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.
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.
There’s not a lot of agreement on what it means to be “enlightened,” but for starters we could look at back to the middle of the 18th century.
That would be a couple of decades before a handful of truly enlightened souls cobbled together a declaration of independence, and about 150 years before these united states committed to an education system funded by the public purse (1870).
Voltaire, according to some, thought the appeal of the new way of thinking boiled down to seven social and intellectual phenomena:
— the autonomy of reason
— perfectibility and progress
— confidence in the ability to discover causality
— principles governing nature, man and society
— assault on authority
— cosmopolitan solidarity of enlightened intellectuals, and
— a disgust with nationalism.
(Gerhard Rempel, Western New England College)
I could argue that the corporatist siege squeezing the moral life out of this country, perpetrated by heavily lobbied facilitators at every level of government, has maneuvered us in totally the opposite direction. We’ve abandoned all of Voltaire’s phenomena.
The Age of Enlightenment is well on its way out, and the ignorance, social chaos and repression of the Middle Ages are making a big comeback.
The campaign against Reason is spearheaded here in New York City by the mayor and his five-star general Joel Klein. They command a whole army of hastily trained-up staff sergeants from the Leadership Academy and a slew of corporate players bidding for pieces of the education pie.
BloomKlein campaigns best when the rest of us are overworked, apathetic or comatose. Shuffling things around under the guise of reform, they’ve come up with ill-conceived reorganizations, a perverted school grading system, falsified testing analyses, and some very strange notions of quality education.
These are the fabrications of an unenlightened oligarchy.
They don’t seek to understand or fix the underlying problems of the system — like overstuffed classrooms, too few experienced certified teachers, not enough school buildings, arts and phys ed programs, or services for special needs. They don’t listen to educators or parents, they intentionally place blame where it doesn’t belong, and they show little respect laws that get in their way.
Thumped for half a generation at least, we’ve learned how to keep taking it on the chin. We're becoming un-enlightened.
Across the country, being educated, articulate, and rational in thought has somehow become a bad thing. We’re still reeling from a federal administration that put nationalism at an all-time high and the ability to reason at an all-time low.
Nevertheless, the reasoning people among us are forever confident in the ability to discover causality, so we should be able to think this one through:
Oligarchs grab power when society allows them to. Enlightened people need to get out in the streets and stop them.
That’s what they did two hundred years ago, and that’s what they need to do now.
Just like what they've already been doing:
at P.S. 57 in Manhattan . . .
at P.S. 160 in the Bronx . . .
at IS 218 in East New York . . .
at IS 278 in Brooklyn . . .
At Bethel Church in Harlem . . .
What a self- congratulatory, biased, obsfuscatory, and exclusionary rag the NY Teacher is.
In a post I wrote last September, I said I thought it had morphed into some kind of arm of the DoE, with all its Tweed friendly, Tweed collaborative, Tweed duped, and Much Ado About Nothing articles.
I don’t know whether to laugh at some of the things in there or cry.
For example, it’s really funny where Weingarten is talking about getting the cuts reduced and she says “Let’s take a moment to appreciate what we've accomplished so far.” In the very next sentence she says what really “saved the day” was the federal stimulus package. By her own admission, she accomplished little or nothing. It was Washington that came through with some cash.
I love it when she suggests that if adding some non-mayoral appointees to the central board “fails to make it into law” — as surely it will — there would be other ways to curtail Bloomberg’s "dominance." I’m taking this as a joke, and I’m pretty sure she is, too. I mean, she has to say something if she’s going to defend her indefensible position on continuing mayoral control.
What does Weingarten suggest to rein in this mayor? Three things. Give the board members fixed terms — that’s so they can say “Yes, sir! Of course, sir!” for a finite number of months before a new group of flunkies is rotated in. Increase the number of DoE actions that require board approval — as if Joel Klein ever wanted, thought he needed, or asked for approval for the nefarious, sometimes illegal schemes he’s gotten away with. And end “the chancellor’s voting status and automatic chairmanship of the board” — like fish Klein would give that one up. Isn’t she a card?
I also love it when she crows over the test scores:
Almost any way you look at the data, there was good news in the June 1 release of the 2009 statewide math test scores.
Puh-lease. Don’t tell us about test scores being better this year without getting an impartial evaluator to determine whether the newer tests were dumbed down last time round. Absent that teeny-weeny bit of information, what does anyone gain by calling the higher scores “good news” except to score a political point dealing with BloomKlein or give a very transparent tap on the back to math teachers, who might really have had nothing to do with this year’s “improvement” at all.
By the way, you have to wade through to the last paragraph to see the demurral: “Overall, gains in scale scores were much more modest than gains in proficiency.” I guess that’s why Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and State Ed Commissioner Richard Mills “recommended looking at the finer detail of scale scores (students are graded on a scale of 400 to the upper 700s) rather than the simplified level scores (in which students are graded on Levels 1 to 4, and small gains can bump into the next level) for a truer picture.” Not to mention that there are times when Weingarten finds it convenient to downplay test scores, like when she's selling her new ACES network.
I’m not laughing anymore and start flicking through the thing a lot faster, until a “Schedule of Program and Operating Expenses” for the year ending last July 31 catches my eye on page 32.
Payroll last year (and probably every year) was the biggest expense. Between the Borough office and Central, the union spent a cool $29,971,086 on staff salaries, plus an additional $12,648,653 for additional benefits and taxes. Total: $42,619,739.
Way down the list, after the Conventions, Workshops & conferences, Meeting expenses, Travel, Lodging, Negotiations, Legal fees, Consulting fees, Elections & referenda, Chapter Leaders’ stipends, and DoE released time cost, there’s this:
ARBITRATION: $171, 078.
Is that the figure they're saying they spent for a whole year's worth of arbitrations? In this climate of administrator thuggery? The only redress a member has with Step Is and IIs being so reliably unsuccessful is arbitration, and the union paid so little for it? That's weird. If that number included AAA fees for surveys and elections, it would make what they spent on our Step IIIs even less.
With so much union-bashing these days, it’s definitely not funny that Arbitration came to only 0.4% of the UFT staff payroll. That's just not enough money spent on defending members. What’s also not funny is that the amount laid out for Gifts and condolences — $47,396 — is a quarter (27.7%) of the Arbitration amount. What are they buying everyone, mink coats?
There's no clarification of these terms and categories in the chart, so it's obvious no one's really interested in helping us understand what their expenditures really are. For all I know, the amounts listed in Legal fees ($2,712,223) and Consulting fees ($1,131,153) could actually include the costs of defending members. I doubt it, though. I'm told it's the DoE that pays the arbitration costs for 3020-a cases, not the union, and I’ve asked a couple of people what the difference between “Total Expenses” and “Non-Chargeable Expenses” might be, but they don’t know either.
As I said, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry when I read this stuff.
All I can hear in the background is the kerching!, kerching! of our dues money dropping into murky union coffers, and as the Queen of England says: We are not amused.
It's getting harder and harder to listen to Weingarten plod through her President's Report at the Delegates Assembly each month just to eat up time.
Because that's what it's all about: eating up time — so she doesn't have to deal with any tiresome member complaints and horror stories coming from the chapters.
Weingarten could say everything she has to say and still have loads of time left if she'd just write it all down for us let us read it. 5 minutes, 10 at most. Not the hour we have to sit listening to her, and listening to all the puppets she puts up to convince us she's doing a great job fighting the fight. Ho very hum.
The only way to get through her reports is to keep track of some of the crazy things she says, which is what I did at yesterday's meeting.According to Weingarten, the UFT is the "voice for the voiceless." Yes, she says, she's "out to protect our money," but the UFT is also the "safety net for the most vulnerable."
Silly me, I didn't know I was paying dues so that she or the union could be a "voice for the voiceless" or a "safety net" for the most vulnerable. I thought my dues were for some job protections.
[ALERT: There's a new Norm's comment in the comments. He's right, of course.]
Come to think of it, though, if anyone is the most vulnerable at this point, it's the veteran teachers and the probationers, and I can't see how the UFT is being a voice or a safety net for any of these people. Weingarten also said it's the main job (or most important job) of the union to protect children. If someone wrote down those exact words, I'd love to have them verbatim. It's hard for me to believe she hasn't yet figured out what her main job is as president of a teachers' union.Weingarten then tried to say that her goal is to be the person whom BloomKlein and the rest of the politicians "can focus their ire on," instead of the members.
Cracky. Ask any ATR, any maligned chapter leader, or any of the many members in the rubber room for no cause if they feel BloomKlein is focusing its ire on Randi Weingarten. Most of us think she's making deals with them all the time. And if you need proof of that, look how many times we hear about something way down the line when it's no turning back and the delegates so-called voice is just a rubber stamp.Someone can correct me if I'm wrong here, but Weingarten seemed never to have heard of TAGNYC — the Teachers Advocacy Group NYC — since she referred to it as an "organization called TAGNY," and pronouncing it Tag-nee.
TAGNYC is one of the most articulate teacher activist groups in the union, and for starters, you can read the testimony they put into the record at the recent Mayoral Control hearings. If she meant the TAGNYC I think she meant and mispronounced its name, it speaks volumes about her callousness towards the members.In response to a complaint that older teachers are being really hurt and marginalized, Weingarten responded professorially: Well, this kind of thing is going on across all professions nationwide.
Trouble is we're not looking for a sociology lesson here. Compassion would be far more appropriate. Steaming mad would be the best — angry enough to really go to the mat for us.
A person behind me rightly remarked at this point that if such a trend for youth existed and that's all Weingarten had to say about it, maybe the president of this union should be replaced by a 25-year-old. In response to a complaint about not being able to remove Letters in the File by grievance, Weingarten said she couldn't think of a single substantive thing that couldn't be changed with the Todd Friedman arbitration.
Darn it. And I thought she actually knew about the lies being allowed to fester in teachers' files. Surely she knows there's no vehicle to get these malicious letters removed, and surely she knows that once upon a time when we did have the right to grieve these things, principals tended to use their power of the pen a bit more judiciously. No one's saying the Todd Friedman arbitration hasn't done some good, but it only works when you can attack a contractual violation. Then part of the remedy is to remove the offending LIF. But I'd venture to say most LIFs these days contain a potpourri of misstatements, distortions and downright lies. There's no way we'll be getting these out any time soon.
If anyone has any more of these RW "messages" from yesterday's DA, I'd love to keep a record of what we're dealing with here.
And I'm starting to get why she doesn't ever put her President's Reports in writing. Who'd want this doublespeak out in the public domain.
[For a full report on yesterday's DA, read James Eterno's detailed account on the ICE blog.]
Though I've temporarily suspended this blog during my involuntary career change to Bandleader, some things that catch my eye are worth repeating.
This is a comment Mr. Talk left on Chaz's blog about ageism in the Rubber Rooms:
"There should be real penalties for principals who abuse the RRs. And what ever happened to that age discrimination lawsuit that the UFT said they would pursue? The truth is, the RRs are a de facto early retirement system. If it isn't stopped, no one will reach 55/25 anyway."
To the first sentence about real penalties for wayward principals: Yes, and you can come to a RALLY in support of a teacher working for one of these principals with a fetish for rubber rooms. Iris Blige runs the Fordham High School for the Arts and has arranged stints at the reassignment center for several unlucky educators over the years. She's not the only one of course, but the union is focusing in on her this coming Friday. Be there.
To the second sentence, where Mr. Talk asks what happened to the age discrimination suit the union got us all excited about (me too, I was part of it until they made me remove myself from all lawsuits against the DoE if I wanted the arbitration to go in my favor), the short answer is that the lawsuits were dropped.
Each case was different, but I'll tell you this from what happened with mine. We offered lots of documentation — licenses, online application data, letters of commendation, years of S ratings — all stuff relating to the application process for which I never received a single response. The DoE's answer to that was a point-by-point "explanation" of why none of those applications led to an interview — such things like the job didn't really exist, or the principal didn't look at the online requests or had someone else in mind anyway — but offered no documentation to back any of those explanations up. It was all commentary, with no legal standing that I could discern. The NYSUT lawyers were as troubled as I was about that, but guess what: I never heard from them again. If what happened in my case happened to others, it's obvious the union just backed down. Otherwise, why wouldn't they have demanded documentation to support all those whimsical explanations the DoE put out in lieu of a proper response? Proof positive that the system failed, and the unions collaborated.
As for the "truth" Mr. Talk alludes to in his final two sentences: Damn right. The RRs are a de facto early retirement system, and so is the burgeoning ATR situation, with all the closing schools and the ads they keep running for new teachers.
PS: Shame on you, Cynthia Nixon, for taking part in that campaign. Decimating the ranks of senior teachers and filling up the schools with trainees is not what I think you had in mind for your children or anyone else's. Before you offer your services, please think the whole thing through, or you just become part of the "PR"oblem.
Mr. Talk: It's not that no one will reach 55/25 anyway, it's that BloomKlein's COUNTING on no one staying in it that long.
SUBSTITUTE POST: Originally I called this blog:"BloomKlein computers that get it wrong."
That's because I was told by TRS (Teaches Retirement) a couple of weeks ago that the DoE computers had changed my status from "Active" to "Inactive" on October 31st.
In fact, I found out today that TRS got it wrong.
The UFT acted very quickly to help sort this out, and it seems my change of status was the result of a TRS employer error. Moreover, efforts were made to ensure it was not done to a lot of members, particularly ATRs as a group.
I was tempted to remove this entire post, since I was given the wrong information as to who created the error and went after BloomKlein. Then I thought perhaps it would be better to leave most of it, so that people can see that problems like this occur from time to time over at TRS and payroll and you should be aware of them. So, here's the revision:
Still unable to spend a lot of time on the computer as the result of a back injury, it's worth mentioning the following. Consider it an alert.
With my retirement age fast approaching, I got to daydreaming this morning whether I'd have enough money to live on a NYC pension and a couple of annuities. I remembered that on the TRS website, there's a nifty little Retirement Allowance Calculator that could possibly make all one's dreams come true.
Strangely enough, I couldn't find it today, so I decided to give TRS a call. Maybe it wasn't working in the holiday season. The phone was answered by a nice gentleman who found my account and quickly told me that TRS doesn't offer that Retirement Calculator to "inactive" members, which according to his records, I have been — since October.
This news horrified me, since apart from Nov. 4th (which I spent at the Protect the Vote offices down in Manhattan) and the 8 days I was laid up in excruciating pain, I've been quite an active member of the workforce. In fact, restored to the music position I was excessed from a couple of years ago, I have resumed a program of five classes a day with 50 kids on register each. This regimen is not for dawdlers or for the faint of heart.
[Here is where I removed my sarcastic comments on BloomKlein's fake accountability, fake computers and fake expertise, because the DoE was not the culprit in this case. But, it's not to say I don't still loathe them for all that. They've been manipulating data since they've been in office, a real threat to both reality and transparency.]
My advice to anyone who reads this blog: Here's the TRS tel. no. 1-888-869-2877 — in case you want to check for yourself whether your status is as it should be.
Now, see how easy that was? I changed the entire thrust of this blog once I found the error was not made by the DoE or its computers.
Would that principals would change the distortions, exaggerations, omissions, and lies in the letters they write to our files when they find out they've been wrong. Dream on. These days, they're leaving all that garbage right where it is — just in case they may want to build a big case against you down the line.
You can read Joel Klein’s spiel today in the Sydney Morning Herald on the great job he’s been doing with the NY school system — if you have the stomach for it.
In a whole era of arrogant men and women, ethically and morally challenged and entirely untrained for the powerful positions they’ve attained, Klein’s fabrication of his successful chancellorship really wins top marks. What claptrap. [And by the way, some Australians aren't buying it either — see this link posted on Ednotes.]
I do want to talk about one point Klein makes in amongst all that corpospeak:
Our "children first" reform strategy is based on three principles: leadership, empowerment and accountability.
This is not new, of course, and I must credit Ed in the Apple who wrote back in December of 2006 that Klein and Cerf were up to no good. In a post called “The Education NeoCon Plans for the NYC School System: Privatize and Walk Away,” he asked:
“Who are these “masked men”?
The new motto of the DOE is “leadership, empowerment, accountability,” expect to see it on T-shirts and emblazoned on banners. Makes sense: the three leaders have taught for a total of less than ten years, none has ever lead a school and are thoroughly disliked, or unknown to the hundred thousand employees and million kids and their parents in the NYC school system.”
He also spoke of the hundreds of new empowerment schools the DoE was creating, in a world
where schools are “managed” by outside organizations under a performance contract. In the totally cynical world of politics it might make sense: if schools fail it’s the fault of the outside manager, if schools succeed the Mayor can claim credit.
I know I didn’t listen carefully enough back then. I only remember thinking “What? More restructuring?” It took a couple of more years for me to understand the nature of the war BloomKlein had already started waging against public education.
For the heck of it this evening, I decided to google the three terms Klein was pushing to the Aussies — leadership, empowerment, and accountability — to discover who coined them and who’s been throwing them around.
The earliest reference I found came up in Shropshire Online, “Your Gateway to Services and Information in Shropshire.” On the agenda of a meeting in November 1998 was an Organisational Review that listed leadership, empowerment and accountability among the “guiding principles for the way we work.”
Curious ... a British governmental Tourist Agency.
There was Sandra Donovan, who wrote a paper for the journal Industrial Biotechnology back in December 2006 called "Ten Keys to Successful Technology Commercialization":
Commercializing technology successfully is the result of thoroughly understanding and applying the basic principles [which] include . . . leadership, empowerment, accountability . . . all of which have significant impact on commercialization endeavors.
Biotechnology. Industry. Commercialization. Interesting ...
In May 2007 an announcement appeared for a new staff development initiative at the National Solid Waste Management Authority in Antigua. It would be led by Myrtle Looby, founder and CEO of LEAP Training Consultants. LEAP stands for “Leadership Empowerment Accountability Professionalism.”
Hmmm ... Solid Waste Management.
The journal Design Intelligence had an article by James Cramer in October of the same year on “Global Growth, Design Demographics, and Business Success.” He wrote about a diagnostic analysis called LEAP™, derived from the words “leadership, empowerment, accountability, and processes.” The say they have a way to assess
the culture of an organization as it relates to real world success. Twenty-six critical areas of a firm’s culture under the umbrella zones of professional services, marketing, finance, and operations are analyzed . . This LEAP™ diagnostic has been used for over three years now to identify strategic priorities, to create alignment in merger situations, and to create a meritocracy environment that produces high performance firms.
I hate to admit it, but I'm not familiar with Design Demographics. Does it involve people?
This might, but I can't make heads or tails out of it. Let me just throw it in for good measure:
An application for an award being offered by the Red Cross says that candidates must share six “core values,” one of which is teamwork. They must be "committed to workforce leadership, empowerment, and accountability."
So they've found their way into Emergency Medical Services as well. Nice.
Any ten-year-old can tell you what’s missing in all this leadership, empowerment and accountability.
It’s children, and it’s learning. And we don't need no Joel Klein to tell us that.
Just for the record, the commenting is winding down over at the NY Times post about how New Yorkers feel about Joel Klein becoming the Secretary of Education in the Obama administration.
Which doesn't mean I have to wind down, because BloomKlein's values are so base and I'm so unconvinced that what they favor and how they go about installing their agenda are so bad for the city that we can't afford to put this issue onto the back burner.
37 of the 44 comments over at that post are anti-Klein, most to the max. As for the other 7, not much in there either: 1 just asked for information, 2 couldn't care less, and 2 others hate public education altogether. I guess those people have a choice where to send their kids to school. Two were actually favorable, one of which I left in for a good laugh (#40).1. November 10, 2008 4:07 pm
Quote from Mr. Klein’s Press Secretary: “Along the way he’s angered adults with entrenched interests in policies that have never worked.”
I am a 70-year-old adult who has never had children, have never been a teacher, did not attend the New York City school system, and therefore I have no “entrenched interests” of any sort.
I am APPALLED by the mess Mr. Klein has made of education in New York City.
— cynthia
2. [asks for information]
3. November 10, 2008 4:21 pm
Mr. Klein has failed public education in too many ways: He is obligated to a corrupt and disasterous high stakes test machine that has made our schools absent of learning, soul or life. He is in service to Mayor Bloomberg’s governing philosophy of “screw the public first.” They as policy view parents and students- the client- as in the way. Worse, NYC schools have not improved one iota during his tenure. He runs an expert-less, management first enterprise that scoffs at educators, insults parents and looks at children as data creating subjects. President-elect Obama- select an educator first!
— mitchell
4. November 10, 2008 4:47 pm
A really nasty person
Wants to rid the system of all teachers with experience and replace them with new cheaper teachers.
Paying for results is just a way to show better results. Telling Principal’s to drive teachers who give proper grades a hard time. If no resluts then you are out. So what do many do? They just pass students. An alcoholic teacher who sleeps in class but passes all students is considered satisfactory and one who works hard in every way angive fair grades is considered unsatisfactory. It’s a reign of terror.
Please get someone else and please investigate Klein
— bob
5. November 10, 2008 4:50 pm
I don’t see how Klein is worse than any other education official. The fundamental failure of school systems, all over the USA, is that kids don’t learn to read, write, calculate, and think.
Education is NOT effective in a democratic process. Of course parents should have input, but wasting billions of dollars on PTAs, sports, and other fluff is a problem. Schools should be run more like universities, where trained educators create curricula and organize classrooms. Biologists should create biology curricula, chemists should create chemistry curricula, historians should create history curricula, etc., etc.
— Rick
6. November 10, 2008 5:27 pm
In response to David Cantor’s comment that “The chancellor has spent the last six years building a school system focused on the needs of kids. Along the way he’s angered adults with entrenched interests in policies that have never worked,” I would respond that he’s antagonized parents who care about their children’s education and teachers who care about teaching. For him to call parents “adults with entrenched interests” is surely the most blatant example of projection I’ve ever read!
As for Rick, for him to say that billions of dollars are wasted on PTAs, which raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for schools that are inadequately funded by government, shows that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
— Ellen
7. November 10, 2008 5:42 pm
Joel Klein, like his boss, Mayor Bloomberg, is virulently anti-union. For example, a few years ago he unilaterally denied almost all his teachers sabbaticals that they were entitled to under their collective bargaining agreement.
— Bob
8. November 10, 2008 6:02 pm
In response to David Cantor’s comment:
The Chancellor has spent six years focused on building a system defined by the policy ideas of the Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, Dell Foundation and many wealthy New Yorkers like Caroline Kennedy and Courtney Ross who would never send their own kids to public school yet have no qualms about dictating how my kids should be educated.
And to dismiss parents who care about smaller classes, arts education and shielding their kids from Klein’s relentless bludgeon of standardized testing as “entrenched interests” is despicable.
It should be obvious to all why a Klein role in the Obama administration is a non-starter. Let’s focus on changes to mayoral control of our schools and the next mayoral election to bring an end to this.
— Patrick J. Sullivan
9. November 10, 2008 6:11 pm
Klein is NOT the man. It’s strange that a job of such importance is given to ‘politicians and those politically connected, instead of someone in either of those categories with true experience as an educator and leader.
When Secretary Spellings was appointed, both the Dems and Repubs applauded this decision, but her tenure has been a complete disaster. She simply sought to push rules on the K-16 community with real engagement or understanding.
We need a leader who has true experience, exposure, and knowledge of education. At some level, that should include some time spent as a teacher/professor as well as managerial experience. Not just “business” leaders/policy analysts that think they can just swoop down and make everything “right”. It hasn’t worked in Washington, and we all know that it hasn’t worked in NYC.
— Xilla
10. November 10, 2008 6:30 pm
This letter has been signed by a hundred New York City parents since Friday night:
Dear President-elect Obama,
First of all let us congratulate you on your election. Many of us worked ardently to advance your cause, and today we celebrate the bright and hopeful years before us under your leadership.
We write now as parents in the New York City public school system. We would like to urge in the strongest terms that you select a Secretary for Education with deep practical experience in teaching and learning. We feel that there is a fashion now for placing school reform in the hands of leaders outside the field. In our experience in New York this trend is catastrophic; in our view the administration of Chancellor Joel Klein has disastrously neglected the fundamental needs of children. To lead in education one must understand something about children, about human development, about the history of successes and failures in pedagogy.
Please appoint an experienced educator, a person close to the lives of children, to lead our nation’s education system.
Yours sincerely,
[see pspac.wetpaint.com for a list of names]
— Ann Kjellberg
11. November 10, 2008 7:03 pm
If you think having a typical kid in the NYC system is difficult, try having a Special Ed kid. You are treated like a criminal by the Board of Ed who makes it as tough as they can for you to get these kids an appropriate(non-existent)education. The money spent on endless paper shuffling and legal battles would be better spent ridding the Board of Ed of dead wood and overhauling an archaic system that fails this population. The idea Joel Klein is even being considered as an Education Secretary is horrifying.
— luci p.
12. November 10, 2008 7:03 pm
Joel Klein has drawn the ire of teachers and parents alike.”
That in itself is high praise.
— Jim from Brooklyn
13. November 10, 2008 7:28 pm
As much as I’ve been angered by Mr. Klein, there may be one bright spot should he become Secretary of Education: We will, at last, get rid of him in New York.
— Carol
14. [couldn't care less, doesn't want taxes going to pubic education]
15. November 10, 2008 7:34 pm
I am the mother of 11-year old twins who have been in the New York City public school system since kindergarten, all under Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.
While I would gladly see him leave, I protest as strongly as possible his appointment as Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration.
Chancellor Klein has proven himself to be an autocratic bully, surrounded by people who agree with everything he does because they know their jobs are on the line.
He does not care what parents think and does not seem to believe that parents should have a say in their children’s education. He pontificates at hearings then walks out without listening to parents’ responses.
Klein talks a lot about “transparency” in the schools, but his Department of Education is the least transparent in City government.
Klein is committed to the discredited theory that the only measure of a child’s achievement is the the score on standardized tests. This is despite the extensive research in education that points to the fact that standardized tests “dumb down” a curriculum.
The Chancellor uses the 3rd, 5th and 7th grade tests as requirements for promotion — when the test designers themselves have warned that these tests should NOT be used for this purpose.
Testing and other data collection activity is extolled by Klein as a means towards accountability — yet his own office is not accountable to the parents, children, or teachers. Klein sits in judgment on principals, teachers, and children — but he has not created a mechanism through which he and the department can be judged in turn — for good reason: he has failed.
The Chancellor has also proven himself to be an extremely poor administrator of public funds. He has wasted millions of dollars on a data tracking computer system that not only does not work, but is not appropriate for a school system. He spent extravagant sums on importing consultants from Britain to administer a “quality review” of every school, consultants discredited in Britain itself.
New Yorkers were justly in an uproar last year when Klein’s expensive consultants cut bus service — and thousands of children were left standing on street corners in the cold. From Klein, no apologies, and the system remains in disarray.
Over the years of Joel Klein’s administration, we have seen trained, credentialed educators forced out of his department. It is now filled with lawyers and businessmen whose only experience with pedagogy occurred when they were in school 30 years ago.
Education is not a business. Each year that a child spends in school is his or her one chance to “get it”. If an 8-year old spends a year in 3rd grade being taught how to take a test, and the next year it’s decided that the test was faulty, that child’s loss is forever. Under Klein too many children have lost too many precious years.
America needs a Secretary of Education who is an educator, a listener, and a person who understands that our children are not a collection of data, but the future of our country.
That person is decidedly NOT Joel Klein.
— Linda Levy
16. November 10, 2008 7:41 pm
Mr. Klein is a walking disaster,
Of mismanagement a past master,
Has the wit and the charm
Of a piranha farm,
A dyed-in-the-wool flabbergaster!
— Larry Eisenberg
17. November 10, 2008 9:14 pm
Isn’t it important to have someone who is not afraid of the current bureaucratic structure and enforce the new administration’s policies on education reform?
— John
18. [not for or against him]
19. November 10, 2008 9:46 pm
Now that education is a department under mayoral control, every teacher I know is afraid to publicly speak out against adiministration policies. Pick a free crative thinker with a background in some other discipline than educatiion, e.g. science.
— ***icle***
20. November 10, 2008 10:24 pm
The Secretary of Education should be an educator, not someone who has had a negative impact on the NYC Dept. of Education. There are so many talented people who could provide leadership in this important position. Mr. Klein has not distinguished himself as a positive leader in NYC-the country deserves better.Rachel
— RP
21. November 10, 2008 10:37 pm
I quit after five years of teaching high school largely because of the tremendous negativity in the system. I was a former lawyer who left the profession and obtained a Masters Degree to pursue teaching. I have never worked harder and been treated worse than in the NYC public school system. I credit that, in part, to a culture created/reinforced by Joel [Klein], who constantly belittled teachers and made it acceptable for administrators to do the same.
— Anonymous from Manhattan
22. November 10, 2008 11:38 pm
If Mr. Kristof is correct that Barack Obama is an intellectual, then he will revive a respect for professionalism and appoint an educator as Education Secretary.
Mr. Klein is no educator. Obsessed as he is with voluminous record keeping and standardized assessments, he can be credited with inventing what I call, “bureaucracy-centered pedagogy.” As a New York City ESL teacher, I am compelled to spend more time with paperwork and testing than actually teaching my students.
With Ivy League credentials and publications under my belt, it is safe to say I am not another of Mr. Klein’s alleged lazy teachers standing in the way of rigor.
— Constance Benson
23. November 10, 2008 11:50 pm
David Cantor’s dismissive comment (”he’s angered adults with entrenched interests in policies that have never worked”) is, unfortunately, totally typical of the Klein administration’s low regard for parents, most of whom have no axe to grind other than wanting a well-rounded education for their children.
I can’t think of a single person in my children’s public elementary school who approves of the DOE’s obsession with standardized testing. And while Klein coopts the language of the civil rights movement (”equity of access”), the city’s schools remain shamefully segregated and changes in G&T and early childhood admissions have resulted in fewer minority children in those programs.
President-elect Obama, I (and my children!) traveled out of state to knock doors for you, spent evenings phone banking, bought buttons and bake sale cookies. I realize that you can’t please all of your constituents, but I beg you to listen to the grass roots on this one and not to be fooled by the NYC DOE’s misleading and disrespectful PR machine.
– Brooklyn mom of preK and 2nd grade students
— kk
24. November 11, 2008 12:19 am
I have 2 children currently in the NYC public schools, and I myself attended NYC public schools from grade K-6.
My daughter is an 8th grader, and her class was the first year for whom the 3rd grade NYS test was the promotional criteria. I watched a child who had been an enthusiastic student become increasingly demoralized and crushed by a curriculum that did not offer clear teaching methods, particularly in the mathematics curriculum, and which did not match what was covered on the assessments she was given prior to the test. In the years since, I have seen no improvement in either the ability of the curriculum to match the test, or in the ability of the test to measure any progress in educational achievement.
My son is autistic, and in a 5th grade equivalent class at this time. When I attempted to get information about kindergarten level placement for him, I was unable to find anything pertinent on the DOE website. Being something of an involved parent, I called the phone number provided for District 75 and was told such information was confidential. I ask you, who would I tell? Is educating an autistic child now classified? It took a rather sarcastic email to Mr. Klein to get information that allowed my husband and I to interview schools for our son. He’s doing well, but to be very honest, his school is now attempting to inflict the general education curriculum on his class, and I am beside myself. Autistic children have a great deal of trouble connecting with abstract notions like “How do you feel? How was your day?” Imagine what will happen when someone asks my son, who taught himself to multiply when he was 6, to describe how he chose to solve a problem.
In all honesty, if Mr. Klein is given the opportunity to do for the nation what he has done for New York, I’d strongly suggest we abandon all hope and become a nation of homeschoolers. I don’t care about the ridiculous letter grades he assigns to schools based on some Byzantine calculations. I loathe filling out the annual parent surveys, which ask absolutely no questions that I find relevant, but which are deliberately skewed to produce data that supports his agenda. I want parent involvement to actually have meaning again. I want my children to be taught by methods that may very well be considered didactic, but which actually worked for my generation. In fact, I’d like teachers to have some input on the curriculum, based on what they know works as opposed to what a think tank thinks might work. I’d like principals to have at least 15 to 20 years of classroom teaching under their belts before we place them in charge of an entire school. Otherwise, obviously unqualified individuals like myself (my work history was strictly corporate/financial) could apply for the position, although I suspect I might at least have the maturity to know I was in over my head.
— Christine Burke
25. November 11, 2008 3:05 am
Mr. Klein’s statment from his press secretary David Cantor said:“The chancellor has spent the last six years building a school system focused on the needs of kids.”
Mr. Klein, your claim is bassless and unfounded.
— CR
26. November 11, 2008 6:18 am
The man is unqualified and the SED should never have granted him a waiver to take a job for which he has no qualification whatsoever.
He and all the cronies he brought in are arrogant. Like they are the only ones who put “Children First.” He never spent a day in a classroom and has not the slightest concept what the teachers, Assistant Principals and Principals go through on a daily basis.
He has destroyed many of the finest high schools, especially in minority areas of Brooklyn, with his belief that smaller schools work better. He has brought in Principals who don’t have a clue, who wouldn’t know a good less if they saw one.
He has gotten a lot of good press by playing the role of politician by ripping apart the people who put it on the line every day of their working lives.
His grading system of schools makes no sense. Why tell people their child works in a school that is an F. Why tell teachers that. Why tell Principals that. Are there some schools that have problems; yes of course. But more often than not, these problems are far above what the teachers can do. How would you like walking into a class every day and 3/4 of the students don’t bring notebooks to school. Or get up and walk around the room. And of course, the teachers are blamed.
Teachers who have spent 20 years of their lives working at a high level are told their schools are closing and told go out and find a job. And then they discover that because of this moron, schools no longer get a personnel budget based on one teacher unit but based on actual dollars. So of course a Principal will be very reluctant to hire a teachers making $100,000 when he or she can hire 2 newbie making $40,000 and still have $20,000 to spend. Or teachers go on interviews and discover they are dealing with mental midgets brought in to be Principals by a “Leadership Academy” that doesn’t have the slightest clue. So they rightfully mind their time in the Absent Teacher Reserves and this jerk blames the teachers and wants to take away their jobs because of his inability to comprehend what his policies have done. And then we get the newspapers supporting him and blaming the teachers and accepting his idiotic comments that the reason these teachers can’t get jobs is because they are incompetent. And then nobody questions why most every teachers retires on the first day he or she can to get away from this madness.
And we see the papers and the Mayor trying to tell the world what a wonderful job they have done “improving” the schools. And of course the newspaper editors buy into this.
Maybe New York City does need him to get a job in the Federal government so that we can spread this incompetent’s “wealth” (in terms of educational knowledge).
But as for NYC, it will take decades to recover from what has been done to its school system.
The man has to go.
— Jeff S
27. November 11, 2008 7:20 am
I served as a New York City public school teacher for over ten years. I hold two New York State teaching certificates and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. I currently teach at a top private prep school in New York City. In my experience, Joel Klein’s leadership of the NYC public school system has been a complete disaster. If Barack Obama wants to replicate this disaster on a national scale, Klein is his man.
First, Mr. Klein created a new centralized bureaucracy and tried to micromanage teachers. This flew in the face of all experience and research with school reform, which shows unambiguously that successful school reform is and must be staff driven.
When Klein’s micromanagement predictably failed, he declared victory: “Now that I have brought accountability to the system, it is time for the next phase.” This next phase is management by numbers. Knowing nothing about education or about running a school system, Mr. Klein thinks it is a simple matter to measure the performance of students, teachers, and administrators using test scores.
The result is predictable: teachers are being pressured to teach to the test, and administrators are being pressured to tweak the metrics to make the numbers come out right. This has nothing to do with quality education, but Mr. Klein will get his numbers. At least he will until the whole house of cards collapses in an Enron-type academic scandal.
Mr. Obama, if you want to improve education in this country, you need a master educator, respected by other educators, in charge of the nation’s Education Department.Brian D’Agostino, Ph.D.
— Brian D’Agostino
28. November 11, 2008 7:48 am
As a graduate of New York City’s public school system at a time when the system, for all its many faults, provided an excellent education for many of its students, I would like to see a return to education and the end of those endless standardized tests. All they measure is test-taking ability, which is a skill having nothing to do with learning. No child left behind, indeed! Klein represents the failure of Bush education policies, and should not be rewarded with a federal position. Neither should he continue in his position in New York City.
New York’s public school system has never been perfect, and it had a sad amount of failures even in my day. But to say it is broken and can never be fixed is to doom our future. Klein’s tenure has been an outright failure. Let’s give him an F and try education instead of testing.
— Amy Stoller
29. [liked Klein, trusts Obama to make the right choice]
30. November 11, 2008 9:03 am
And the police-state conditions now in effect in our schools, with the nypd having more authority than principals, thanks klein!
— Wanda
31. November 11, 2008 9:56 am
Deliver the City of New York from the ineptitude and malfeasance of Joel Klein. Appoint him secretary of the US Department of Education and be done with him once and for all.
— Vir Gules
32. November 11, 2008 10:16 am
Response to some of the comments:
To 2. Please read Obama’s ideas on education, which were up online for a while but are taken down from time to time while they construct the site. I made some comments about certain items in his bulleted list at: “A whiff of Educorp” — using assessment to get “quality” teachers (quality teachers come from experience, not from entry assessments), charter schools and merit pay.
To 5: You hit the nail on the head when you say that education should be designed be trained educators. Klein is not an educator, was waivered in by the State, and is a political, corporate appointment by a billionaire mayor. So I don’t understand why you think he’s no worse than anyone else: of course he is, with those non-credentials.
To 10: Update on the number of signatures: 323 right now.
To 12: If drawing the ire of parents and teachers is a good thing, you must be part of the moneyed class who sends their children to private schools and wants the rest of the city ghettoized.
To 14: We are not talking here about the next NYC schools chancellor. We’re talking about a much larger position.
To 18: You say that individual “successes” in the public sphere are more revealing regardless of who’s chancellor. What elitism! The kids who “make it” big through this system are mostly the ones with huge emotional, educational and financial support from home. This guy condemns the rest to any combination of huge class size, failing buildings, circumvented laws (sp. ed), and rescinded programs. No one is extending a helping hand to the kids who have no way out of this muck and get dragged down further.
Send Klein back to wherever he can do least harm, and start mounting a parallel campaign of equal importance to NYC: against a billionaire mayor who has already bought the system and wants to do it some more.
— Woodlass
33. November 11, 2008 12:44 pm
One of the most destructive things Klein has done while Chancellor has been to dismantle the school districts. The districts used to be huge sources of support for the principals and the schools. Those working in the district had once been principals and teachers themselves, and principals report to me that the relationships they used to have with the district personnel were “almost familial.” New principals were mentored by old. If a principal encountered a problem, he or she could call up the district and get advice from people who had once stood in her shoes.
One principal reported to me that during her first months as a new principal, the district superintendent showed up one morning before school, meeting her unexpectedly in the doorway. The two of them sat downstairs at the security officer’s desk and together went over a document the principal had written about her plans. Similarly, the week after 9/11, the district realized that they had a brand new principal in a school and sent a district representative over to spend the day with her, to give her support and make sure she was all right. Interestingly, this was District 2, the same district that had 4 or more schools in the vicinity of the World Trade Center, schools that had had to be evacuated and temporarily housed elsewhere. Obviously, District 2 had a lot on its plate. But the people in the district remembered the new principal they had just assigned to a school and were nursing along, and they were committed to helping her.
Now, in stark contrast, principals report to me that the only time representatives from the DOE show up is on testing days, when they stand and observe, eyes squinted, arms folded, while the principal unpacks the tests and distributes them to the classrooms. Now, because of Klein’s destructive policies, most of the district personnel, many of whom were nationally respected educators, have “retired,” and are no longer available to shepherd our schools.
I am not a teacher; I am a parent who has been a public school parent for 8 years now, and in that time I have seen how hard the teachers and principals work. These are people who not only have experience every day in the trenches, but who have academic backgrounds, advanced degrees, in education. Education is a field, just as law is, or business, and I object strenuously to the DOE’s assertion that Klein and Co. are working against “entrenched interests.” Instead, what they’ve done time and time again is arrogantly refuse to listen to or respect the professional educators who have devoted their lives and careers to educating our city’s children.
— Jan Carr
34. [won't make a difference Klein or anyone else, since school system bad all around]
35. November 11, 2008 6:07 pm
If one is to really vet the selection of Joel Klein, I would hope the Transition Team would speak to parents and teachers alike. Do not believe the hype that the Bloomberg administration is giving the media. You will find that under Klein, education has turned to TEST PREP. Under Klein, more money was wasted on corporations that could have went towards lowering class size. Under Klein, parent concerns go unheard. Under Klein, the Department of Education is flooded with lawyers instead of educators. Under Klein, appointments have been made that ended in disgrace. Under Klein, principals are allowed to abuse educators instead of collaborating with them. Under Klein, little children were forced to wait hours for their school bus in the middle of winter. Under Klein, budgets were cut in the middle of the school year forcing many after-school programs and tutoring sessions to close. And under Klein, principals are forcing teachers to pass students so they can get a bonus.
— Linda
36. November 11, 2008 7:20 pm
Let Klein go to Washington and let’s see how long it takes them to figure out that he knows nothing of building capacity in schools and school systems, that he lacks leadership, vision and compassion. For me, as a parent of a school aged child, he has made it perfectly clear that he has no interest in hearing the voices of the families and teachers he serves. If that is what the Obama camp wants, let them have it.
— Angie
37. November 11, 2008 9:14 pm
As a father of two middle school sons solely educated in the NYC public school system, past president of a PA, currently on the SLT and proud parent who gives school tours to perspective parents, I must speak out. I have heard the words of Mr Klein up close and personal when he speaks about education being partnership between the schools and the parents (as long as the parents abide by all his decisions). He has elevated high stakes testing to an unthinkable degree (the numbers don’t lie, do they Mr Bloomberg?). He had to receive a variance to become Chancellor as he hadn’t earned appropriate teaching credentials .. and feel free to sing the praises, Mr. Klein, of the public schools your children attend.
HE IS NOT AN EDUCATOR. HE IS A LAWYER and that doesn’t make him a bad person, it has made him a bad choice to head the Department of Education in New York. He has hired other lawyers to run his no bid, opaque spend fest, without reducing class size or investing directly into the classrooms. Parents will never have a seat at his decision making table. Oh did I metion, its all about testing, Testing and more TESTING not education, and the buckets of money (that would be far better spent for instruction) have been pissed away keeping score. Years from now, when this failed experiment perpetratred on New York City’s publically educated children is analyzed after having wasted our students’ precious years, will we be thanking the God of your choice because he left NY to run our nation’s education into the ground? President elect Obama, have mercy for the educational future of America’s children…DO NOT APPOINT KLEIN. Hire an educator, just because.
— Don
38. November 11, 2008 9:44 pm
I voted for Barak Obama because I believe tomorrow can be a better day and that real improvements can be made in this country if our leaders use common sense and seek input from a wide variety of views and experts.
Speaking as a teacher in the NYC public schools, if Obama picks Joel Klein as Secretary of Education I will feel my vote has been used in vain.
I’ve been teaching for six years now and like everyone, I know the system has flaws but the way the DOE has gone about solving them makes the cure far worse than the disease. Klein has no clue about education, has no idea what happens in the classroom and has shown no interest in learning and improving. His policies actually make it harder to teach and less likely my students will learn.
Klein’s obsession with flawed testing, inane and inaccurate school grades and wasteful outside reviews would be a disaster if pushed on the rest of the country.
— Alan
39. November 11, 2008 10:19 pm
“Education is NOT effective in a democratic process.” - Rick (#5)
I do not endorse the rest of that post, but those eight words are at the very center of the humungous problem facing American public education from K through 12. Voting for the members of local school boards is so strong a convention in the US, and has been for centuries, that the disconnect and inconsistency is never remarked on. As Rick points implies, and I would emphasize, the one and only area of public education in the US which is indisputably world-class is the work of the Land Grant Colleges - our magnificent network of State University systems. If there was some way of running the pre-post-secondary sector as the state universities are run (with public oversight by boards of regents happening at an appropriately large remove from the administrators of those institutions) we would have a chance to bring about the changes so desperately needed. Otherwise, I suspect that many more billions of dollars will go down many more drains, with very little to show by way of real change for real students.
Or perhaps we could follow Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice: We could empty our prisons in very short order if our K-12 public school system throughout the nation was based on having one teacher for every six students!
Worth a try, I would suggest.
— Old-timer
40. November 12, 2008 10:32 am
[This is Pro-Klein, but so craven and absurd I had to leave it in for the entertainment value.]
Of course Joel Klein has angered educators. He made some moves to introduce accountability and innovation to a malfunctioning system which is in some ways simply a tool of a Union whose last concern is actual education. I am a parent of a New York City public school student and Mr. Klein has at times disappointed me with moves he made. However, those cases were usually due to his concern for the all the children in NYC being in conflict with my parochial interests in my child’s school. In every case, there was and is never any doubt that Mr. Klein thinks of children first.
I wasn’t a Barack Obama supporter, but an appointment of Joel Klein as Secretary of Education would go a long way towards convincing me that our President-Elect has wisdom that is commensurate with his charisma.
— M. A.
41. November 12, 2008 12:29 pm
As a recent graduate of NYC’s public schools, I cannot even begin to relate just how poorly matched and unqualified Mr. Klein is for the country’s top education job. Mr. Klein was a fantastic antitrust lawyer, especially in the Microsoft cases. That is the only salvageable part of his legacy. He should beg for a Justice Dept. job, perhaps senior-level. Personally, I think that if a New Yorker should be Education Secretary, it should be Caroline Kennedy.
— NYCDOE Grad
42. November 12, 2008 12:31 pm
TO “M.A.:
“In every case, there was and is never any doubt that Mr. Klein thinks of children first.”
No one doubts whether Joel Klein thinks about children first. its just that other people are better suited candidates for the job.
— NYCDOE Grad
43. November 12, 2008 12:57 pm
I am African American Single Parent among many other things had enrolled my precious child inot a district three public school on the Upper West Side. We made it though 3 weeks in which i vowed that my children will NEVER be a product of a public school education. Between the Raggedy Classrooms , with No Textbooks a Fifth Grade Curriculum that is fit for Preschoolers a slick hustlin’ Absentee Principal and the SYSTEMATIC RACIST STRATEGY called THE GIFTED AND TALENTED program … I was done . It absolutely amazes me that Middle Aged Adults with a million dollar budget cannot NO will not pull it together to ensure that all children of America have a descent environment to send thier children.
— Karimu Abena Hamilton
44. November 20, 2008 6:45 am
It’d be interesting to know what about Mr. Klein would spark interest in an Obama administration to consider him for such a position. It’d interesting to know.
Mr. Klein has, at best, managed to be an unmitigated disaster. His may claim good intent if he so wishes, but his policies, management style and practices have been unproductive and harmful to the NYC DOE. Worse still, to cover his tracks of failure, he uses watered down assessment tests - the results of which are used as political instruments to perpetuate and justify what isn’t so as to reach for more political gains. He surrounds himself with consultants and businesses that have no pulse on what goes on in the classroom.
What is his position on class size, parent and teacher support and involvement, collective bargaining, salaries, curriculum design, textbook design and selection, and (Lord have mercy) special education.
Yes, special needs children. In Klein’s DOE, providing education to your special needs child is a torture of a thousand cuts and a million deaths. He has set up these painful processes that take parents through this maze of raw frustration. I know because I’m a parent of a SpEd child and a NYCDoE SpEd teacher.
President-elect Obama, mull this one over very carefully. If your expectation is unproductive angst and a sure failure of your education agenda, Klein is sure to deliver. I doubt if he’d fail.
— Emma
I thought I was done for the night, but then I read this post from a teacher at Jane Addams HS.
Dear Colleagues,
Yeah, Addams got a D. But the fix was in, right from the start, for us to "fail."
A closer look at the "report card" reveals:
1. Our "Student Performance" (success in graduating students, in four years) score: B. Honestly, what the hell else matters???
2. Our "Student Progress" score: F. Simplified — We didn't improve enough from the B in "Student Performance." And in case you haven't noticed — the competency of the students admitted to Addams is not the same as it was just four years ago. (No longer are students who really want to come to Addams routinely admitted.)
3. The group of 40 so-called "Peer Schools" to which Addams is being compared includes schools that are very different than ours. Many of the 40 are newer "mini academies" — the replacement schools for schools that were previously closed down. These schools have much smaller enrollments, and can, to a larger extent, "cherry pick" which students are admitted and which are rejected. The dirty little secret is that many of these rejected students are sent to . . . Addams (and Truman).
Remember, the big money (Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, et. al.) and its lackeys (Klein in NYC, Rhee in DC, et al.) is on "proving" that "traditional" "big" schools (read: us!!!) don't work. And — surprise, surprise — this report card does just that.
Hope y'all haven't already spent that $3,000 "bonus money" that we were never gonna get, but were conned into voting for — twice.
Solidarity forever (for the Union makes us strong),
Glenn Tepper
BloomKlein and his crowd have polluted the waters, and we're dealing with swamplife. We can't drain the stuff because we're not at the controls. The only thing we can do is aerate it with our professionalism and replace the slime with truthtelling. Lots and lots of truthtelling.
Weingarten's Oct. 23rd statement on Bloomberg's third-term coup is posted here, but I refer you there at your own risk, because two lines will make you quite ill:
Weingarten 1:
"We deeply respect people on both sides of this issue."
Weingarten 2:
"Ultimately, we all share the same goal: to protect and enhance the quality of education in this City."
Just how deep is your respect, Randi, for these racketeers, unionbusters, profligate financial institutions, and real estate people restructuring and selling out our city? You respect them deeply? The Council members who caved on this issue? The BloomKlein non-educators who have run this system into the ground?
Don't you dare imply that these people have the same goals for our kids and our union as we do.
No thanks to you and your collaborative caucus members, we'll now have to suffer another miserable term under a billionaire's impoverished ethical standards. Which means we'll be working for a whole army of devious, manipulative and nasty corporate administrators trained up by his generals and installed in our schools until kingdom come.
Weingarten: If you do think we have the same goals as them, you're not the right president for our union.
Step down.
For everyone else:
You can sign this Petition against our imposter "Education mayor" running for a 3rd term.
Here's what this important advocacy group has to say to Weingarten and the Unity caucus, and boy, do I agree with it.
If you ever get a chance to hear some of these people speak — like at Klein's PEP sessions (sample video here) — you'll find out how articulate some teachers are and how committed they are to their profession and their colleagues.
TAG's 11 questions to Weingarten were posted on Ednotes in April of last year, and none have been answered, only exacerbated. You can read them in full over there, but in short, they had to do with:
1. Not educating the membership,
2. Fearing for the careers of senior teaches,
3. No attempt to rally,
4. Stalling til 2009,
5. Not railing against the 3020-a process,
6. Not talking about frivolous charges more publicly,
7. Not protesting the absurdity of turning senior teachers into ATRs,
8. Not protesting the willful destruction of careers by unethical people,
9. Weak UFT support at district offices,
10. Not advocating for students when their teachers are being hounded out of the system,
11. Not protecting competent teachers during the "tough Bloomberg-Klein times."
They're rallying again with other protesters:ATR Urgent Campaign
Gather outside the UFT Delegate Assembly Wed., Oct. 15, starting at 3:30
Please join us outside and stay for the D.A. if you can. We'll be there with press packets, petitions, fact sheets -- we need to get out the ATRs real story.
We're calling on the UFT to hold a rally in front of the Department of Education and demand all ATRs who want positions be placed before any new teachers are hired. We also need to advocate for teaching fellows who have been told they will be "terminated" if they are not placed in positions by December.
NYC Educator put up another flier that will be handed out at the DA called "The Real Facts about ATRs". I mean, how much more testimony do you need?
If anyone doesn't see BloomKlein's locomotive coming after you, better wake up. It's big, ugly, and very, very nasty.
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.
