James O'Keefe, head of Project Veritas, yesterday released two videos in a series that he titled Teachers' Unions Gone Wild, a take-off on a popular TV show titled Girls Gone Wild. It contains candid footage taken by "citizen journalists" (meaning volunteer temporary stringers) interviewing several persons purporting to be teachers attending the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) leadership conference at the East Brunswick Hilton (August 7-13, 2010). Jason Method of the Asbury Park Press filed the first report yesterday evening.
The two videos are uploaded to YouTube and embedded at O'Keefe's Project Veritas site. The first of these videos follows:
WARNING: This video features candid interviews with persons or groups using profane and even obscene language. Parental judgment and discretion are advised.
The first video is taken at the conference, and shows several teachers describing hypothetical situations in which teachers (especially those with tenure) could utter racial slurs at their pupils in class and not be subject to termination, and also making crude references to Governor Chris Christie and describing the sort of violent assaults that some members would like to perpetrate upon him. Equally embarrassing are the shots of teachers playing video arcade games and boasting about doing so "on their dime", meaning at an event that they attended at parent/taxpayer expense.
One teacher, identified on the video as Alissa Ploshnick, a "special educator" in the Passaic Public Schools, appears telling an interviewer that "it is very, very hard to fire a tenured teacher." She said that even inappropriate sexual conduct would not be sufficient, and said that a teacher would have to be caught literally in flagrante delicto in the hallway for an immediate termination to occur. (The preceding is the Bowdlerized version of Ms. Ploshnick's remarks.) She then described the case of another teacher, whom she would not identify, who actually uttered a racial slur at a student and suffered no worse sanction than demotion.
The video goes on to capture several chants intended to demean Governor Christie, with shots of stories told of certain episodes of unprofessional conduct by school officials (like the Bergen County official who cut and pasted an e-mail wishing Christie dead and sent this memo out to the teachers who answered to him). It also mentioned an unidentified teacher describing the NJEA's role in altering the application for the Race to the Top federal grant without informing Christie or then-Education Commissioner Bret Schundler of the alterations. (New Jersey ultimately placed eleventh in the RTTT race and lost out on the grant.)
The video ends with the posting of a telephone number (609-599-4561) as if it were an advertisement for ordering a full-length video, and makes references to the rigging of elections. The telephone number turns out to belong to the NJEA. A viewer might interpret its presence in the video as either a take-off on lengthy TV ads for consumer goods "not available in stores," or an invitation to call the NJEA to ask, or complain, about the behavior depicted in the video.
The second video is largely a follow-up by one of the volunteer stringers on the Alissa Ploshnick interview. First he conducts an "ambush interview" with Ploshnick, an interview that turns out to be unproductive. Then he calls the assistant superintendent of the Passaic Public Schools, posing as the father of the boy who allegedly had suffered the racial insult.
NJEA spokesman Steve Baker denounced the two videos as inauthentic, saying, "It's James O’Keefe and that’s all you need to know."
However, in a later story carried by The Star-Ledger (Newark), Project Veritas spokesman Shane Corey defended the videos and insisted on their authenticity. He specifically says that no person posed as a teacher to be recorded making an embarrassing statement.
O'Keefe is famous for appearing at several housing-assistance offices of the old Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and posing as a procurer, with a young woman in tow posing as a prostitute, and asking for, and most of the time getting, housing assistance. The resulting scandal led to the official defunding of ACORN and ultimately to the spectacle of the national organization shuttering and its chapters changing their names.
Today O'Keefe released yet another embarrassing video for the NJEA, alleging a possible role for them in election fraud surrounding the Jersey City mayor's race in 1997, when Bret Schundler ran for a second term of office.
