George Schmidt: Why every Substance reporter should be proud of the work we've done

[We] knew that at the May 22 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education, we were going to witness one of the greatest anti-democratic and racist attacks on public schools since Alabama Governor George Wallace declared "segregation now and segregation forever" while trying to block the integration of the public schools of Alabama more than a decade after the Brown decision. Wallace was there along with several other Southern governors -- from Virginia to Texas -- who  were following the same course, but less flamboyantly. Remember: The attacks on desegregation in the Southern schools were also an attack on public education.  ... George Schmidt

I'm inspired just reading this.

There was a time -- 2001-2004 when I hoped Ed Notes could be like Substance but got sidetracked with the formation of ICE. I wonder if I hadn't gone in that direction and just kept developing Ed Notes as an independent ed news source for NYC teachers if that wouldn't have been more valuable an organizing tool. But I do know myself -- I don't have the patience, the organizational ability, the organizing ability, the reportorial skills, and lots more missing --- including the ability to recruit a staff --- that George has had for the past 40 years. So it was done.

A group of 10 MOREs are heading to Chicago in two weeks for a conference. Very much looking forward to seeing and hanging out with George.

July 27, 2013

Colleagues, comrades, friends, and others...

1. REASONS FOR SUBSTANCE PRIDE... As your proud editor, I spent half the night working editing the two great reporting jobs by Marybeth Foley and Susan Zupan that are now on the top of the Home Page at substancenews.net -- and I'm still not finished because I want to add a dozen more photographs to help our readers understand each in context. 

As the summer of 2013 began, just about everyone who had experienced the 2012 - 2013 school year in Chicago was either tired, exhausted or more than "all of the above." We had all achieved a great deal, from the Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012 through the fights against the school closings. But after CORE won the great victories in the May 17 Chicago Teachers Union election, it was soon clear that the ruling class was not going to lighten up in their struggle to privatize as many of Chicago's real public schools as possible as soon as possible. Virtually all of us knew that at the May 22 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education, we were going to witness one of the greatest anti-democratic and racist attacks on public schools since Alabama Governor George Wallace declared "segregation now and segregation forever" while trying to block the integration of the public schools of Alabama more than a decade after the Brown decision. Wallace was there along with several other Southern governors -- from Virginia to Texas -- who  were following the same course, but less flamboyantly. Remember: The attacks on desegregation in the Southern schools were also an attack on public education. So the hypocritical votes of the six members of the Chicago Board of Education at the May 22 meeting to close 49 schools and "co-locate," "turnaround," and screw more than a dozen others (while simultaneously adding more to the charter schools) was no surprise. 

At the same time, we began hearing from people in Connecticut after a court there ruled that Paul Vallas didn't have the credentials to be a school superintendent in that state. And that's what I want to remind us of today...

2. SUBSART AS A 'FIRST ROUGH DRAFT OF HISTORY.' One of the reasons why it has become so important for those of us who report for Substance to do our jobs quickly, thoroughly, and with lots of graphics within a day or two of the event we are reporting (or analyzing) is that we are forced to move on quickly. Tomorrow we have new stories to report. We are covering the most important "beat" in the struggle for democracy and public education in the USA today: Chicago. The integrity of our reporting enables people to go "back" and find information they can't get anywhere else. The Vallas situation is one case in point I'd like to share (again). We began out presence on the Web (at the "old" site, substancenews.com) in early 2002 with our special issue, "The Paul Vallas Hoax" at the time Vallas was trying to get the Democratic Party nomination for Governor of Illinois. We were just learning to use the Web, and had to make major revisions in our web site to fully utilize the capacity of the Web to do graphics. We didn't get that capacity until 2007. Since then, we have all learned almost as fast as we need to keep up with the technology. Over time, most of us have mastered digital photography (remember when we used to share those one-use Fuji cameras, and when Kodak was King?) as well as honed our reporting skills. At the same time, I've learned how to edit better, especially how to maximize the "search" tagging for all of our stories. As a result, over time we are contacted more and more as people across the USA (and some from elsewhere on Earth) look for the alternative history of "school reform" in Chicago. The latest is Bridgeport, where the Vallas Hoax is in a new iteration. 

But the key is that every day our reporting, tedious as it may be, brings in the latest chapters. We miss more stories nowadays than we can cover, but that's a tribute to the organizing in Chicago (and elsewhere in some cases). We might have covered more of the dozens of school closing hearings, and recent protests, but we are still covering as much as anyone.

Which brings us to...

3. THE FEDERAL COURT CASE AGAINST SOME OF THE CLOSINGS. The current federal court case against some of the school closings (because they are a violation of the ADA and IDEA) is just the latest in the court cases we have had to cover (or miss) going all the way back to our landmark 1980 case (S.U.B.S. v. Rohter) which established our right to sell Substance in Chicago's public schools. Susan Zupan's coverage of that case was doubtless stressful, but the fact is we are now the only news organization that has complete coverage (to date) of that very very important case. Reading the reporting (and virtually having a front row seat to the testimony, which the reporting "brings alive"), I knew that over time, despite its length, our reports would be central to people's understanding of the case. I had heard from others in addition to Susan that the Board's witnesses were weak and duplicitous, but only after reading the report on Markay Winston's doubletalk did I fully realize what that means. And as you can see from the way I've shared graphics to highlight the history of Winston's ascension to the "cabinet" in Chicago from her Cincinnati roots, we are the only news organization that can tell a story in context as well as with the facts.

4. THE BOARD MEETINGS UNDER RAHM'S REGIME. 
Never underestimate the willingness of tyrants to expand their tyranny. As Marybeth Foley is reporting this month, for the first time I know of, fewer than half the total number of speakers signed up to speak at a monthly meeting of the Chicago Board of Education actually got to speak. As we've reported, almost exclusively, under David Vitale the Board has worked overtime, and sneakily, to undermine every aspect of public participation. At the same time, they rehearse their talking points and smiles proclaiming over and over and over that they want more "transparency." Etc. BlahBlahBlah... 

Thanks for making this a wonderful summer, despite the nastiness we are organizing against and reporting about...

George Schmidt, Editor   

DON'T GET DISCOURAGED.   

Read More

A Chicago Teacher's Action Inspires Antitest Crusaders - 14 Years Ago

"He's not going to teach in our system," --Paul Vallas
"What kind of people would do this?"  -- Mayor Daley

The district has brought in university professors to review questions, recruited graduate students to take tests before they are administered and hired a testing-research concern to evaluate its exams. Mr. Vallas says the Substance case hasn't influenced such moves. "We have always ignored Schmidt," he says. ..... Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2001

How come Ed Notes was able to report the Chicago ed deform story that was to spread around the nation as far back as the late 90's - which we did to all the UFT delegates and leadership on a regular basis (leading me to a ---DUHHHHH moment)? Because of George Schmidt and Substance, where I began to read Susan Ohanian for the first time.

I just looked back at the Ed Notes May and June 2001 issues and I must publish them online so you will see the full nature of the Unity Caucus sellout.

Susan Ohanian republished the full story of George's career-ending actions in 1999 with this article from those 5-25-01 in the Wall Street Journal.

Ohanian Comment: It occurs to me that since this website was not launched until a year after George Schmidt's courageous Act of Principle, many readers of this site don't know exactly what he did.

Substance cannot survive without the support of people who claim to believe in resistance. We all owe George--big time. Subscribe--and donate--now. Today.

Page One Feature

A Chicago Teacher's Action Inspires Antitest Crusaders

By Robert Tomsho, Wall Street Journal
2001-05-25
CHICAGO -- When copies of the citywide Chicago Academic Standards Examinations came into teacher George Schmidt's possession in 1999, he did something unusual: He published them in his newspaper.
Although the tests, completed by students earlier that year, were still being given on a no-stakes trial basis at that point, the act got Mr. Schmidt denounced, fired and sued for $1 million. But as President Bush pushes a sweeping proposal for U.S. schools to adopt achievement tests nationwide, Mr. Schmidt was also transformed into a hero among students and educators in the grass-roots antitest movement.
The admirers do not include Paul Vallas, chief executive of the Chicago school district, whose lawsuit against Mr. Schmidt alleging copyright violation is pending. Chicago, like most other school districts and states, doesn't want the exams published because it would cost too much to produce or buy all new questions each year. "His intent here was to sabotage," Mr. Vallas says.
But the publication of the CASE tests in Substance, a newspaper edited by Mr. Schmidt, exposed a number of test questions with sloppy wording or seemingly accurate answers treated as incorrect among the multiple choices.
The world-studies test asked whether economic systems determine: "a) what trade should take place, b) food and language, c) how much goods are worth," or "d) which people should be employed in certain jobs." The answer the school district wanted was "c," but Mr. Schmidt asked Substance readers to "imagine an economic system that didn't help determine trade" or "the kinds of employment people can have."

Another question asked which event was the "spark that ignited" the Civil War. The only answer acceptable was choice "d" -- "the attack on Fort Sumter" in April 1861. But also valid, Mr. Schmidt argues, was choice "a" -- "the election of Abraham Lincoln" five months earlier, which prompted the secession of seven states and the Confederacy's formation.
District officials stood by those items and others, saying the answers they deemed correct were the best of the lot. Carole Perlman, director of student assessment, says perfection was too much to expect from a test in the trial stages, but adds that district officials were embarrassed by some of the questions published. "It certainly wasn't something we were happy about," she says.
Chicago began moving toward rigorous application of standardized testing after being denounced as the worst district in the country by William Bennett when he was education secretary during the Reagan era. In 1995, the state Legislature handed over control of the schools to Mayor Richard Daley, who put his former budget director, Mr. Vallas, in charge. To make sure that teachers followed its back-to-basics curriculum, the new administration pumped $1 million into developing the CASE tests. Students in grades nine to 12 now take the CASE tests in 11 subjects and junior high students will eventually take them as well.
'Sick of It All'
Former President Clinton praised Chicago as a model of school reform, but within the city, testing became a tempestuous issue. Parents protested after eighth-graders were held back or required to attend summer school because of their scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, a national test. Already required to take a raft of other standardized exams, high-school students launched demonstrations of their own as the CASE tests were prepared. "We were pretty sick of it all," says Will Tanzman, now a Yale undergraduate,
who helped organize the protests.
It was the sort of tumult that Substance had thrived on since 1974 when it was founded by substitute teachers pressing for better working conditions. If the muckraking monthly's tenor could be shrill, it also made a mark with a late-1980s series that helped lead to the conviction of an administrator for molesting students.
Mr. Schmidt was teaching ninth-grade English at Bowen High School when he became its editor in 1996. Under him, the paper regularly harpooned administrators and promised confidentiality to school personnel who provided story-generating tips. The paper also blasted Chicago Teachers Union leaders for being too cozy with the administration. "It's just generally antiestablishment, whether the establishment is the union or the board," says CTU spokeswoman Jackie Gallagher.
A burly 54-year-old with a push-broom mustache, Mr. Schmidt has never shied away from an argument. During Chicago's Democratic National Convention of 1968, he and a few other protesters were arrested for criminal trespassing after they waded into the midst of some bivouacked troops to talk. Later, he worked on a quixotic campaign to organize a labor union for soldiers.
Though rated a superior teacher in job evaluations, he could be
unconventional in the classroom. In the fall of 1998, Mr. Schmidt and other ninth-grade-English teachers were advised to cover Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" in preparation for a trial run of CASE the following January. Since he didn't yet have to use CASE results to calculate class grades, Mr. Schmidt advised his Bowen High students to go see the 1968 Franco Zeffirelli movie based on the play. In his judgment, incoming freshmen had enough adjustments to make in Bowen's tough culture, so he never taught Shakespeare before the second semester.
The English exam that Mr. Schmidt administered was among the six CASE tests that Substance later published -- 140 questions in all: two English tests, two in Algebra, and one each in world studies and U.S. history. Mr. Schmidt, whose basement serves as Substance's headquarters, says he received the tests anonymously at his home in unmarked packages, one of which was left dangling from his doorknob in a grocery bag. School-district officials, who later investigated, say they aren't sure how he got them.
Stumbling Rhetoric
Some of the snafus he highlighted involved seemingly careless editing. Of Martin Luther King Jr., one English question asked: "Which of the following activities of King's actions directly led to his imprisonment in the Birmingham Jail?"
But the phenomenon of multiple good answers was more serious. The history test asked which of these items contributed to America's industrial growth: population increase, government regulation, availability of natural resources, or increased taxes. Population increase was deemed correct, but Mr. Schmidt questioned why natural resources should be excluded, or even government regulations "allowing the use of public lands for railroads and the massive immigration to provide factory labor to exploit natural resources."
Ms. Perlman, the school-district official in charge of developing the test, concedes that that item "was possibly not a very good question" but adds that bad questions sometimes slip through multiple screenings before being caught.
Seeing the questions from various tests in Substance "woke everybody up," says Barbara Radner, director of DePaul University's Center for Urban Education, who was working with Chicago schools at the time. "The questions were uneven and some of them were confusing."
Perplexing the Mayor
But city and school officials accused Mr. Schmidt of violating copyright laws and district regulations while rendering hundreds of expensive questions useless for future tests. "What kind of people would do this?" Mayor Daley asked at one news conference.
The school district got a court order barring Mr. Schmidt from publishing more exams and sought more than $1 million in damages from him for copyright violations in a pending federal lawsuit filed in Chicago. Mr. Schmidt contends that, as an editor, it was his First Amendment right to publish the tests.
While the union hierarchy kept its distance from the matter, Mr. Schmidt was removed from the classroom and assigned to a central-office job. There, for a time, he designed refrigerator magnets that listed emergency numbers for latchkey kids.
During a three-day disciplinary hearing at the school-district office early last year, Mr. Schmidt flew in expert witnesses, one of whom likened the CASE exams to a game of Trivial Pursuit. But the district succeeded in limiting the matter to a simple question of whether Mr. Schmidt had violated district regulations, and the presiding administrative-law judge agreed that he had. In August, the school board finally dismissed Mr. Schmidt.
Seeking his job back, late last year he filed a still-pending lawsuit in Chicago asking a state court to review the firing, claiming the board's move was arbitrary and capricious. Chicago school officials say they stand by their decision. "He's not going to teach in our system," Mr. Vallas says.
Chicago teachers and other observers say that recent editions of the CASE tests are much improved. The district has brought in university professors to review questions, recruited graduate students to take tests before they are administered and hired a testing-research concern to evaluate its exams. Mr. Vallas says the Substance case hasn't influenced such moves. "We have always ignored Schmidt," he says.
'Big Inspiration'
But word of Mr. Schmidt's plight has spread wherever people have taken aim at one-size-fits-all testing. A call for donations by one sympathetic Champaign, Ill., teacher has helped to raise more than $80,000 to defray Mr. Schmidt's legal expenses, which now total more than $110,000. "This has really been a big inspiration to people around the country," says David Stratman of New Democracy, a Boston advocacy group that is trying to organize a teacher boycott of state exams in Massachusetts.
Jeffrey Orr says that what Mr. Schmidt did helped inspire him to boycott this year's CASE exams at Chicago's Whitney Young High. "If you are not shown your mistakes, then there is no way you can ever possibly learn from them," says the 16-year-old sophomore.
Meanwhile, copies of the latest CASE tests continue to arrive at Mr. Schmidt's house. He recently used one of them to help his own son figure out how he had done on the district's algebra test. "I think every parent ought to have that right," Mr. Schmidt says.

— Robert Thomsho

http://www.mail-archive.com/science@lists.csi.cps.k12.il.us/msg00423.html

Read More

George Schmidt Rakes Over Paul Vallas: Liar, Crook, Racist

It may have been that the truth got shelved for Vallas's lies (and of course the bigger lies of corporate reform that went to Washington with Barack Obama and Arne Duncan) for a time, but the facts don't change over time despite the massive work of the liars.

Vallas had publicly compared himself and his talents to Michael Jordan and then trashed Rahm Emanual. Anyone who wants to know why the ruling class dumped Vallas in Chicago in 2001 can see from this the WHY.

Corporate America then put the Vallas show on the road, and Philadelphia and New Orleans suffered as a result..... George Schmidt 

Due mostly to the work of George Schmidt in Substance, Ed Notes (modeld on Substance) has been reporting on Paul Vallas for well over a decade most recently the other day (Drive-by Superintendent Paul Vallas, YOU'RE OUT!!!!!!!!) .

Vallas fired George, had him banned from teaching in Chicago and sued him for a million dollars for publishing and ridiculing the CASE standardized tests. George beat the law suit but not the banning. Well, he had more time for publishing Substance and organizing groups like CORE.

Substance published an article yesterday on the racist aspects of Vallas' reign in Chicago (followed by Philly, New Orleans and Bridgeport, where he seems to have met his Waterloo.

VALLAS FACTS: Paul Vallas began to purge of Black teachers, administrators, and other staff from Chicago's public schools as part of corporate 'school reform'... The Paul Vallas I knew, by Dr. Grady C. Jordan

This morning George sent out a missive to Substance staff. Here is the section on Vallas.

PAUL VALLAS OPENS THE FLOODGATES. As most veteran Substance staff members know, we have always operated on some of the thinnest threads financially... we had to shift our Web site from www.substancenews.com to www.substancenews.net in 2007.... it has now sustained daily -- yes, DAILY -- news and analysis coverage since June 2007, and as a result we are one of the more sustained placed to get news and analysis about Chicago's public schools and about corporate "school reform" in general.

One result of this, over time and with patience, is that we are often the first in Chicago to be contacted about Chicago-related nonsense taking place across the country. Recently, the ruling by a Connecticut court that Paul G. Vallas was ineligible to serve as a school administrators in Bridgeport has roiled the world of corporate "school reform."

As usual, Vallas's ego splashed in the way of some of the more sober people trying to sustain corporate reform. Within a few days, Vallas had publicly compared himself and his talents to Michael Jordan and then trashed Rahm Emanual. Anyone who wants to know why the ruling class dumped Vallas in Chicago in 2001 can see from this the WHY. By the time Vallas assured Richard M. Daley that Tom Reece and the UPC were a shoo-in for re-election to head the CTU against Debbie Lynch and PACT, Daley already knew that Vallas had been making fun of Daley behind Daley's back. The CTU upheaval (which turned out to be more hope than we should have put into it, given Debbie's version of school reforms) gave the pretext for the end of Vallas. But the following year, he tried to get the nomination for Governor from the Democrats, but thanks to Roland Burris failed (Vallas would, like Rahm, have gotten a large part of the "Black Vote" in 2002...). Corporate America then put the Vallas show on the road, and Philadelphia and New Orleans suffered as a result.

At each point where Vallas was caught lying, while his friends were caught stealing, someone surfed the Web carefully enough to get in touch with Substance. We were there, thanks to being on the Web, publishing accurate criticism, and indexing extensively, for people to locate and read the truth about the various miracle workers who were oozing out of Chicago and into the bloodstream of American public schools. Philadelphia officials contacted us when they realized Vallas was a fraud, and Grady and I spent a great deal of time briefing them on the details of how the Vallas frauds operated. After Philadelphia got rid of Vallas, he landed in New Orleans, where he helped destroy the largest and most powerful Black union (UTNO) in the USA and create the largest expansion of charter schools in any major city. Before "Race To The Top."

The past couple of years, as Chicago administrators have taken the Vallas road and gotten out of town, we have heard from people in school boards and unions across the USA who wanted to know the details about CPS bureaucrats who were vying for big jobs, usually based on their version of the "Chicago Miracle." With Arne Duncan in D.C., it was hard for the facts to get out, and a lot of districts (Broward County and Sarasota Florida; Glochester Massachusetts; Madison Wisconsin) are now suffering the penalty of believing the corporate reform hype and hiring one of those Chicago "rock star" administrators who've been bailing out from Chicago quickly of late.

Vallas was also called a "Rock Star" by some Board of Education people in Bridgeport when they were hiring him.

What this means about out responsibility is simple: Substance published the facts first, and we report clearly and with sources. As a result, when someone looks for an alternative analysis about Bob Runcie, Rick Mills, Hosannah Mahaly, Steve Zrike, Jennifer Cheatham -- or Paul G. Vallas -- the best place to get information is at substancenews.net. 

2002 AND SUBSTANCE TODAY. As you have noticed, we are re-printing in 2013 Substance articles about Paul Vallas and Chicago's version of "School Reform" from 2002. As the Vallas story gives people a renewed interest in the lies that have been pushed across the USA for the past 20 or 30 years, our reporting has always had an edge. But I was rarely so proud as I was after someone asked us about what we have on Vallas before he left Chicago, and I could resurrect what we reported the month (March 2002) when we first went on the Web. It may have been that the truth got shelved for Vallas's lies (and of course the bigger lies of corporate reform that went to Washington with Barack Obama and Arne Duncan) for a time, but the facts don't change over time despite the massive work of the liars. I am proud that we can be reprinting the stories we first published about Vallas's frauds and lies a decade ago, and look forward to continuing updating them in the age of Barbara Byrd Bennett and Rahm Emanuel, Arne Duncan and Barack Obama.

Afterburn
Is there a better lesson than Substance, publishing since the 70s, for staying the course and being persistent? George is one of the founders of CORE, works for the Chicago Teachers Union and has been a force in Chicago teacher union politics for almost 4 decades.  So every day when I feel like calling it quits I think of George, who I beg to set me free to laze around on a beach chair.

Read More