Charter School Board Conundrum
A conundrum that charter schools face when recruiting prestigious one percenty-types (celebrities, politicians, stockbrokers and lawyers) to serve on their governing boards is that, yes, this may open the school up to more charitable giving. But, people with outrageous fortunes sometimes came to them through outrageous means. When a school board member is hoisted on his own petard, to what extent should that reflect on the school? Old-fashioned school district school boards – however incompetent, corrupt or amateurish – have the benefit of being democratically elected by the people, and therefore, NOT OUR SCHOOL’S FAULT when they go to jail for their own idiocy.
In the era of charter schools, where governing boards are corporations appointed through insular networks of money and influence, things get tricker. Take the scary situation of Bronx Charter School for the Arts, an otherwise lovely and totally rare arts-centric (in this day of standardized math and English testing!) charter school, which had the relatively good fortune of securing “record producer, DJ, rapper and painter”, as well as Alicia Keys’ husband, Swizz Beatz, as a member of its school board.
Today, Swizz Beatz is facing federal scrutiny for his role as CEO of MegaUpload, the sacrificial lamb of Hollywood’s failed attempt to upend anti-piracy law through the “SOPA” and “Protect IP” bills that were so overwhelmingly rejected by popular opinion earlier this week. While this may be welcome news to Bob Dylan, at Bronx Arts where board-member Swizz Beatz accepted the CEO position at that now-controversial company as quickly as he accepted a seat on their governing board, everyone involved in the operation must be worried about guilt by association.
I don’t mean to damn MegaUpload. It seems like a fairly innocent pawn in the war between Hollywood and moviegoers who are tired of paying more for less. I don’t mean to damn Swizz Beatz, who seems like a relatively decent guy who was only supporting a decent charter school that tries to keep the arts front and center while most laws and funding streams emphasize student test results in math and English. I’m just saying that when you treat each individual charter school as a district unto itself, you’re going to embroil otherwise-decent schools into controversies in which they play no role. Take this fact, as a parting shot: in New Jersey, where 187 school board members have failed to complete criminal background checks, that statistic equates to only .2% of public school district members failing to live up their their obligations under the law. Charter schools? Nearly one in six charter school corporate school board members failed to follow the law. Quite the conundrum for anyone trying to support otherwise decent charter schools as they attempt to carry out their missions.
NYAAF’s 10th Anniversary Celebration
Since it seems my main venue of non-labor activism is charitable giving, I have signed on as a Co-Chair of the New York Abortion Access Fund‘s 10th Anniversary Celebration.
This is a wonderful organization that directly addresses what may be the greatest threat to reproductive freedom today: the high cost of, and limited access to, abortion procedures. This is an entirely-volunteer grassroots organization that puts money directly in the service of women in need. They do intake and connect women to the best health-provider for their situation, negotiate lower rates and leverage what matching funds they can raise from donors like you and help women get the medical help they need.
This may be the first time that the NYAAF has held any kind of event like this; y’know, a seemingly bourgey cocktail party. I’m glad they are doing it. Firstly, nothing is too good for the working class. Secondly, the organizational space that is hosting the event is, itself, a worthy charity. Thirdly, the women who have kept NYAAF as a going concern (on top of all the other demands of their lives) for over a decade deserve a little party. And, finally, because it’s an opportunity for people like me to invite you to check them out and either donate your money, or better, still, your time to one of New York’s best causes.
Something Pointless About Generation X
It’s been a while since we Gen X’ers had a good, long stare at our collective navels. The occasion of the 20th anniversary of our invention by the media is begging for more of this “are we becoming them?” kind of nonsense. Count me in!
Nirvana marks this auspicious anniversary with a reissue of “Nevermind” so bloated with extras and marked up in price that even Mick Jagger would blush. Pearl Jam team with Cameron Crowe for a career-retrospective documentary that makes a compelling argument that Eddie Vedder did the right thing by not blowing his brains out too. And R.E.M. trumps everybody by quietly, gracefully calling it a career, provoking pangs of nostalgia in, well, just about everyone I know.
Here and there, you see the media-bait question, “Wait, aren’t all these Generation X people waxing nostalgic about the rock-n-roll of their youth just doing what they angrily accused Baby Boomers of doing twenty years ago?” Well, yes and no. Look, we’re all entitled to mourn our youth. And this was a hell of a week to remind anyone who was a teenager twenty years ago that we’re not young anymore; that our heroes are dead or dying and that nothing – no song, no record, no band – will ever speak to us like the music of our youth. Not because Nirvana, Pearl Jam and R.E.M. were better than Elvis, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, or better than…whatever the hell the kids are listening to today. But because music that speaks to you when you are 15, does so on a much deeper level than when you are older. Every crush, every kiss, every three week romance just kills you and the music that helps you understand it all tattoos your brain permanently. Everybody Hurts, if you will. And that is the feeling that we mourn this month. And we are entitled to this period of mourning and to the sense of outrage we will feel when our beloved songs inevitably get sold out and are used to sell cars, hamburgers and life insurance.
One key difference between this round of Gen X nostalgia and all the previous decades of Boomer nostalgia: twenty years ago, we still had a mass media. This meant we all had to share Rolling Stone magazine with its endless “greatest ever” lists that always placed the Beatles at the top; we all COULD NOT AVOID that Beatles documentary that took over ABC for a year and OMG the Elvis stamp! Fat Elvis! Skinny Elvis! And that is largely what makes “Nevermind” so noteworthy. They pierced through. They made it to the Top of the Pops and dozens of great bands got to follow them, for, like, two years. Now, who cares what is the best selling record in the country? We download music and share it on blogs. Don’t like Rolling Stone? You can actually read the NME online and immerse yourself in a weird little world where Oasis’ recent break-up is, like, the biggest news ever. Don’t like that? Migrate over to Pitchfork, where the LCD Soundsystem break-up is the biggest thing ever. My friends and I aren’t clogging up the TV airwaves with our nostalgia; only our own Facebook newsfeeds. Which is important, because we are not the world. Hell, we’re not even the generation. Half our generation could give two shits about R.E.M. They were too busy listening to hip hop back in the day.
“Honest to Goodness! The Bars Weren’t Open This Morning.”
I voted for myself for U.S. Congress today. I walked into the polling place intending to vote for Michael McMahon, our first term Democratic Congressman. Bay Ridge, y’see, is lumped in with Staten Island for representation. This is the first election that I’ve ever been in a swing district. Boy, the number of phone calls and mailers a voter receives sure can get annoying if the election matters. I now sympathize with the citizens of New Hampshire, slightly.
Now, obviously, there’s a lot at stake if the Republicans retake the House. So, every time I received a campaign call or a survey I’d commit to voting for McMahon – but I’d be sure to tell that campaign worker that I’m pissed that he voted against the Employee Free Choice Act. I figured I would have my cake and eat it too: register my protest but hold my nose and vote for the disappointing Democrat.
But here’s the rub: voting against EFCA cost Rep. McMahon the Working Families ballot line. Y’see, in New York, we have fusion balloting. A candidate can appear on more than one ballot line, but all votes count cumulatively so that a candidate can cobble together coalition support. Most third party ballot lines in New York exist to put pressure on either the Democrats or the Republicans by adding to – or subtracting from – a candidate’s total vote. The Conservative party, for instance, usually endorses the Republican candidate unless that candidate is too namby pamby for this proto-Tea Party group. If the Republican candidate doesn’t headstomp single mothers with enough gusto, the Conservative party may choose to run its own candidate and cost the GOP nominee enough votes to throw the race to the Democrats and teach the Republicans to run a more conservative candidate next time.
Working Families employs a similar tactic, except they almost never run their own candidate. Instead, if the Democratic nominee offends, the WFP merely removes its endorsement. The candidate runs on the Democratic line only, receives fewer votes and is thusly admonished for next time. Ah, but for whom should Working Families voters cast their ballots if there is no nominee? I am genuinely unsure of the answer to that question. I’m sure that most WFP leaders and staffers would prefer that the Democrats not lose a seat that cost cost the national party control of the staff. And yet they’ve essentially told their supports, “Don’t vote for this bum.” Further, I am sure that I’m not the only WFP voter who has never pulled the lever for a Democrat in his entire life (*yes, I know we don’t have levers anymore – more below on that). It is only the thin cover of WFP endorsement that has enabled me to vote for erstwhile Dems on the WFP line. But no name appeared on the WFP line today. Just Democrat McMahon and his Republican challenger. So, I did the only logical thing and wrote in my own name. I hope this isn’t a close race, because it seems like these new voting machines in NY actually count write-ins, and I’d hate to be the margin of difference. Again.
(In case you’re wondering, I voted for WFP in all the other races except for Governor, where I voted for Hawkins and Mattera on the Green line. Cuomo does not need my vote to claim a mandate when he starts beating up on the teachers union tomorrow. I also gave good old Norman Thomas a write-in vote for the fourth judge seat that WFP did not make an endorsement for.)
So, yes, we finally have new voting machines in New York. The pull lever machines that sent JFK to the White House have finally been retired. Our new ballot is kind of a Scantron fill-in-the-bubble sheet that one hand-feeds into a scanner that is no more sophisticated than that all-in-one scanner/printer/fax machine you set up for your parents. It sucks the ballot up, the screen chirps “Thanks for voting!” and you hope your vote is counted. A friend of mine was not reassured by the on-screen confirmation, and longs for the old lever machines.
But the old lever machines used to eat huge numbers of ballots. There were races where as many as ten per cent of the ballots cast were “spoiled” and not counted. Pulling that giant switch when you were done would sometimes cause the machine to crumple and rip the ballot(s) inside. I remember that in 2000, the Socialist Party’s presidential ticket received only two write-in votes in the entire city of New York. Both the candidate and his campaign manager lived in New York, so you gotta imagine that a few votes got lost along the way. My election district did report a vote for McReynolds, so I think my vote was counted. But my poor intern on the campaign, Maddie VanHaaften-Schick, was assigned a defective voting machine at her precinct. The write-in button wouldn’t click and reveal the tiny slip of white paper on which to write in a name. She waited. She fought with the machine. She caused a long line-up behind her of voters waiting to do their civic duty. Finally, the manager of the polling location came over to see what the problem was. Maddie explained that she had ben working on this campaign for five months and wanted to cast her write-in vote for David McReynolds. This useless bureaucrat told her, “Oh, honey, we don’t count those votes!” Not content with merely saying this outrageous thing, he commenced to prove it by spinning the machine around and opening it up to show the weird jumble of paper rolls that were in the guts of the machine. “We don’t even look at these,” he said of the write-in roll – a continuous spool of blank paper with occasional scribbles that corresponded to no set ballot position. Thus defeated, Maddie voted for Nader, who was on the ballot.
In the first couple of days after the election, you could understand how I was left cold by complaints that some ballots might have gone uncounted in Palm Beach because voters couldn’t punch the right hole. Votes go uncounted all the time. The only way you can be sure your vote counted, it would appear is to write in your own name.