate as older schools, leading to an overall profit of zero. What should the next mayor do? Like a small-business owner who works as hard as possible to ensure her business succeeds, he must put children first and hold the education bureaucrats accountable for the success of each and every school in New York City.

Enron-like accounting practices versus independent auditor. Under Bloomberg, the Department of Education fudges and manipulates numbers to serve their political ends. They refuse to open up their complete data sets to independent researchers at universities who publish results in peer-reviewed journals. Someti mes they release limited data to friendly “think” tanks or to organizations that need to maintain their good will. These paid advertisers publish favorable “reports” in order to continue to have access to the seemingly top secret data.

Now they plan on deleting all emails from the Department of Education right before Bloomberg leaves office, just like Arthur Anderson and Enron.

What is the end result of all this? Bloomberg touts false numbers as “evidence” of “success” while the voices of independent researchers are silenced. For example, Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, was refused access to data after finding that the achievement gap did not close under Bloomberg.

What should the next mayor do? Just like an honest business has its results audited by an independent accounting firm, he must put children first and create an independent panel of researchers who are guaranteed full access to all DOE data. The reports of the panel should be made public and should inform education policy decisions in the city.

Crony capitalism versus fair business practices. Under Bloomberg, select schools are favored and granted unfair financial advantages over other schools. New schools that opened under Bloomberg are given more money per student than other schools. Charter schools are given more money per student, including free-of-charge public school space, than other schools. Favored schools are granted extra money through mysterious appeals and special grants.
This is similar to business practices in corrupt countries where relatives and friends of the ruling family are granted monopolies and other unfair advantages in business.

What should the next mayor do? He should put children first and institute a set of fair business practices under which all schools receive the full share of funding they are entitled to based on the students they serve.

Buyer beware versus fiduciary duty. For years credit card companies and other financial firms used small print and legalese to rip-off customers. Companies are now required to abide by consumer rights laws. Under Bloomberg, a complicated and frustrating high school application process has been deceptively advertised as choice for students. While some parents and students have the time and patience to navigate the process others do not.

What is the end result? Vast differences in student enrollment patterns between schools. The 10% of schools with the highest special education enrollment rates average 27.4% students with special needs. The 10% of schools with the lowest special education enrollment rates average 4.5% students with special needs. The 10% of schools with the highest English Language Learner enrollment rates average 40.8% (not including specialized schools for new immigrants). The 10% of schools with the lowest English Language Learner enrollment rates average 1%. Screened and specialized schools have a student body that is extremely unrepresentative of New York City’s children.

What should the next mayor do? He must put children first and ensure that every student has the opportunity to attend a quality school with a diverse student body that allows students to build the skills needed to function in our global economy and international city.

False advertising versus truth in advertising. Under Bloomberg, schools were supposedly being run along the lines of a business. It is now clear that this was false advertising and the “business” practices employed have bankrupted many a corporation. Ideology has determined policy rather than data and evidence.

Charter schools were touted as putting public schools to shame while the data showing that charters do not serve similar student populations and get rid of under-performing students was ignored. Then the test scores of the new common core exams were released and charter schools performed significantly worse than public schools. This data was ignored.

If Coca Cola had followed a similar “business” approach they would have continued to market “New Coke” and bankrupted the entire company. What should the next mayor do? He must put children first and ensure that all children have access to a quality early childhood education program. The economic data shows such programs have very high returns on investment and more than pay for themselves over time. We need a mayor who is willing to employ honest business practices such as ownership, honest accounting, fairness, and responsibility to the consumer in improving our schools

Whistleblower Francesco Portelos wrote on the comments how the DOE has targeted him. This is probably representative: that there are many damning details in the emails. The media's ignoring of the DOE governmental shenanigans that Portelos and the DOE mole point to is a crime against the profession of journalism of the highest order.

Absolutely, there must be an injunction against the deletions. Not only should good government groups, but NYC public advocate Bill de Blasio or comptroller John Liu must seek an injunction against the deletion of the emails. Let them show their Moxie. Portelos wrote:

I’m still only 80% through 3,000 pages that just have my name in it. I’m dumbfounded on the conversations between my principal, Supt, Tweeds, including three Deputy Chancellors, investigators and CEC members. 3,000 Pages of Secret DOE Emails. [Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm Enters Stage Left]
We cannot allow destruction and I believe coog.gov and Robert Freeman need to be involved.

What the Portelos case means for all NYC teachers

                   *Relevance for Danielson observations under "Advance"
This week has some matters of importance to New York City teachers. Besides the Democratic primary for mayor, it has the termination hearing of Francesco Portelos. The matter of the Portelos case is an instance of reality being more cinematic than fiction.

For those that do not know the Francesco Portelos case: he was the model recruit, coming from a successful engineering career--taking a $20,000 salary reduction in the move to public school teaching, and wanting to share his knowledge and enthusiasm with students. As a teacher he set up a special STEM lab and had glowing reviews from his supervisors.
Flash forward to his time teaching science in a middle school. All that he did was ask an innocuous question in the School Leadership Team (one positive structure in the current Bloomberg --when it is handled by administrators with scruples) meeting about the school budget. From there he was able to find more and more complicating, suspicious details about how the principal was running the school. For deeper details read Educator Fights Back (his blog) and NYC Rubber Room Reporter and ATR CONNECT.

Almost immediately, Portelos was subject to all kinds of actions by school administration, actions that evinced general paranoia, over-reaction and flagrant abuse of power. He was denied all kinds of due process, such as habeas corpus (granted, he wasn't jailed).

Merely asking a question, a responsible got Portelos into a deep process of institutional retribution.

This case has significant ramifications for New York City teachers for the following reasons:
1) If the city prevails it will further indicate that this is a vindictive system, even towards an employee acting merely with the actions of good citizenship.
Moreover, a termination decision, sustaining the city's position, will have a far deeper chilling effect on the likelihood that teachers will feel free to speak, it will sustain the climate of repression, reinforcing the feeling among many teachers that this is an authoritarian regime. Not everything changes 1/1/14. The mayor changes, but your principal remains the same.
2) The general abandonment of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) regarding helping Portelos in a serious manner demonstrates that the UFT is far too often just interested in going along with the city Department of Education (DOE) to get along. This case makes very clear that contrary to the media hoopla in 2010, the rubber rooms did not disappear. Merely, the large ones disappeared (an honest account of the closure of the large rooms can be found here), and they became very small, like solitary confinement.
3) Of prime relevance to teachers in the Danielson era: it shows that when administrators want to target you, they will do so, and do so with exacting impunity. Danielson exploitative will happen in the following manner: administrators will fly in, expect compliance along 22 domain components, including observers' assessments of  students' body language. Aside from the veneer of fairness, the system is riddled with openings for administrators to practice bias. The Framework makes assumptions about the teacher's impact on the class that ignore other factors that could contribute to student engagement, cooperation and learning.
Refer back to 2)-- the UFT left Portelos to hang on his own. Again this was a star teacher with no disciplinary letters prior to the witch-hunt treatment. If the UFT abandons a stellar teacher thrown into the new solitary confinement rubber room on trumped up charges, you can bet that it will abandon thousands more in the 3020(a) hearings from the Advance evaluation system (analyzed here and here).

Portelos' 3020 hearings are on September 12, 23, 30 at 49 Chambers Street, Manhattan.

UPDATE: Portelos has reported his receipt of damning 3,000 pages of secret DOE emails.
Porteles Monday -ahead of Thursday first of his 3020(a) hearings- received a CD of over 3,000 NYC Department of Education emails on him. The abuse of his dignity and the flagrant denial of his constitutional rights of due process are one thing. Yet, as he notes, the neurotic obsession by the DOE about him constitutes a blatant exploiting of taxpayer dollars. Read this beginning excerpt of his blogpost:

Anyway, my attorney gave me this CD he received from the NYC attorney defending the city in my Federal case. We opened it, made copies and saved them (on servers around the world.) It contains approximately 3,088 pages of emails to and from Principal Linda Hill and Superintendent Erminia Claudio’s DOE accounts with the word “Portelos” in it from January 2012 to June 2013 plus other items. That includes when they were just copied.

Let me just start with Wow! You thought the Cathy Black emails were interesting? I started backwards and only got through 1/5th and am absolutely floored. I’m not sharing any just yet, but let me make some quick points that should make taxpayers and parents upset as well as the students who lost out.

- The amount of man-hours and resources that went into trying to “get me” is ridiculous and appalling.

- Deputy Chancellor of Operations Kathleen Grimm is copied a lot and weighs in. To help alleviate the situation? No. The first time I heard of her was at a Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) school closure meeting and some audience member yelled out “Boooh.. Grimm Reaper!” That’s not polite I thought. I was then informed that she closes down schools.

- Deputy Chancellor Shael Suransky is in the emails as well.

- There are times when “they” got wind that I would be present at a public event, speaking out and actually upped security. What? Harmon Unger, Frank Jordan and the Office of Safety and Youth Development was on the case. I thought it was odd to see the guys in suits with wires in their ears. Now it makes sense that they kept an eye on me while I sat in the back of the Petrides auditorium.

-The words “he’ll stop at nothing” and “he is relentless” were used by many. It’s funny, because I was talking to a teacher at my school and said “Remember when I first came to IS 49 from the environmental field? I was this scrawny guy running around helping out with tech issues and staying late and weekends?” She replied “I was thinking that. Look what they have created, but what choice did you have? You’re up against an army and they don’t know what to do. It’s ridiculous! ”

-David Brodsky of Labor and Relations, Kelly Doyle of ATU, Karen Solimando.

- Several UFT members, within the building, helped with the demise of the great atmosphere we once had. We knew this, but the amount of teachers and paras who were emailing the principal my chapter leader notices is crazy. Some were not involved in my case at all, but I guess they wanted to ensure a Satisfactory rating. Another reason the teacher evaluation is going to be subjective. “Keep giving me info and you’ll get rated Highly Effective.

- I’m under even MORE investigations than I thought. Have lost count, but somewhere around 34. Lol. Great job SCI and OSI…ignore my evidence backed complaints and investigate magazine subscriptions. Yes apparently my principal was getting Playboy subscriptions and she reported that I subscribed her. You can’t make this stuff up.
. . .
Update: With less than 24 hrs before my termination hearing, SCI investigators visit my mother in law & play with my kids. Desperate? I believe so.

[Emphasis, added.]
And that is just the beginning of the vindictive madness, all at the expense of you New York City taxpayers. Accountability, my foot.
Go to Porteles' blogsite for the full post on this wild trove of Kafkaesque bureaucracy run-amok: "3,000 Pages of Secret DOE Emails. [Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm Enters Stage Left]"

A modern day Frank Serpico, only this one, Portelos, was banished in often solitary confinement to the rubber rooms that the master of disinformation UFT president Mulgrew said were closed three years ago. Yes, public, know a teller of disinformation (Mulgrew) by the company he keeps (candidate Thompson) -read here and here, here, here, here.

Portelos' hearings are public: on September 12, 23, 30 at 49 Chambers Street, Manhattan.

On a related note, we must show solidarity with an anti-judicial corruption whistleblower, Sun-Ming "Sunny" Sheu, murdered in 2010. Read "The Death of Sunny Sheu" --Truth-Out called the New York Police Department's Own Trayvon Martin Case, and these other reports, at DailyKos and a local blogger's repository of info re Sunny Sheu. The writer of Truth-Out's "The Biggest NYPD Scandal in Decades: Murdering of Sunny Sheu" called this case "the New York Police Department's Own Trayvon Martin Case."
Bill Thompson's technocratic disinterest --merely, your time is up-- to testimony regarding Sheu should send shivers through the spine of people already concerned with how Thompson has a history of political self-aggrandizement, yet no passionate commitment to principles in his general political life. See this video of Thompson presiding at hearing in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWivhbIVgMU