Raw experience into words

I've posted Pakter before (feisty alliteration) and need to do it again, not only for the breadth of his commentary, but for his insight into the way this malevolent chancellorship distorts a profession and maims a generation of kids.


He wrote this to Norm Scott of Ednotes fame.

In New York City, Whistle-blower Teachers
— of Joel Klein's School System —
Get Blown Away

Dear Norm:

I read Ed Notes religiously, every day, as well as some of the other excellent Education websites, although nothing even comes close to your Ed Notes- may it go on till you are one hundred and perhaps for a few years after that.

All the present fuss over New York City Teachers reporting cheating truly amuses this old geezer writing to you. Not that the topic is not important.

Shocked- just shocked. You mean to say there are really car thieves and illegal Betting Parlors in every big City in America. Impossible - How can that be ??

So what else is new. Cheating went on in every school I ever taught in and at the High School where I taught for twenty five years, mark altering / "improving"/ "updating" - was raised to a virtual "art".

I wonder if Principals demand Kickbacks for all the gallons of "white-out" they order every June to ensure that their graduation totals will look even better and rosier than the previous year's stellar "improvement".

As for using a "Passing" Regents grade as an excuse to ignore a Failing Class Grade score- how the heck do you think they come up with those "regents scores".

At my former school, and I am sure many would not be surprised to learn, at 99 % of the NYC High Schools, all Regents Scores are referred to as a student's "Raw Regents Score". That is to say- the actual grade the student earned on the actual Regents Examination.

Then at my former school, the teachers were actually given printed "Regents Score Conversion Graphs" that indicated what to enter as the student's final official Regents grade in a particular subject- such as Earth Science for example.

If the student achieved a real grade of 43 for example- the teacher just ran his/her finger across the graph to find that this "raw" score was to be converted to a 65, for example. You can imagine what a "raw score" of 65, became in the final adjustment. "Harvard University - here we come".

When it comes to grades and grading, the entire 23 Billion dollar NYC DOE is one big scam from A to Z.

As for a Teacher going to "The Office of Special Investigations"- please - give me a break.

That office is the slickest shell game of all. Sure, they bust a small time independent electrical contractor from time to time just to make it look like they are really doing "Investigations".

But their real purpose for existing is to put out potential political fires before they even have a chance to become fires. I went to them with tons of stuff and got stone-walled every time. I know everyone down there by name. That office is a total crock.

I shall never forget the day, after I was most unceremoniously removed from my school (after I refused to surrender evidence in my possession of egregious Federal Civil Rights violations as well as financial fraud being perpetrated by the Principal and her cronies), when I received a very brief call on my cell phone.

I had just been removed and illegally transferred to a Rubber Room gulag in Brooklyn. The caller was one of several SCI "investigators", (most of them former or retired NYC Police Officers), assigned to look into the allegations I had reported to that agency on several different occasions.

His words were- and I recall them as though it were yesterday:

"Mr. Pakter, I am just calling you to inform you that I have been ordered to close the book on your case". The call was that short and simple.

But then again, you find this situation existing in the NYPD, the US Army, Mega Corporations, the US Post Office et al. It is the way of the world.

Anyone who seeks to have any type of wrongdoing investigated, quickly discovers that he or she soon becomes the prime object of "investigation".

It is, and has been the way of the world since the Dawn of Time- "Bad News- Then Kill the Messenger".

When I observe all those teacher "nubies" running down to SCI at 80 Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan, a stone's throw from Wall Street, to report horrendous and outrageous criminal activity in the NYC DOE, schools system, I never really know whether I should laugh or cry.

Any one who Whistle-blows in NYC, or most other places just doesn't understand that he or she has just signed and Notarized their own "Death Warrant".

As for going to the Newspapers- "paleeeeeze"- give me a break. Who do you think owns and controls the news media- and I mean 99 % to all of it ???

But every year, as sure as Day follows Night, some young group of idealistic Teachers, God Bless their innocent and naive beautiful Souls, goes running all over the Universe- here, there and everywhere, crying "the sky is falling".

You bet it is, right down squarely on their soon to be chopped off innocent heads.

We old timers smile and just send out our warmest telepathic messages of Love to all the Teacher Whistle-blowers in Gotham and wish them our deepest and most sincere hopes for Good Luck and that they may emerge at the far end of the SCI gauntlet with a little of their tattered skin still hanging from their bloodied backs and torn and broken bodies.

Can an old Geezer like me fault these young idealistic Teachers for all their efforts to make the system better for all the powerless and vulnerable children in NYC- most of whom are already "at Risk", from the moment when they first emerge from their Mother's womb and cry their very first cry.

Who am I to fault and be the least bit cynical that someone wants to protect Gotham's children. When I stare at the face of a NYC Teacher "Nubie'", all pink cheeked and eyes shining, hurrying through the ever-revolving glass doors at 52 Broadway, knapsack heavy with text books hanging over their shoulders, who, my old friend, am I really looking at, but the perfect reflection of who I myself was, almost 40 years ago, starting out in the world of Education in New York City.

I thought back then, as a young Teacher, in the South East Bronx and later, working in Bed-Stuy and Harlem and finally via my self created Medical Program for gifted Minority students at Art & Design High School, that I could, by sheer dint of hard work and a driving Idealistic vision of the Universe make a difference.

That somehow "Good" would triumph over "Evil", honest "Idealism" would or could vanquish rampant corruption, and that somehow, by hook or by crook- I would make a "Difference"- even if just a small degree of difference.

Tell me dear God, I did make a difference.

Tell me my old and dear friend, Norman Scott, that it was not all for nothing.

And that those young Teachers presently fighting the good fight we both began to fight also, in our long distant Youth, so many decades ago, long before the present Whistle-blowers were so much as a glint in their Mother's and Father's eyes- oh please do tell me that they will succeed where we failed to make things better.

Hey Jude- please tell me that things can and will be better and that some good and healing force in the Universe- call it what you will, can and will wash away all those twisted and demented minds and sorry excuses for human beings, who for now at least, have temporarily hijacked the futures of all of Gotham's innocent children and are Hell bent on privatizing all Education in Gotham and turning it all into one gargantuan, multi-billion dollar, For Profit, enterprise.

In some cases trading their future lives and future hopes for a bag of Silver coins.

And I still see, when I lay me down to sleep each night all the laughing, beautiful faces and shining innocent eyes of my former gifted, so very gifted and talented, Medical students in Room 316, so radiant with great expectations and so deserving of Hope, that this present Chancellor, a pathetic "Legend in his own mind", via his countless lackeys, lapdogs and stooges and confederates, criminally robbed from their futures when I, as payment for becoming a Whistle-blower myself, was so violently torn from their school and so violently torn from their Lives.

---

David Pakter, former Teacher of the Year, STILL STANDING

---

NO BLOOMBERG !

ANYBODY

BUT BLOOMBERG.



NEW YORKERS don't need

a self-serving billionaire

and an entrenched oligarchy

carving up the city

and lying to us

for another

four years.

---

Excerpts from Mayor Bloomberg’s Report Card

From the Chinatown Community

While the Chinatown community is still trying to recover from the 9/11 disaster, Mayor Bloomberg’s policies have only made immigrant working families and small businesses suffer more during his eight years in office.


F In Quality of Life & Housing

Bloomberg’s rezoning plan in the community has resulted in eviction for hundreds of residents and soaring rents of as much as 400% for both residents and small businesses.

Bloomberg has allowed illegal rent gouging to continue on City property without any oversight for many years.

While working families are being displaced from NYC, Bloomberg continues to give tax incentives to luxury developers, only resulting in luxury condos and hotels sitting empty our community.


F In Education

Bloomberg is Cheating! He is inflating school performance scores to cover up problems of overcrowding, cuts in after-school services in schools, and disparities in schools in different communities.

He is excluding parents from important decisions.


F In Democracy

Overturning term limits is something even Guiliani did not do — even right after 9/11; but Bloomberg does it after promising otherwise.

His hijacking of democracy coupled with a $200 million dollar budget, denied New Yorkers a broader choice of candidates for Mayor.


A+ In Lying

Bloomberg is a master of saying one thing and doing another!

Faulty technology at the DoE:Incompetence, or hiding the facts

The early weeks of the fall term is a very critical period for establishing which classes citywide are too large, and of course there's the year-round issue of keeping track of student attendance. Troubles with the DoE data systems have been mucking up the whole lot.

As to the issue of class size, the UFT sent a directive to all chapter leaders early in the term asking them to make sure principals equalized their registers by the tenth day of school (Sept. 15th). That's so it could file for arbitration on any violations of the class size limitations set out in Article 7M of the contract.

You can tell the size of your registers using your daily and weekly bubble sheets generated by ATS (Automate the Schools), which is defined by the DoE as:

A school-based administrative system which standardizes and automates the collection and reporting of data for all students in the New York City Public Schools. It provides for automated entry and reporting of citywide student biographical data; on-line admissions, discharges, and transfers; attendance; grade promotion; pupil transportation and exam processing; and many other functions. In addition, it has a school-based management component that supplies aggregate student data, human resources data, and purchasing information for use by school administrators and school-based management committees.

There might be other ways to determine class size, but as a teacher I only have access to the ATS printouts (that we're given for attendance-taking) and to ARIS. We can't access HS Scheduling and Transcripts (HSST), which is another data system used for scheduling, grade reporting, and transcripts.

These data systems control the information teachers need for two important things that affect how well they can teach and what they can be criticized for by not monitoring: oversized classes and attendance.

With regard to attendance, we bubble our homeroom class attendance onto daily ATS forms and all our other classes (including the homeroom once again) on weekly ones. The system is programmed to make automatic changes so that being absent in your class doesn't have to mean a student is absent for the whole day.

Our personal record-keeping, on hard copy rosters or Delaney cards, is a necessary duplication of this task and one that annoys everyone. (A colleague asks a very simple question, which I’ll just throw in here: If a school has scanners, and many do, why do teachers have to take attendance on bubble sheets at all? Kids can scan themselves into the building, THE END. If you learn they’re cutting your particular class, which they can tell you on a periodic printout, call home.)


This year, my registers were more unstable than usual . . .

. . . and there were other issues I've never seen before, such as students appearing or disappearing from the ATS sheets when I had actually seen printouts of schedules they’d just been given. Of course these should match — at least by Friday afternoon, when a new ATS set is printed for the following week. But, they didn’t always, and sometimes the changes were not showing up on the daily sheets either.

I had just about had it trying to take attendance on the bubble sheets by early October. It was a such mess that I checked two other data bases used by my school that teachers can get into: a local one that has to be manually updated from ATS by the tech person (which he tries to do daily) and the famous ARIS, which is supposed to tell you everything about your students.

Lo-and-behold, they neither matched each other or the set of ATS sheets I'd been given for the week. In fact, what ARIS produced was a list from Mars, including dozens of students whose names I had never even seen before. So, I just gave up with the databases and wrote the tech person at my school for advice on how to take attendance.

For the uninitiated, it is terribly inconvenient to teach students you can't precisely determine as your own.

Yet, we’re told all the time that attendance-taking is serious business. A big bad student may cut out of the building and get into trouble somewhere in the community and our records could be used in the investigation, blah, blah, blah. No one knows if that is true, but teachers can and do get those irreversible Letters in the File when admin tells us to do something and we don’t do it. So, if we're directed to call the parents about non-appearance or cutting, we really want to take care of it. Naturally, it's a terrible waste of time to work from inaccurate class lists. It's also sometimes a hazard, as long as power-wielding principals have the right to discipline us for anything that comes into their adversarial minds.


What I have learned is this

In early October, schools were informed that the DoE had done an "upgrade" of its systems and none of the data bases were actually "talking to each other." The system was apparently changed on Sept. 25th, and “nothing relating to ATS worked.”

Two people I’ve spoken with on this could not understand why upgrades weren’t done in the summer when attendance was low (summer school) or non-existent (vacation). Why wait until September when the DoE is contractually obliged to cough up real data on oversized classes?

I learned that HSST was changed to STARS, which is now being used by all high schools and some middle schools citywide. (I can’t find the term “STARS” on the DoE website or anywhere else: if someone knows, please respond in comments so we all can learn something). Two or three weeks of attendance was not getting printed correctly, and I was told that at on a certain number of days, all of last year’s graduates and discharged kids were now sitting in this year’s registers — having been given full schedules to boot! At that point, every class was over the contractual limits.

I have since seen a copy of the “ATS News” for Oct. 9th, in which the DoE reports the following (typos theirs, not mine):

HIGH SCHOOL ROSTERS: ATS prints daily attendance rosters based on data that we receive from HSST/STARS. The latest file we received was from 9/26/09. If the rosters appear to be using that older [word missing] it is because HSST/STARS was unable to pass ATS an updated file. They are working very hard to see that the newest schedules are passed to us.

That schools were not made aware of these problems until two weeks after they occurred is a disgrace.

(NOTE: On the same Oct. 9th "ATS News" there’s also this item, but I am not sure what these scan sheets are and whether the problem they’re talking about is very large and/or important:

INDICATOR SCAN SHEETS: We have rectified a problem with indicator scanning where the bubbled forms were not updating ATS. The fix for this problem was implemented during the evening of October 7, 2009. If your school has experienced this problem Please regenerate and bubble the indicator scan sheet then scan them in. They should now update correctly.)

Class sizes bigger than ever, but how would anyone really know?

In the Sept. 13th issue of The Sun, Elizabeth Greene reported that the state was asking the DoE to explain “how it failed to reach its own goal of reducing class sizes” with the money it had given them to do that. The DoE’s response was that its progress was “substantial” and they'll get back with more information. I wonder.

In the Sept. 23rd issue of the Queens Gazette, Dan Miller reported the following figures based on UFT information: 7,419 oversized classes citywide at the start of the year (5,450 in HSS, and 1,969 in all the rest), leaving some 225,000 students in these classes for all or part of each day.

In the Oct. 12th issue of the Daily News, Clare Trapasso said Queens bore the brunt of the overcrowding, holding more than half of the city’s then 6,749 oversized classes, which is up from last year.

A TJC spokesperson reports that in one high school they are taking no-show students off registers to put them “who-knows where rather than create additional classes.” I have wondered the same thing, as I see names come and go from my registers almost every day since school started.

How the city calculates class size was discussed by Arthur Goldstein’s in his Oct. 15th Gotham Schools post, and parent advocate Leonie Haimson (Class Size Matters) says she's been working on anomalies for a while now. She believes the system is inherently faulty. It’s set up to record two classes where only one exists (e.g., CTT/inclusion classes, and any two "sections” of the same course that meet in the same room at the same time with the same teacher), “which has the effect of bringing down reported class sizes below their actual levels. After two years of advocates warning about this issue, the DoE still has not fixed this problem."


You can actually find reports of anomalies and technological screw-ups going back years. The New York Observer reported on these last July, and JD2718 talked about tech issues on Sept. 6th of 2008:

As schools scramble to balance class sizes and give schedules to new students, the New York City Department of Education's computer scheduling system sputtered and stalled due to secret modifications . . . Every year since it was introduced, HSST has had September problems, and stalls or halts at least once. We understand, it is by design, the Department of Education steadfastly refuses to acquire sufficient servers for peak-load. It is “brown-out as a way of life.”

But this year? Boom! Three days without reports. Even reports on the “clients” failed. And it wasn’t the normal accident.

More than four years ago, on June 8th of 2005, Samuel Freedman wrote about HSST snafus in an article called "The System Is Down. Is That a Problem?" His answer at the time was: "It is, quite simply, too soon to tell."

But, it’s bloody well not too soon to tell anymore.

If Ms Haimson and others suspect incompetence and/or the “failure to properly align or update their enrollment systems,” I suspect worse.

In this era of Ed Deform, whose proponents push and pay for mammoth data systems, transparency, and accountability, another explanation for such enormous problems is entirely within reason: the BloomKlein DoE is intentionally mucking up attendance and enrollment to avoid responsibility, not only for the oversized classes, but for issues relating to special ed services and attendance — all of which have to do with money and political will. With the amounts the DoE spends, you just can’t have these entirely fixable kinds of mistakes year after year.

It's also acting irresponsibly to their employees, the teachers (who serve in loco parentis to some extent), and to parents, who have the right to know precisely where their kids are when they send them off to school.

And our Union?

They are certainly not making a stink about the faulty technology, the inane directives to teacher members regarding attendance, or all that time-consuming and duplicative attendance-keeping.

They're either falling for the DoE's excuses or they're complicit in the charade.

BLOOMBERG MUST GO — far from New York City

ICE Statement on the Nov. 3, 2009 Vote for Mayor

---

The election on November 3rd will have lasting consequences for public education and the city. It deserves the attention and involvement of all New Yorkers. The UFT has a long history of candidate endorsements made without any regular process of consultation with the membership and often contrary to members' interests. The decision to sit out the contest between Michael Bloomberg and his opponents speeds us to the brink of more disasters. If appearances are real and the UFT leadership's passive support for the mayor's reelection is a deal for a new UFT contract by deadline, our union is deeply complicit in another landmark defeat for the teaching profession.

Nearly eight years of direct control over the schools have provided Bloomberg with an unchecked opportunity to implement numerous policies premised on distrust and contempt for teachers, students and school communities. Early on with his rush to implement grade retention policy he put the blame on 8-year olds for low reading scores and further worked to make standardized testing a year-round concern. “Weekend, vacations, summer — time off is a luxury earned, not a right,” he told a radio audience in 2002. Chancellor Klein went to work making testing an obsession for all schools by hanging their fate on it.

His administration accelerated the wholesale closing of neighborhood high schools. Together with a successful assault on teachers' contractual rights this led to the creation of an excess teacher reserve force in the thousands. The result of dozens of school phase-outs deepened the gulf between the two worlds children in New York encounter at the high school level. One consists mostly of large neighborhood or selective schools and is increasingly filled with white and Asian students An entirely different realm awaits black and Latino students consisting mostly of new small schools, stripped of both enrichment programs, IEP services and bilingual programs and plagued with teacher turnover.

The new schools have been staffed with discriminatory hiring through privately-run programs. Just as tens of millions in funding by Bill Gates went to school reorganizations, Eli Broad's millions were used to train principals to see teachers as antagonists. In recent years Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein have extended the agenda of privatized education by embracing charter schools, displaying a marked preference for the chain operators. Their favoritism towards the charters has allowed them to invade neighborhood schools and shrink them.

For educational activists the past eight years have meant not only palpable damage but also lost opportunity for positive and progressive change. The Bloomberg monopoly of power has excluded local participation in decision making, eliminating a common entry into politics by Black and Latino New Yorkers. It has also preempted meaningful discussion around educational goals and policy. What should be the goals of a public education? How can schools do more just provide an exit from the poorest communities? How could schools be part of a collective effort to improve neighborhoods and increase democracy?

Bill Thompson has played an important role as city comptroller in exposing Bloomberg-era fraud and mismanagement. His supporters are waging a spirited fight against a billionaire mayor with lopsidedly less resources. It is difficult to offer Thompson unqualified support when he has thrown support to mayoral control and supports much of the underlying corporate agenda for education. The mayoral race this year also attracted Tony Avella (who Thompson defeated) and Billy Palen who is running as the Green Party candidate. Both advocated a more grassroots response to the current mess and it's a shame Thompson didn't adopt some of their policies in his campaign against the mayor.

Despite these differences anything other than energetic rejection of the Bloomberg monopoly is the wrong choice for our union.

We urge all readers to vote against Bloomberg!

---

Published at the ICE blogs and website: UFT Elections 2010, ICE Blog, and ICE main website.

On hold for good reasons

I continue to blog less than I used to —

NOT because I've become bored with the subject . . .

NOT because I don't have things to say about the coup in NYC education we've witnessed, come to understand, suffered through, and written about for seven or eight years . . .

NOT because I've given up on unionism . . .

and NOT because I have become any less of an activist . . .


It's because I don't have the time, and that's because

HIGH SCHOOL MUSIC TEACHERS
get 50 kids per class 5 times a day.
Total: 250 students to be
accounted for on a daily basis,
whether they show up or not.

The picture up above is what 50 kids looks likes (plus the teacher in the back row). Who cares if it's in India, it's a good visual.

My registers this past week have been fluctuating between 50 and 53 kids as things are getting worked out. When I mentioned this to one of the highest officials in our "pro-active" union (I say that with tongue in cheek), his response was something like: "The principal doesn't have to give you that many kids," as if it were my fault my classes are this large.

Do I have to remind him that the likelihood of any principal in this city putting fewer than 50 kids in a high school music class to improve the quality of education is about zero?

The UFT fails to accept responsibility for this. It's somehow the DoE's fault, or in this case, the principal's, that the numbers are so high. But, who do these union execs think they're kidding? It's they who negotiated this contract, unless they all went to the bathroom when it came time to rethink Article VII.M.2.g. At any rate, no one's ever explained the purpose of putting 50 in a music class, and my gut feeling is that their bottom line is: Shut up. You're lucky you have a position.

So, the glorious summer vacation is Over with a capital O, and I've been bubbling duplicate attendance rosters and marking reams of classwork straight through the morning commute and all my preps, lunch hours, and cafeteria duty, on the subway going home, during happy hour, and halfway through Keith Olbermann. That's when I usually just fall asleep.

I won't bother anyone with the detailed letter I sent the union about these numbers. I've complained about them before, and though Weingarten said she'd look into some "non-contractual relief" for music teachers, nothing was ever done. The official I recently wrote to says he is looking into it, but "nothing" is what will continue to happen as the execs fall in line with pattern bargaining and give away some other hard-fought stuff in our current contract.

So, I was thinking that as long as I'm not posting much these days, I should at least have something here that relates to another issue that's not going away any time soon. ATRs.

You can read the full post on the handbook I wrote for ATR subs over at "Surviving limbo," but here's the manual itself, with a few current changes.

I wish I could say it was no longer needed.

---

THE ATR HANDBOOK

[Note: This manual was written mostly for per diem subs.
Even if you've been given full or partial programs, a lot of this still applies.]

Part I: THE MINDSET

1. You are an inconvenience to your administrators and are essentially being tolerated. Do not try to be a goody-goody or get them to like your work, because bottom line, they don't actually want you on their budget.
[NEW COMMENT: Of course, if you're being paid out of central, they probably DO want you, but not enough to take you in properly.]

2. Do what is educationally sound at all times. That's the only way you'll be able to sleep at night.

3. You are a place holder, not a place filler. You are in someone else's room doing what you can with someone else's lesson for someone else's students, a situation which lasts for the duration of that person's absence.

4. Know that you the only person in the building being asked to "wing it," and no ed school ever taught you how. In the wonderworld of BloomKlein, your job specification has just shifted, and whether you like it or not, you're now a Jack-of-All-Trades, particularly in the HSS with all those specialized classes. Either enjoy, or . . .

5. Detach. Students might be cold-hearted, either unwittingly ("Hey, Miss, did you get downgraded or somethin'?") or purposefully ("F— you. You not a real teacher.") They can also be delightful, like the girl at the bus stop who shouted enthusiastically to her friend: "Hey, there's my substitute!" You are neither a sub-order of teacher or fabulous. You are doing your job to the best of your ability under volatile circumstances.


Part II: WHAT YOU'LL NEED TO CARRY WITH YOU

1. Class registers. Oh, how the intruder types love subs, and what a run-around they can give you.

2. Pens, pencils: but get collateral if you lend them, because they'll walk out with them and when they remember to return them, you've moved to another room.

3. Wordfinds, math puzzles, crossword puzzles, scrap paper. There'll be days when the teacher has left you nothing, and when kids are bored enough, some will take whatever you're handing out.

4. Chalk, eraser, dry erase pens. Don't rely on the teacher's supply.

5. List of school phone numbers, like for security, guidance counselors, the program office.


PART III: PROCEDURES

1. Have kids sign in on a separate sheet. Bubbling comes later, at your convenience and when you've had a chance to reflect over the legitimacy of the signatures.

2. Assign work immediately. Better still: write the assignment on the board before they get there and don't even open your mouth. Teens respond better when they're not being told by you to do anything.

3. Announce that you'll help anyone who needs it.

4. Then help a few of them, or at least look at what they're doing over their shoulder. Send a message that you're not just a disinterested bystander. It will convince some of undecided characters to crack a book.

5. Standard behavior for immature classes is to test the sub, and they can be merciless. So, it's now time to annotate that sign-in sheet. Look really serious when you do this, as if the mark you're giving them really means something. Tell one person he gets a check because he's working, another a half-check for not working so hard, or NW for No Work at all. Give your own marks for anything you can think of: being disruptive, intruding (contact Security to remove these kids), breaking school rules (don't contact Security for these because you'll annoy them, but you can write the student up later and let other people handle it).

6. A malicious child can really hurt you, but remember this. There are Chancellor's Regs on abuse to protect the student, but you won't find any regulations for the kind of abuse substitutes are frequently subjected to. In BloomKlein, teachers are abusers, students are . . . well, just kids.

7. Put the room in good order when you leave and the work in a neat pile. It's like wampum: you're trading a bit of effort for a bit of good feeling, and you'll be needing as much of that as you can get.


Part IV: DOCUMENT EVERYTHING, for example:

1. When no assignment has been left for you
2. The kids who enter late
3. When kids sign the attendance sheet, then cut out
4. Dangerous items left around the room (broken glass, formaldehyde, etc.)
5. Ripped books
6. Security not arriving if you've called them
7. An AP or principal walking into the room, for whatever reason
8. A kid's tirade of vulgar, aggressive words. It might get worse before it stops, but it will stop, especially when the rest of the class sees the humor (i.e., the stupidity) of it.


Part V: HONE YOUR TECHNIQUES, and SHARE THEM!

Greg Palast's new war

Someone suggested at a meeting a couple of years to sic Greg Palast on BloomKlein and let him do what he does best: connect the dots.

I'm glad to have been alerted now to his Sept. 6th post on "No Child's Behind Left," where he turns his attention to educational malpractice American-style.

Palast's remarks on Title I caught my attention, because when they told us at a faculty meeting last June that all NYC schools were now going to be classified as Title I schools, I couldn't see why. I thought Title I meant low-income, and some schools in the city don't fall into that category.

In fact, the ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) that set up Title I funding in 1965, and re-authorized it every five years up until NCLB (the 2001 re-enacted version), was designed to get some extra money out to schools with a high percentage of students from low-income families.

Federal guidelines allow school boards to set that limit between 35% and 75%. NYC had been setting it at 40%, but it's now been lowered, and now the whole system gets to be Title I.

As I say, I didn't understand why the whole city was going Title I, but here's the dots Palast connects for me:

In this flat, tilted new world, we have to adopt the methods used by emperors of Confucian China: Test for the best, cull the rest.

Of course, not everyone takes the same test. Only "Title 1" schools must test students: working class and poor schools. The wealthiest suburban districts are exempt and all schools where students wear designer blazers. It's true that our President took a test to get into Yale. It had one question: "Was your grandfather, Prescott Bush, a Yale Trustee?" His answer, "Yes," gave him a perfect score. No Child Left offers no "options" for those with the test score Mark of Cain — no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new social Darwinism, the marketplace jungle brought into the classroom. This is educational eugenics: Identify the nation's loser class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap. Someone has to care for the privileged. No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers.

And so we have No Child Left Behind — to provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale Alumni Club, punch the cash registers color-coded for illiterates, and pamper the winner class on the higher floors of the new economic order.

To clarify a bit (though the people who read this post probably wouldn't need any clarification at all), NCLB requires annual standardized testing to all students, but those who get Title I funding must make Adequate Yearly Progress. And here's a very clear definition of AYP (underlining mine):

Every state education agency is required to determine which schools do not meet AYP every year. However, a specific designation by the U.S. Department of Education called "Federal school improvement status" applies only to schools that receive Title I funds. State education agencies are required to determine what larger goals are required of every school as they fail to perform annually.

Title I schools that do not meet AYP for two consecutive years are placed in "School Improvement Status" and must offer alternative school attendance opportunities to students within their schools. If these same schools do not make AYP for three consecutive years, they must offer both alternative school attendance opportunities and opportunities for students to increase their learning outside of school time. If those schools miss AYP for a fourth consecutive year, they are designated as being in "Corrective Action" and must choose among strategies outlined by NCLB. A fifth year of missing AYP results in restructuring planning year when the school is shut down, and then a sixth year of missing AYP requires that the restructuring plan be implemented.

NCLB restructuring options include:

• Chartering: Closing and reopening as a public charter school.
• Reconstitution: Replacing school staff, including the principal, relevant to the failure in the school.
• Contracting: contracting with an outside entity to operate the school.
• State takeovers: turning the school operations over to the state education agency.
• Any Other: engaging in another form of major restructuring that makes fundamental reforms.

The option of extending NCLB-required sanctions to non-Title I schools does exist; however, there is little current research indicating the implementation of this practice.

In other words — let's not bother with chartering, reconstituting, contracting, and taking over schools in the burbs. The teachers in those schools are just fine, everyone's on task doing great. Not that I wish the heavy hand of the BushBama to come down on them like it's been happening here in NYC. It's more like I wish we had the smaller classes (that they refuse to give us) and the freedom to teach (that they refuse to allow) so we can do our job.

With school districts given the Congressional right to decide how they would set Title I eligibility, there's some question as to why the whole city — which is really a conglomeration of many towns and villages — had to all become Title I.

Part of the answer (maybe all of it) lies in that AYP business. The DoE now has free reign not only to test mercilessly, but to restructure, close schools instead of fix them, charterize, and contract out whatever bits suits them — which is what this game is all about.


NCLB hasn't been the only federal passport to EdDeform. In a press release last May 11th, the government announced that NYS was going to get a couple of billion more dollars under the new American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In order to receive those funds, though, the state would have to provide

assurances that it will collect, publish, analyze and act on basic information regarding the quality of classroom teachers, annual student improvements, college readiness, the effectiveness of state standards and assessments, progress on removing charter caps, and interventions in turning around underperforming schools.

The jump from getting more ed dollars to help out low-income populations (1965) to creating national standards of so-called achievement and quality (2001 and later) is complicated and disingenuous.

Patrick McGuinn tries to capture this in his book on ed policy for the past 40 years. As he says in the introduction:

The original ESEA was narrowly targeted (to disadvantaged students), focused on inputs (providing additional resources to schools), and contained few federal mandates. In contrast, NCLB embraces a much broader scope . . . focused on outputs (measuring academic performance) . . .

A review of the book says that McGuinn argues

[NCLB] signaled the clear emergence of a new policy regime that had been building since 1988. No longer do federal policymakers simply focus on ensuring equity for disadvantaged students and monitoring policy inputs . . . Rather, McGuinn sees a fundamentally new regime that now stresses excellence for all students, backed by high-stakes accountability for results. That shift, McGuinn notes, was built by conservatives and liberals who charted a middle path while sidestepping the preferences of key interest groups in their respective coalitions.

I love those middle paths we're charting and have written about them recently (here).

Since it's not possible that all conservatives and liberals in this country are either business people looking for cheap, mildly educated labor or military commanders looking for war fodder, I am wondering what it will take for them to see that ideology without basis doesn't get our disadvantaged kids up and running.

Electoral hardware: another arm of the privatization monster

With all the talk of privatization of the public school system, it's easy to lose sight of all the other ways corporations are changing the way our government operates.

Naomi Klein spoke a couple of years ago about the "faulty logic of the Bush administration's vision of a hollowed-out government run everywhere possible by private contractors":

According to this radical vision, contractors treat the state as an ATM, withdrawing massive contracts to perform core functions like securing borders and interrogating prisoners, and making deposits in the form of campaign contributions. As President Bush's former budget director, Mitch Daniels, put it: "The general idea — that the business of government is not to provide services but to make sure that they are provided — seems self-evident to me."

It's happening with our electoral system as well.

Some watchdog groups are examining the machines NY and other state governments are being persuaded to purchase. They're scared, and they're calling for people to get involved.

The message I received from one of these groups invites you to learn more about the ramifications of turning over our electoral system to contractors and their optical scanning technology:

Our state expects a deficit this year over $2 billion.
In 3 years our expected deficit is $18 billion.

In spite of this, we are moving ahead to privatize our elections with expensive paper ballots and optical scanners (vote-counting computers).

New York counties have already objected to proper security for the paper ballots and scanners because security is too expensive.

There are two sessions being offered:

Sat., Sept. 12, 12:30-4 PM, 28 E. 35th St. between Park and Madison Aves in Manhattan
Saturday, Sept. 26, 1:30-4:30, 40 E. 35 St. between Park and Madison Aves in Manhattan

Anyone can attend, just RSVP via email or phone (Teresa Hommel, 212 228-3803) and include your phone number.

More info at these links: Legislative Memo , 186 Failures of optical scanners, and WheresThePaper.org

Neoliberalconservatism

Obama's "Race to the Top" initiative, which is like a sledgehammer whacking ed deform deeper into public policy, is the conflation of at least three philosophies, if not more.


Neoliberalism. The first of these definitions sounds tame, the second like a hungry beast:

"a political orientation originating in the 1960s; blends liberal political views with an emphasis on economic growth"
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

"The policies of privatization, austerity, and trade liberalization dictated to dependent countries by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as a condition for approval of investment, loans, and debt relief." (6)
www2.truman.edu/~marc/resources/terms.html

Neoconservatism. The first makes you feel uncomfortable, the second is terrifying.

"A right wing political movement that opposes liberalism in political, economic and social fields."
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/neoconservatism

"Neocons - Neoconservatism is a political philosophy that emerged in the United States of America, and which supports using American economic and military power to bring liberalism, democracy, and human rights to other countries."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocons

Liberalism. A virtual potpourri of economic and social elements, such as:

The quality of being liberal; Any political movement founded on the autonomy and personal freedom of the individual, progress and reform, and government by law with the consent of the governed; An economic theory in favour of laissez faire and the free market
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/liberalism

"broad, large-minded, tolerant"
"having political or social views favoring reform and progress"
wordnetweb.princeton.edu

And all this doesn't seem strange anymore, because since Obama's been in office, he's morphed.

Gone are the autonomy, personal freedom, broadmindedness and tolerance.

Being fixed in stone is an opposition to all that – plus privatization and an imperialistic federal government that dictates policy to the states. (Who needs State Ed Depts anymore, come to think of it.)

Much to think about, but it feels like a tsunami.

Cartoon credits:
Neo-liberalism: azlanmclennan.com
Neoconservatism: pissedonpolitics.com
Liberal: cafebabel.com
The New Yorker, which I'm very angry with for the Steven Brill article

---

Since this blog is on hold while there's much to do at the school level against the threats to NYC public education, I'm leaving this reminder of the kind of battle we're in.

Danny Weil's essay in Counterpunch, from whence these two paragraphs:

Neoliberalism, Charter Schools and the Chicago Model
Obama and Duncan's Education Policy:
Like Bush's, Only Worse

. . . What the Obama administration is doing, in tandem with the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is part and parcel of typical neo-liberal policy making: wielding federal stimulus funds as a financial weapon to force all states to increase the amount of charter schools they host as well as force those states that do not have them to pass legislation authorizing them. Through financial arm-twisting at a time of disastrous economic crisis, the Obama administration plans to use the power of the federal government to create a much larger national market for charter school providers, be they for profit or non-profit, virtual charters, EMOs or single operators.

This is deeply troubling, for many states which do not want charter schools or have found the experiment to be less than adequate and in fact damaging to kids and funding, for traditional public schools will now be forced to choose stimulus money over policy, a form of economic extortion and increased federal and corporate control over decision making, especially at a time when many of these states are literally financial insolvent. This is another example of how disaster politics operates, only this time the disaster is not a natural disaster but an economic disaster that threatens public policies.

Is anyone feeling like I am that we've been ripped off by this presidency?

Wearing the right shoes

Frank Rich in the NY Times last Sunday got it exactly right when he said there's a "sinking sensation that the American game is rigged," that the system is in hock to lobbyists and the very, very rich.

I take this very much to heart. In fact, I am way past that "sinking" sensation and know to the bone how entirely rigged this American game is.

The editorial boards of the largest NY papers are caught up in the same sphere of influence, and they've pretty much abandoned the notion of unbiased reporting. A disappointment, but no surprise anymore.

Fortunately, the gap in reportage is being filled by some tireless activists, which means as long as you own a computer, you'll never be more than an hour or two away from the latest education news. These people connect the dots, provide links to other scholarship and muckraking, and tell you when it's time to take direct action.

My warmest and most heartfelt thanks for doing this for us goes to Ednotes (Norm Scott), NYC Educator (NYC Educator), and NYC Public School Parents (Leonie Haimson), a virtual dream team of bloggers. There's also the indefatiguable GothamSchools produced by The Open Planning Project.

I will not include in this list what should have been there all along: Edwize and the NY Teacher, the ethically challenged arms of the UFT/Unity Caucus.

As for myself, I've learned this summer that I've got to come off the computer and spend my non-teaching time in civic protest. There's no other way I'll be able to feel comfortable in my own shoes.

Looking for Michael B.

Summertime for me usually means reading Tom Stoppard, but let’s face it: There’s nothing like Shakespeare to help you understand the mind of a despot.

I’m talking about Richard III, though I’m sure anyone who knows me probably thought I meant Michael Bloomberg.

When Al Pacino came out with his documentary Looking for Richard in 1996, he had spent four years poking around the soul of that hideous king. The film is fascinating if you’re looking for insights into the psychology of New York's ruling class.


Take the remark Vanessa Redgrave makes in the film, that "those in power have total contempt for everything they promise, everything they pledge,” and then review the list of Bloomberg statements about running for a 3rd term:

"The people themselves have twice explicitly voted for term limits. We cannot ignore their will. They want the openness new faces bring. And they will get it. We will not go back.” (2002)

“I would oppose any change in the law that a legislative body tries to make.” (2002)

“There’s no organization that I know that would put somebody in charge for a long period of time. You always want turnover and change. Eight years is great. You learn for four years. You can do for four years." (2002)

"I think it would be an absolute disgrace to go around the public will." (2005)

"I always thought term limits were a good idea. I am not trying to overturn term limits." (2008) [credit to www.youreadisgrace.com]

Contempt, yes. There's also the greasing. For example, the Independence Party — “Asked if the mayor had pledged a specific amount of money to support the party this year, Salit was understandably coy. The mayor had assured them that ‘ample resources will be brought to bear,’ she said with a smile. In Bloomberg talk, this is always a seven-figure number.” Or the people who find real estate projects a piece of cake these days — look at image 2 in this link when it zips by, which shows how they're planning to build 4 big towers in the Coney Island acreage that’ll block the sun for the next 200 years.


Barbara Everett, a Shakespeare scholar Pacino interviews in the film, suggests that "Everybody may have a price, but for a lot of people there is a fundamental decency. It takes quite a long time for them to reach that point. The action of the play, the sense of exciting movement, is Richard's finding the point" — or in real time, the moment the pandering and corruption stops.

Bloomberg may be getting his kicks from straddling the line between legal and illegal, moral and immoral. He certainly doesn’t need the cash.

Richard, Everett continues, is "bound to be left alone, because nobody can love the king beyond the degree of their own egoism, or perhaps their own goodness. There’s going to be a point.”

Well, New Yorkers are sure waiting a long time for that point, the one when enough legislators and council members break away from the mayor’s contemptible grip to vote for something relating to public education that makes sense. It hasn't happened up in Albany, and it's not happening down here either. A few perhaps, but not enough of them.


Says Richard when Buckingham asks him to make good on his promises:

"I’m not in the giving vein."

Neither is Bloomberg. He’s locked out parents and educators for eight years, and if he’s handing them a few crumbs this past week, it’s because he was forced to. He wants that third term.


Al’s producer, Michael Hadge, suggests Richard is a man who in the end “knows that he does not have his own humanity. That he’s lost it, that he has let the pursuit of power totally corrupt him, and that he is alienated from his own body and his own self.”

To my mind, so is Bloomberg, else how could he as a Jew compare anything going on in the Senate these days to the failed policy of appeasing the Nazis. That’s losing your own self big time in my book.


At the end of the play, King Richard comes to terms with his self-loathing, and he doesn’t hide behind a cloak of insanity when he openly convicts himself in Act V, scene iii:

"Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain.
Every tale condemns me for a villain.
And if I die, no soul shall pity me.
Nay, wherefore should they?"

I think Bloomberg’s not there yet, because he’s still an arrogant son of a bitch. But as Everett says about Richard, "Although he’s frightfully clever, he’s at the same time like a kind of boar who has subsumed into himself all these frightful animal images. And all the rest have got to do is hunt the boar, and that’s what they do. And they get him."

We’ll never be able to “get” Bloomberg for the crimes he’s already committed against half a generation of NYC school children. But we can get him OUT, for as Richmond puts it:

"England hath long been mad and scarred herself." (V, v)

Not one shred less than New York, methinks, when scoundrels rule and people beflower the paths they tread.

Now for some levity . . .

. . . while New York slugs it out with a mayor we were never meant to have.

A NEW FILM: "A blogger turned stand-up comic, an obsessive political gadfly and a high-school math teacher compete against each other and arch rival incumbent Michael Bloomberg for the post of New York City mayor."

Click to see the trailer.

And this, about saving Coney Island from robber barons.








Click on Dick
(below)
for an important
video message!

Obama's double-take

If you haven't seen this video clip on Obama's July 16th speech at the NAACP, here it is:

"And let me say this. If Al Sharpton, Mike Bloomberg, and Newt Gingrich can agree that we need to solve the education problem, then that's something all of America can agree we can solve. [clap, clap, clap]

"Those guys came into my office . . . [pause for irony] . . . just sitting in the Oval Office, I kept on doing a double-take.
[mimics his own disbelief, laughter, clap, clap, clap]

"But that's a sign of progress . . .

Progress?

I would like to say Obama doesn't get it, but he's way too smart. With both feet planted square in the neocon agenda, he and his Secretary buddy Arne "Non-Educator" Duncan have been working overtime on creating a feeding frenzy for public monies.

The cash is going to charters without a doubt, even though nobody says what the big deal is with these schools. The only thing I can tell is that they get to keep the class size down and pick their students. That doesn't cut it with the masses, the people whose dreams were once tied up with putting this president into the White House.

Sharpton, Gingrich and Bloomberg — not an educator among them. Just a trio of dissemblers with a nose for power and cash.

President Obama, I agree with you it's weird to see these guys sitting around the Oval Office, but what I can't get is why the heck were you in there with them?

Welcome to Lilliput

NYC Educator brought up the word "liar" in a recent post, and I agree:
It's time to go there.

A few minutes after I got the latest flyer from the Bloomberg campaign, I found myself driving up the FDR and doing what the man in the movie Network told us to do. I rolled down the window and yelled out:

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Boy, did it feel good.

There is so much lying these days, and absolutely nobody should be taking it anymore. Particularly people who send their kids to public schools.

Across the front of that flyer there's this bold announcement: "New York's newspapers say: Mike Bloomberg is making PROGRESS in our schools." A nice trick when you think about it, to use quotes from a bunch of newspapers instead of facts.

Inside, a heading quotes from the Daily News: "New York public school students are achieving at unprecedented levels." Well, that's a lie right there — unless you take it to mean that literacy and math competence in our schools have reached an unprecedented low.

Then there are four big-print highlights of the mayor's "strong, independent leadership" and more newspaper quotes to back them:

GREATER ACCOUNTABILITY . . .

MORE PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT. . .

STANDING UP TO THE BUREAUCRACY . . .

HIGHER TEST SCORES AND GRADUATION RATES . . .

All lies. Flaming, outrageous, hugely expensive prevarications of a billionaire pol who has quite frankly crossed the line.

It's clear that the mainstream papers print what the Bloomberg pressroom sends them, because you can't publish something like this:

"Mr. Bloomberg has created clear lines of authority in this once-chaotic system and cut back a spreading bureaucracy that defied previous mayors. Judging by test scores, the city's students are benefiting." (the NY Times, Sept. 08)

without someone failing to check the facts and do some analysis.


Fortunately there are muckrakers and sharp-sighted eagles picking up the slack where the ostriches, sloths, and varmints at city newsdesks renege, and there are sites like this to remind you to re-read their posts.

For Bloomberg's claim about "GREATER ACCOUNTABILITY", read how Seung Ok and Steve Koss debunk Press Secretary David Cantor's claptrap on regents scoring over at Ednotes and Leonie Haimson's latest post on the resignation of the DoE's Chief Accountability officer, James Liebman ("the man had no qualifications for the job"). Eduwonkette did a whole week of posts on school report cards when they first came out (she covered strategy, flubs, theory and problems), and you can both laugh and cry at Celia Oyler's pop quiz on the same topic.

For his claim about "MORE PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT", see James Eterno's post on how parents had to fight to get a decision-making role at local schools after Klein marginalized them with a 2007 regulation. Then check out this G.E.M. post (earlier ones also) for stories of parents fighting back against BloomKlein's school closings and doing things specifically without their involvement.

For his claim about "STANDING UP TO THE BUREAUCRACY", that's baloney to start with. See Elizabeth Green in Gotham Schools for a frightening account of the three reorganizations of the system to date. How much more fiddling around with bureaucracy can the city take, or pay for?

And for his claim about "HIGHER TEST SCORES and GRADUATION RATES", there's tons on this already. Two good reads come to mind: Diane Ravitch's important testimony at the NYS Assembly on both these topics last February, and NYC Educator "Just the Facts." In fact, you can get a whole lot of other links about grad rates if you read Chaz's post, like he suggests in the comments.

I'm at the stage where rolling down a car window is not going to be nearly enough. It has to be louder, bigger, and pack a big punch.

But until all that comes together, I'll just keep thinking of Gulliver and how a whole lot of little people doing their thing can eventually bring a big guy down.

Barron and the art of protest

For more on this demonstration, see the David Mark Greaves report "Parents Demand Voice in Education System."


If you were lucky enough to attend the rally at Tweed two days ago against BloomKlein malfeasance and thuggery, you would have been reminded of something we don't always see these days. People power.

About half an hour into event, Councilman Charles Barron led the crowd right up the steps to take the place back. Of course he stopped at the doors, and of course we all wished he'd barge right on in. Not this time, but we're getting there.

The sunsetted Department of Education did a miserable job of serving the people in spite of Bloomberg's cash-flow hype, and most know in their bones that the new so-called Board of Education is illegal.

It's clear there's no shortage of great speakers at any of the rallies these days. Some of the parents, teachers, and council people who've taken the mic have really been able to put our profound disgust into spine-tingling speech. [For more on our profound disgust, read Polo Colon here.]

Too bad, of course, that NONE of these speakers are Weingarten's people, and that's a fact. The staff she sends out to monitor these events all hover around the back edges in their Sunday best looking fairly muzzled — when they're not hob-nobbing with Tweedies, that is.

Thanks to NYCteachers.com, there's a video of part of the protest.

And here's a transcription of the text, because honestly, it's time we learn to start sounding like this to everyone who'll listen. So, practice up.

There’s no way on God’s earth can you get into the 21st century if you’re not teaching science,
if you’re not teaching computers, [someone yelled out History],
if you’re not teaching about the green economy,
if you’re not teaching about economics,
if you’re not teaching about leadership,
if you’re not teaching about the culture and the rich history of the African community,
if you’re not talking about the Latino community and their rich culture and their rich history.

So, we gotta say: We want a culturally relevant curriculum.
We want a curriculum— not some businessmen getting in a room and saying one-size curriculum fits all.

We say: You failed us, Mayor. You failed us, Chancellor.
And we come to make citizens’ arrests, because they are illegally ... illegally ... occupying this building.

THE MAYOR MUST GO!
THE MAYOR MUST GO!
THE MAYOR MUST GO!
THE CHANCELLOR MUST GO!
THE CHANCELLOR MUST GO!
THE CHANCELLOR MUST GO!

Finally, on this day, on this day ...

We the People ... [WE THE PEOPLE] ...
declare ... [DECLARE] ...
this Board of Education ... [THIS BOARD OF EDUCATION] ...
now belongs to the people ... [NOW BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE] ...
now belongs to the parents ... [NOW BELONGS TO THE PARENTS] ...
now belongs to the children ... [NOW BELONGS TO THE CHILDREN] ...
now belongs to the teachers that want to teach ... [NOW BELONGS TO THE TEACHERS THAT WANT TO TEACH] ...
And we support student unions.

So that’s the declaration we make here today.

This struggle will continue.
They’re not going to take our education system from us. We’re taking it back.

We will be back again, and again, and again
until they are gone.

Thank you very much.

Thank YOU, Councilman Barron. The pleasure hearing you speak was all ours.

Scott the pol

Scott Stringer is sinking us.

I wrote him this morning out of disgust, particularly after taking a look at his website and learning he no longer needed the services of the clearest thinking man on Klein's PEP, Patrick Sullivan.

In my letter, I basically asked him what about mayoral control so pleased him these past 7 years.

As far as I could tell, it's been:

• chaotic (three reorganizations of the heirarchy in 7 years, busing fiasco,etc.),

• faked (manipulated test scores, an inscrutable school grading system, etc.).

• non-transparent (no-bid contracts, hidden liaisons with corporations, etc.),

• dictatorial (shutting parents and educators out of decision-making, the firings at the PEP meeting a couple of years ago over the tests, etc.), and at times

• irregular or unlawful (appointed an uncertified and non-educator chancellor who needed a waiver, broke up the districts into regions without court approval, etc.).

The borough president is not elected to do a mayor's bidding, which is what checks and balances are all about, and since we haven't had any checks and balances for the past seven years on mayoral dictates, Manhattan expects Stringer to start showing some muscle.

A full-out rejection of this mayor's irregularities, arrogance and downright incompetence running our schools would be a good start. Insisting that long-term educators get to make the important decisions should be another priority. At least they know in their bones that parent input counts.

What Stringer thinks about education can be read on his website. In light of his decision to continue backing mayoral control (a position he's taken all along, according to Lisa Donlon), I am concerned that he's become deaf to his own words:

However, there is widespread discontent with the councils and, in 2006, the Borough President released a report [Parents Dismissed] showing that the CECs have not received the support and training the DOE is supposed to provide in order to allow them to be effective.

He's also taken away our best shot for keeping the DoE clean. Failing to re-instate a real advocate for public education on the newly constituted board, we now get his general counsel (Jimmy Yan). What did tossing Sullivan get him? The public really wants to know.

Here's the part of Stringer's position paper that shows how well Bloomberg's PR machine achieved its primary goal, getting elected officials to believe the fabrications and not bother themselves with with due diligence.

New York City’s public school system has seen some improvement in recent years: in certain grades student achievement on standardized reading and math tests has posted notable gains; a modest gain in the high school graduation rate has been achieved; there is an ambitious capital plan that seeks to address overcrowding and facility deterioration; the number of gifted and talented and bilingual programs has increased; and additional accountability measures have been put in place.

Despite this progress . . .

. . . The chancellor has called tackling this achievement gap the major impetus behind new accountability and assessment measures and the most recent re-organization of the system.

In fact, the test score gains and graduation rates have all been debunked, overcrowding is worse than ever (they're still using trailers for classrooms), and there's no sign of a single instrument of accountability or assessment that doesn't leak like a sieve.

If as Stringer says "far too many students lack the most basic skills in reading and math" and "70,000 students each year do not graduate on time," keeping the BloomKlein edifice in place makes no sense. Unless you've sold out for something bigger.

It remains to be seen whether these changes in structure and funding will help close student achievement gaps. Likewise, it remains to be seen if the City’s new pilot program to pay parents and students for improved standardized test scores and good attendance will improve student performance.

If Stringer needs more time to see that this mayoral control thing isn't working, then Manhattan will definitely need to cut him loose.