Corruption, critical race theory, and anti-white and anti-Semitic racism aren’t new in New York public schools. Award-winning teacher Cindy Grosz has been fighting it for years, blowing the whistle on racist language used by the principal at the schools where she worked, and exposing other corruption and bad deeds in New York’s schools. A Trump supporter who ran for Congress, Grosz is a veteran at battling New York’s entrenched left.
For years no one listened. Then she was terminated despite whistleblower protections. Now the true nature of New York schools is a city-wide topic, with the campaign to replace Mayor Bill de Blasio heating up in its final weeks and American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten battling against reopening schools, despite the science, before an abrupt about-face, and pushing more and more critical race theory indoctrination in public schools.
“I was exposing what seemed to be one of the most corrupt districts in New York,” Grosz tells PJ Media, but “Instead of fixing the problems they seemed to have encouraged it.”
A series of 2009 emails make the case. In a letter to parents dated February 2009, P.S./M.S. 156 Principal Noreen Little admonishes parents to get their children to school on time. That’s certainly a worthy goal. But Little, who is black, uses racially charged language to make her point.
“I can’t emphasize the importance of being on time more,” Little writes. “I just know it sets a lifelong pattern. CP time is not recognized here!”
The reference to “CP time” surprised teachers including Grosz. It refers to “colored people time,” which “plays off the stereotype that brown and black communities often run late when they have somewhere to go,” according to Urban Dictionary. It has been sympathetically covered by the Huffington Post, National Public Radio, and even in a book for sale on Amazon.
After a protest, Little was given a mild slap on the wrist in October 2009. In a letter dated October 9, 2009, Little received notice in writing that her “CP time” comment was discriminatory. The letter, from Community Superintendent Lenon C. Murray, advised Little that she had violated the Chancellor’s Regulation A-830 “against any and all types of discrimination” and was, therefore, “derelict” in her duties. But Little kept her job.
Had this been Little’s first offense it would be one thing, but it wasn’t. Three years earlier Little was accused in a scheme to defraud the New York Housing Authority. A press release dated March 23, 2006, from the New York City Department of Investigation said Little and seven other individuals who worked for the New York Department of Education had been arrested for grand larceny and false filing felonies, crimes constituting more than $235,000 in fraud. The case alleged Little continued subletting her subsidized house in New York for two years after she moved to Long Island, submitting documents falsely claiming she still lived in the New York City home. About a year later Little returned, kept her job and all benefits, and kept it all again after the 2009 incident.
While that was going on, several New York City teachers were engaged in a discussion on official email, obtained by PJ Media, in which white women were depicted as “docile” and “easy,” while one black male teacher lauded the history of black Egyptians as superior to white history.
That exchange occurred in 2006. Weingarten, head of the United Federation of Teachers at the time, was advised of it by Cindy Grosz, who was then a teacher at 156. In an email reply to Grosz, Weingarten showed no interest in the racist conversation. Instead, Weingarten admitted she has seen the discussion “lots of times” and asks asked Grosz where she obtained the emails. Weingarten suggested that someone is using the discussion “to be divisive in the school.” That email exchange is below.
Grosz says New York is one of the most corrupt in the country, and it’s pushing critical race theory more and more at the expense of truly educating the students in its care. She pointed to stories from the past few years, such as a woman’s accusation that a school superintendent groped her and sought a threesome with her in 2017. Grosz also pointed to a 2015 case in which a Jewish teacher filed suit alleging that the principal at his school targeted him for anti-Semitic insults and abuse.
Weingarten herself centered in an anti-Semitism controversy this year. She accused Jewish Americans of joining the “ownership class” and then making it more difficult for others to succeed.
“Jews were immigrants from somewhere else, and they needed the right to have public education,” she said. “And they needed power to have enough income and wealth for their families that they could put their kids through college and their kids could do better than they have done. Both economic opportunity through the labor movement and an educational opportunity through public education were key for Jews to go from the working class to the ownership class.”
She continued, “What I hear when I hear that question is that those who are in the ownership class now want to take that ladder of opportunity away from those who do not have it.”
Weingarten made the anti-Semitic comments during a discussion of why teachers were not yet returning to classrooms, in essence blaming her union’s decision on the Jews.
The decision to pander to public school teachers refusing to go back to in person learning cost poor children a year of schooling. Its repercussions on inequality will reverberate for GENERATIONS. Instead of taking responsibility, Weingarten accuses Jews of pulling up the ladder.
— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) April 7, 2021
“No one wanted to talk about my case because of fears of the teachers’ union until now,” but it’s rising now “because (woke education) is such a hot topic,” Grosz told PJ Media. Teachers’ unions have also fought hard against returning to classrooms despite study after study demonstrating that children are hardly affected by COVID, neither contracting nor spreading it except in extremely rare circumstances.
Referring to the “CP time” comment that Principal Little made and for which she was barely punished, Grosz said, “Can you imagine me as a white Jewish woman using that line and not getting terminated for it, and no disciplinary action for it in my file other than a disciplinary letter? It seems the teachers’ unions were well aware of this behavior.”
But bringing it up to challenge it, per Weingarten’s 2006 email, amounted to being “divisive.”
Grosz, meanwhile, has one of the longest-running termination cases anywhere. The case, which started in 2011, has seen union and Department of Education witnesses confirm many of the allegations Grosz has made including documented cases of teachers hitting students and not complying with safety regulations. But she still awaits even the discovery phase of the case.
The old emails and cases matter now, as they mattered then, says Grosz. They show who Randi Weingarten really is and how New York schools are really run.
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