New Mangled Screed From 'Emery Teachers' Released

Mystery Surrounding Mistake Riddled Teacher Attributed 'Door Hanger' Elevated by New Mistake Riddled "Press Release"

Teachers Association President Announces
Childless Citizens Have "No Business" With School Doings

The president of the Emery Teachers Association issued a School Board candidate endorsement statement she called a "press release" Saturday containing grammatical errors that at least two teachers claimed to have no specific knowledge of today.  The president, Ericka Castillo told the Tattler she wrote the mistake riddled "press release" for Tuesday's election but she insisted neither she nor the ETA had anything to do with an earlier printed election endorsement flyer placed on hundreds of Emeryville doors last week that also contained many errors.
Ms Castillo's claim increases the mystery as reported in the Tattler as to the author of the earlier door hanger piece which in addition to the numerous grammatical errors, also claimed support of the endorsed candidates by what has turned out to be a phony election committee, 'Emery Families'.
Emery's current School Board president Brynnda Collins, one of the two ETA endorsed candidates, told the Tattler that the ETA had authored the earlier 'door hanger' flyer, a claim denied today by the president of the ETA, Ms Castillo.  In addition to that denial, Ms Castillo expressed the opinion that childless citizens have "no business" with Emery school doings in response to the Tattler's questioning.

Saturday's error filled "press release" was not actually released to the press but rather simply forwarded to Rob Arias, the editor of Emeryville's conservative pro-business blog the E'Ville Eye who posted it, errors and all.  Teachers were made aware that their vote for their choices for School Board endorsement were going to be made public but apparently some if not all of them were not shown the actual document before it was presented to Mr Arias.  Presumably teachers would have caught the errors if they had been given the chance to see how they're being characterized by their president, ahead of time.

While denying authorship of last week's door hanger, Ms Castillo also took it upon herself to announce to the Tattler that citizens who don't have children enrolled at Emery schools have "no business" with the official proceedings at the public schools, a false statement.  Public schools are public; paid for by the public and administered by the public.  Emery schools especially have gone out of their way to encourage the public to take part in the running of the schools: the whole concept of the Center of Community Life is supposed to be dedicated to this democratic notion.

California's Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC), a five member independent non partisan state sanctioned commission has no record of any registered election committee named 'Emeryville Families' as the earlier door hanger piece announces and that false claim could constitute a violation of the California Political Reform Act of 1974 according to the FPPC.

'Our District Need People... With Increase Enrollment'
ETA's "Press Release"
Teachers weren't given a chance to read their own
would be press release before it was released.

Superintendent Lindo: In Her Own Words

Debbra Lindo Speaks!

The Tattler has obtained a copy of the declaration of former Emery Unified Superintendent Debbra Lindo in the anti-public school teacher Vergara v. California lawsuit now under way in Los Angeles.  Her declaration, reported by the Tattler, is embedded in its entirety below.  The document was signed by Ms Lindo on October 30, 2013 and filed with the court on December 13, 2013.

Some notable points from former Superintendent Lindo's declaration:

• Ms Lindo states that the evaluation of a teacher's effectiveness should include the standardized test scores achieved by the teacher's students. (Paragraph 4).
• She says that the teachers in Emery Unified are "well-intentioned and hard-working overall..." before going into a tirade against "grossly ineffective teachers." (Paragraph 6).
• She argues that teachers are granted tenure too early, when there is only one year of student test scores upon which to evaluate them. (Paragraph 9)
• She bemoans the due process rights provided to tenured teachers when a District seeks their dismissal, stating that if the process were easier she and the Emery Unified School Board would have dismissed more ineffective teachers. (Paragraph 14)

After the falsified credentials of a former superintendent, we were promised that Debbra Lindo was fully vetted.  This School Board assured us we knew exactly who we were getting when we hired Superintendent Lindo.  One must conclude then, that this School Board shares Lindo's dismal view of our teachers and the protections that seniority and tenure provide them. This School Board hired Superintendent Lindo.  This School Board stood by her when the teachers presented a vote of no-confidence making it beyond clear that they could not work with her.  This School Board did not flinch when the teachers announced that they were suspending the liaison meetings with her because they were of no value.  And this School Board bemoaned her retirement when it was first announced and have only given the most terse and uninformative response since.
We must thus expect new banners at each school site reading: "Teach to the test!" It is apparently the conviction of not only our former Superintendent, but also our School Board.

Lindo Declaration Vergara v California-2013-12-13 by sophbeau

The document can be viewed larger by clicking the icon in the bottom right corner.

Emery Unified Is Disdainful Of The Teachers

Opinion
As the amply paid Superintendent of the Emery Unified School District and the School Board of Trustees prepare for another round of teacher lay-offs to help balance the budget we would be well advised to ask, who are public school teachers?  Are they worth so little here at Emery Unified that we should not even acknowledge their grievances?  Is the list of those grievances enumerated in their Emery Teachers Resolution not worth a response?  It's revealing the low esteem the Emery School Board holds for our teachers when they read aloud a resolution of their own, supporting the Superintendent, as an answer, after the reading by teachers of the Teachers Resolution, a document of grievances about the Superintendent.

Our School District may have disdain for the teachers here but for parents, they recognize it's public school teachers that do the actual hard work, the deeply progressive work of educating our children all for barely enough to make ends meet, if that even.  We're appreciative.  We support the Emery Teachers Association, the teachers union.  We think teachers are heroes.  

The following is food for thought from NationofChange:

America’s Teachers: Heroes or Greedy Moochers at the Public Trough?

By Dave Lindorff

I’ll be brief here. Let’s just note that the heroic teachers who died while courageously trying to protect their kids at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, and the others who survived but stayed to protect the kids, were all part of a school system where the employees are members of the American Federation of Teachers.

Let’s just let that sink in for a moment. Those teachers, who are routinely being accused by our politicians of being drones and selfish, incompetent money grubbers worried more about their pensions than about teaching our children (though most, even after 10 years, earn less than $55,000 a year for doing a very difficult job that involves at least 12-14 hours a day of work and prep time counting meetings with parents), stood their ground when confronted with a psychotic assailant armed with semi-automatic pistols and an automatic rifle, and protected their kids. The principal too, a veteran teacher herself, stood her ground, reportedly suicidally charging at the assailant along with the school’s psychologist in a doomed effort to tackle him and stop the carnage.

How many of us would have had to the courage to stand in front of a closet door to keep an armed madman from finding the kids hidden behind it, as one slain teacher died doing? How many of us would charge at an armed shooter, to almost certain death, in an effort top stop him from further killing? How many would bravely hide in a bathroom with a class of kids when we could have run away and saved ourselves?

And this: How many of the politicians in Washington and in state capitals and how many conservative think-tank “researchers” who attack teachers as leeches and drones would have shown such heroism under fire?

My guess is damned few -- if any. Yet it appears from the news reports that not one teacher in that unionized school fled the scene and abandoned the children to their fate. They all stuck with their kids. So did the custodian -- no doubt a unionized worker earning poverty wages -- who ran through the building warning everyone of the attacker’s presence.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the Newtown school board, like school boards all over this country, was considering cutting the school’s elementary music program and library program. It should be noted that both the school librarian and the school music teacher, whose jobs were on the line at the school board, stayed with the kids they were teaching when the attack began.

Yet in an attitude all too typical of many Americans’ thinking, one man, in a discussion section of the local paper, discussing the local School Board’s $1-million budget cutting plans last spring, wrote to a teacher last spring:

You, as a public sector employee, don’t generate ANY revenue. Every penny of the budget of your public sector enterprise is TAKEN from producers. It’s other people’s money versus money your organization EARNED. Your salary is not market based. Your salary, nor your benefits, nor your job, is in jeopardy during contracting economic times. If I want a raise I have to prove I have contributed more to the bottom line, and then it doesn’t matter unless the entire firm has grown the bottom line sufficiently to give me that raise. You are insulated from that reality. Your private (sic) sector salary only goes up. How is that fair? Especially in light of the fact that you don’t even generate the revenue that pays for your constantly rising salary?

Some of those “non-revenue-generating” unionized teachers, and the school’s non-revenue-generating principal, just died defending those kids.

I wonder if their tax-obsessed critics would have done the same?

Text Of Teachers Resolution On Superintendent Lindo

The following is the text of the Emery Teachers Association resolution addressed to the School Board, read aloud at last Monday night's meeting and reported on by The Secret News:

Emery Teachers Association

Resolution Expressing "NO CONFIDENCE" In Superintendent Debbra Lindo

Whereas: Superintendent Debbra Lindo has failed to provide clear leadership and academic direction aligned with the District's vision, purpose, and guiding principles; and

Whereas: Superintendent Debbra Lindo has failed to communicate with or appropriately respond to staff questions; and

Whereas: Superintendent Debbra Lindo has violated the District's guiding principles by only promoting "Dashboard Indicators" to address high expectations of academic performance instead of promoting a multi-faceted approach with true substance; and

Whereas: Superintendent Debbra Lindo's actions have created an unprecedented all-time low in staff morale leaving teachers feeling unwanted, devalued, and disrespected; and

Whereas: Superintendent Debbra Lindo has cut the teaching staff at the secondary school so significantly that it has negatively impacted the teaching staff at the elementary school, and thus negatively impacted student learning; and

Whereas: Superintendent Debbra Lindo has been dividing our community of parents and teachers through her communications regarding staffing; and

Whereas: Superintendent Debbra Lindo has failed to create fiscally responsible ratios of administrators to students, adding more administrative positions while cutting teacher positions; and

Whereas: Superintendent Debbra Lindo's actions have been undermining the workings of unions and member's rights; and

Whereas: Superintendent Debbra Lindo has not authentically involved teachers by systematically and consistently seeking teacher's input; and


Our district needs a superintendent who is a leader that inspires trust and loyalty with families, employees, and the community as a whole.  Our district needs a superintendent who is focused on students and can create an academic vision and purpose that is inclusive, meaningful, and sustaining.  A superintendent who does not abide by our guiding principles will not make our district a beacon to families seeking quality education.

Therefore, be it resolved that the Emery Teachers Association respectfully submits this vote of "No Confidence" to the Board of Trustees of Emery Unified School District.


(Signed by 45 teachers)

Schools Superintendent Called Out By Emery Teachers

The Secret News covers tonight's shocking School Board meeting where teachers excoriated the embattled Emery School Superintendent Debbra Lindo.  The teachers read from their resolution passed by some 90% of their colleagues at both Emery schools.  
From The Secret News:

Emeryville Teachers Blast Superintendent Debbra Lindo; Vote “No Confidence”

June 11, 2012

By Tracy Schroth

 

Teachers cite “unprecedented all-time low in staff morale” created by Superintendent Lindo, “leaving teachers feeling unwanted, devalued, and disrespected …”

Superintendent Lindo

Teachers with the Emeryville School District publicly blasted Superintendent Debbra Lindo tonight for violating the District’s guiding principles, destroying teacher morale, and polarizing the parent-teacher community during her one-year tenure with the District.

The litany of complaints, listed in a resolution of “no confidence” presented to the School Board during its meeting tonight, includes:    Click HERE for more...

Nexus Partners Changes Posting About Teacher Pay

Damage Control: School District Takes Down Inflammatory Post

Yesterday the Emery School District moved to stanch criticism that it is enabling a debate meme that would tie teacher pay to student test scores by removing a story from its Center of Community Life blog site.
The Nexus Partners, a School District client paid to forward the Center of Community Life, responded to a Sunday Tattler story  critical of the blog post by swapping the story about the Education Secretary Arne Duncan forwarding the wisdom of tying teacher pay to student performance with an innocuous story about the Secretary advocating for "community schools".  The District's blog does allow readers to read the original story by linking it but new readers will now have to pay the New Yorker Magazine, the source of the Arne Duncan story.  Before yesterday's swap, readers of the Center of Community Life blog could read the teacher pay story pasted right on the blog for free.

District officials were evasive about reasons for the Arne Duncan story swap on their blog and they refused comment to the Tattler.

Readers can access the February 1, 2010 New Yorker story by Carlo Rotella for themselves on the magazine's website,  but a fee must be paid.

UPDATE / CORRECTION:
Friday May 4, 2012
The Nexus Partners have been revealed to be a consortium of three architecture / city planning firms plus the Emery School District.  Nexus Partners exists exclusively to forward the Center of Community Life and there is no web presence associated with the partners.  


Nexus Partners made changes to their blog and as of today, readers may now read the 'teacher pay' article for free.


The architecture/ city planning firms that comprise Nexus Partners are: mkThink, dsk architects, and Concordia.

School Consultants Say Link Teacher Pay To Student Performance

$6 Million Nexus Partners Lets Their Bigotry Show

Opinion

It's official: the Emery Unified School District thinks we need to bust the Teacher's Union and strongly consider tying teacher's pay to student academic achievement.   Oh, and never mind the fact that child poverty has been proven beyond a doubt to negatively effect their academic achievement.   

The anti-teacher message can be found at the Emeryville Center of Community Life blog and an entry about Education Secretary Arne Duncan posted by Nexus Partners, the moderators of the website.  Perhaps it should be further pointed out that we, the Emeryville taxpayers paid $6 million for the Nexus Partners' expertise to, among other things, allow us to hear this missive about teacher pay and academic achievement.

The toxic message about busting the union and holding teachers responsible for their student's parent's income comes courtesy of this group the Nexus Partners, the architecture / city planning consortium of  firms that the School Board hired several years ago to push forward the Center of Community Life.  That in mind, the Emery Unified School District also, is responsible, by extension, for this outrageous anti-teacher message.  

The Nexus Partners thinks Emeryville is best served by forwarding the anti-teacher message without any counter message in support of teachers, it should be noted.

It's hard to know where to refute this absurdity, but a good place to start is the idea that tying teacher pay to academic performance will somehow work to improve academic performance.  A good analogy is the idea that we should tie police pay to crime rates to  bring down crime, something the Emeryville Chief of Police Ken James said would bring the opposite results.

The teacher pay thing is especially egregious for a School District to float since not only does it bear no allegiance to reality, one only needs to consider the downward spiral  it would engender: As the pay rate goes down, down goes the ability to attract good teachers to the district, creating a negative feedback loop.  Plus it runs roughshod over the truism that children raised in poverty, a high percentage of Emery's demographic it must be noted, are scholastically disadvantaged from the start.

We are so tired of all the right wing attacks on teachers the last few years.  Why, precisely should teachers be held accountable for their students' disadvantaged home life?  Why is it teachers are expected now to solve the problems of poverty and student learning; that intractable problem of disadvantaged children's inherent disadvantaged academic achievement?  Are there any other fields where the workers are expected to produce results for things outside their control?  How about if we started blaming soldiers on the field of battle for how the war is going?  Instead of looking to the top brass, let's blame the soldiers.  How about if we dock their pay if the war starts going badly?

We have to ask, why would a school district, entrusted with children's educational welfare be enabling such an obviously false and disruptive narrative as tying teacher pay to academic performance?  The district has known about their consultants, the Nexus Partner's posting of this anti-teacher, anti-student piece of nastiness since it's inception but they have done nothing to remove it.  At this point we have to assume it meets with the District's approval.  
This has not been a worthwhile spending of $6 million of taxpayer's money, to put it mildly.  How about if we get a little pro-teacher, pro-children message for that substantial sum of money?

UPDATE / CORRECTION:

Friday May 4, 2012

The Nexus Partners have been revealed to be a consortium of three architecture / city planning firms plus the Emery School District.  Nexus Partners exists exclusively to forward the Center of Community Life and there is no web presence associated with the partners.  

Nexus Partners made changes to their blog and as of today, readers may now read the 'teacher pay' article for free.

The architecture/ city planning firms that comprise Nexus Partners are: mkThink, dsk architects, and Concordia.

Teachers Union "Bumping Rights" Challenged

The Teachers Union Should Be Supported

Opinion/ News Analysis

Living as we do, in an America carefully crafted over 35 years by right wing think tanks, sometimes the pervasive propaganda seems as if it were some collective a priori knowledge, even perhaps simply our own common sense.  The 'frame' of the public policy debate has been seized long ago by these right wing interest groups to such an extent that it now seems perfectly reasonable to large numbers of non-wealthy people that labor unions work against the common good, that they are greedy and controlled by "bosses".  The Teachers Union has been especially vilified by anti-public education interests, pilloried in the public square for their "greed" and their "standing in the way of children's education".

As our own School Board votes to cut the budget and lay off teachers, right wing derived memes are rising up in the public debate even here in Emeryville.  Some parents are using the budget crisis to assail the Teachers Union for the use of "bumping rights", the union's policy of protecting their senior members as they're hit with lay-offs.

These parents say that teachers should not behave in a protectionist manner and instead simply concern themselves with educating the children.  The "bad" teachers should be layed off, not the least senior they say.  It's only common sense after all.  They're only interested in the welfare of the children, these parents sanctimoniously state.

This kind of talk enables the anti-public education meme and pushes down reasoned education policy debate.

In fact real common sense tells us that teachers do care about educating children. They're the ones in the educational trenches as it were.  Teachers should be deferred to.  They have the ability and the motive through the Union to rid their ranks of any "bad" ones among them, all the hyperbolic right wing claims to the contrary.

"Bumping should be seen as 

a necessary thing to 

protect the profession 

for professional teachers"

The anti-bumping crowd gets it all wrong.  The teaching profession needs to be valued.  Teachers need to be better paid with better job security to attract the best and the brightest to the profession.  It's not rational to continue relying on "do gooders" to fill out the ranks of teachers, as is often the case, if we really want to provide our children with the best educational prospects.  Teaching is a profession and should be treated as such with at least as much deference as management administrators receive.

A would be great teacher is less likely to enter a field where there's low pay and low job security.  The Teachers Union should be supported by parents as allies in the work to educate their children.

Emeryville parents should not take the right wing bait.  They should see bumping as a necessary thing to protect the profession for professional teachers, to snatch them away from other higher paid careers.  Teachers shouldn't have to go through what our society puts them through to assuage their desires to teach children.  They should be afforded at least a modicum of job security.

As the Emery School Board goes on its budget cutting spree, we need to realize the Union is critical to providing what it takes for education to happen here.  Instead of turning on the Teachers Union, we should fight the lay-offs.  We should fully support the teachers.