Thursday, March 19, 2009  NYSUT Hostility Cracking to Openess on
Charters?  Last week President Obama made a comprehensive and
visionary speech outlining his education agenda for America.
Among the many issues he supported was charter schools,
including removing any caps imposed by states on their allowable
number. New York, for example, has a cap of 200 charter schools,
which was doubled by the state legislature only two years ago.
More significantly were the several education reform measures
espoused by the President that are commonplace among New York's
115 charter schools in operation, and the 30 approved schools
opening in the next 18 months. These include merit pay for
teachers, and removing "bad teachers out of the classroom." He
also discussed longer school days and years, urging us to
"rethink the school day to incorporate more time" and spoke of
getting beyond the agarian school year when we were more of a
nation of farmers.  Even the President's seemingly abstract
discussion of using data systems