Follow-up on Blacklists and Music warehousing

Sometimes blog posts get to have sequels.

Back in November, I brought up the subject of blacklisting, because so many senior teachers remain in ATR limbo, way out of proportion to the number of young grad students who do land jobs. Maybe it's salary or age discrimination, and maybe there's a blacklist. We're not going to find out the back story any time soon.

In response to that post, someone sent me an account of her own job search for an AP position. Here it is with her permission, but edited a bit because it was written as a personal note and not originally for publication:

I read your writing regarding the question of a blacklist, given your HR [Human Resources] and job inquiries.

I wrote to the DOE simply because after well over 100 job applications as an AP, with stellar written recommendations from my principal (since then forced into retirement due to malfeasance) and department chair, no one would hire me. My graduate school MAED in School leadership cum was 3.83 and [I got my] undergraduate degree from NYU. I am hispanic and when invited to interviews apparently did well.

I was only asked to a second interview on three occasions. At one, the principal greeted me with her mouth full and after asking me a question, in the middle of my answer she thanked me for coming. At the second, the principal lauded me, and upon rejecting me wrote a sterling letter.

Last year I received a phone call from a superintendent in my region on a Sunday evening. He introduced himself, and I recognized his name. He told me that I had been very highly recommended by a member of his team and [asked if I would be] interested in joining his team. I paused and said YES. He asked to meet me the very next day right after school. We spoke for over two hours, during which time he introduced me to the other members of the Instructional Leadership team and welcomed me aboard. He added that all he needed to do was call my Principal. I was confident, given that my principal had written so many eloquent letters recommending me. The next morning he sent me an email acknowledging receipt of my resume and saying he would get back to me in a few days. To this day I never heard from him again. I wrote asking him to inform me of the decision. I called, and [he did not even have] the courtesy one should accord to a fellow educator. The salary jump that I was looking at had me so happy.

In the meantime I have seen new APs with less than stellar credentials obtain AP positions, and I have finally given up on the whole process.

I firmly believe that somewhere there is something or someone who has blacklisted me — in spite of my education, my SAS, SDA, experience in staff development, curriculum development, ESL, Spanish and French licenses, and experience in teaching those languages and Special Ed. It seems so peculiar that there was not one position for which I was qualified in the past four years of steady applications.

You have no idea how disheartening it is to watch such mediocre new APs come in, out of the blue with no experience, no tenure, while one has all the qualifications.

So, I guess I am just sharing what I have gone through. I have to work another ten years as a teacher before I can leave the NYCDOE. I hope God gives me the strength to stay put.

Yes, I do know how disheartening it is, and so do many others who've had similar things happen to them.

I hope more people will tell their stories, on this blog or someplace else. Everywhere, in fact.

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About ten days ago I wrote something about warehousing music in New York City. Yesterday I was told my position would be closed. Coincidence?

The principal said something about the "tallies" didn't work out. For student enrollment? budget constraints? I don't know what she meant, but I do know that ATRs who are excessed out of a position in a school that hasn't closed don't save the principal money. They remain on the school's budget until they get placed in another school.

So it's far from clear why she's closing one of the positions down. Why not use the two music teachers who'll be floating in the building this spring to make two smaller music classes out of the 50 kids per class they've scheduled up to now? This would be a great chance to let the students get their required semester of high school music in a more normal — and way more appropriate — learning environment. One can only speculate on her reasoning, but I can't imagine it has anything to do with quality education for children or tapping into staff expertise.

My other question is: Whose idea was this, hers or the DoE lawyers, who seem to be running the ship. I recall a comment she made when I had a step I with her a couple of months ago: "I don't understand this stuff. I just give it to the lawyers."

What a way to run a school system.

There is a kink to this situation, because being the senior music teacher in the building, I had to be offered the remaining band position. I assume she's speculating I won't take it, and instead opt for voluntary excess.

It may be that this cavalier way of marginalizing me for the past couple of years, with one extended tour of ATR duty through improper excess (was reinstated by the arbitrators last month) and another legitimate one looming, is linked to the concurrent issue of blacklisting explained in my earlier blog.

In other words, it's hard to know whether there's a directive from the region to handle me this way or if the principal is just on some kind of personal crusade.

As a chapter leader, delegate, activist and blogger, I've certainly not been invisible. Over the past five or six years, I made no bones about the fact that one principal was a downright liar, then stood up to a Manhattan superintendent who was trying to alter the makeup of a C-30 committee I had to put together. I reported a Bronx principal to New Visions for fraud: he had me sign a document as chapter leader, then changed the text to something he knew I would not have agreed to. (Their response, by the way, was that the man and I shouldn't be in the same school. LOL.) Then, of course, there's this blog, where for a year and a half I've railed against this chancellor, his non-existent credentials for the job, and the failed system he's created the whole length of his tenure.

Some people think this school system is a game.

But who loses are the kids, and all the qualified professionals that are trampled underfoot.

Breaking my silence, musically speaking

Now that I've been reinstated into the music position from which I was excessed two summers ago, it is time I devote at least one post to teaching music in a New York City high school.

Or should I say warehousing music in a New York City high school.

For those who have never paid much attention to the Class Size Limitation clause in the contract that allows 50 pupils in music classes (Art.VII.M.1.g.) — and I’m afraid that includes Ms Weingarten and Partners, who keep hoping this issue will go away on its own — consider what this means for just a moment.

1. The number 50 may have come about when performance groups like choruses, bands and orchestras had these many kids in them, or even a lot more. I’m not questioning those kinds of classes, since not only do the kids who are in them generally want to be there and know how to behave, but it’s really fun to make a great big sound. General music, though, is identical in every way to any other subject, and there is no reason at all for having 50 kids in that kind of music class.

2. Our registers are made up of kids in 4 different grades, 9th – 12th.

3. Our registers contain regular ed students, kids with IEPs (learning and behavioral), kids with hearing and other kinds of disabilities, and ELLs.

4. There are no stipulations at the state or city level that set percentages for IEP students in the class. For example, 65, 80 or 100% of the 50 pupils may have special needs.

5. It is true that not all students show up on any given day, but the same could be said for any other subject class.

6. On the registers alone, record-keeping (including daily and weekly attendance), marking and grading involve 47% more processing time and production than for any other subject.

7. Contacting parents and/or guidance counselors on attendance and behavior issues: ditto.

8. Music teachers still have to devote one period a day to Professional Activities.

9. Roll back to 2003 when the chancellor, new at his job and distinctly unprepared to take it on, decided that there would be a new emphasis on literacy and math and all subject teachers had to focus on skills in these areas. It’s not that I mind focusing on literacy and math. In fact, I’ve focused on it for 21 years, with lessons on poetry and song forms, lyrics and articulations in English and many other languages, with whole notes, quarter notes and all the rest. I feel that music teachers, unbound by a specific curriculum, can do a whole lot to bolster up what's taught in other subjects. But, if there’s to be a directive to do the same kind of work in a music classroom that’s being done in a major subject, then the class should not be 47% larger, because there’s nothing to stop administrators from criticizing you if you can’t make it happen. The union was very much asleep on this.

10. There was also the directive to set up your classroom in the “workshop model.” I could never bring myself to do that, I hated it so much, but I wasn’t in a high school at the time so I don’t know if principals enforced that ruling. A quick calculation makes it 12 groups of 4 kids. Zounds!

11. Discipline. Music teachers are held to the same standards as everyone else.

12. Differentiated instruction. Ditto.

13. Gym classes also have 50 on register in junior and senior high schools, but many of the points made above apply only to music classes.

About two years ago when I spoke on all this at a Delegate Assembly, and where the groans were actually audible when the delegates heard some of the factors listed above, Weingarten asked one of her henchpeople to follow up and see if the union could arrange for some “non-contractual relief” for music teachers.

For my money — literally, my union dues — she should have done away with clause Art.VII.M.1.g. altogether and have high school music teachers teach the same number of kids everyone else does. As long as the chancellor and the regional superintendents were requiring all teachers to include literacy, math, differentiated instruction and workshop models, it was never fair that music teachers had to do it all with 47% more kids. We were left open to any kind of criticism they felt inclined to send our way if we couldn’t make good on the directives.

Failing that, she could have insisted on a new clause “f.”, where the contract discusses Professional Activities (Art.VII.A.6.), something like: “High school music teachers are exempt from a Professional Activities duty because they teach 47% more kids than other teachers.”

At the very least, Weingarten could have asked for one more item in the Professional Activities Options (VII.A.6.a), something like: “f. Extra record keeping, marking and grading (music teachers only).”

Zip, nada, zilch til now, and I expect never.

Weingarten had been negotiating these contracts already for a decade and knew very well she wasn’t going to do anything about getting music teachers any “relief,” non-contractual or otherwise.

I’ll place the blame for this fairly, on the union, on Klein's negotiators, and on school administrators. No one's holding a gun to a principal's head to program 50 kids at a time into high school music classes. That number is a cap, not an order. It's both outdated and stupid, especially when some high schools have a majority of students reading at Level 2. Principals could instead program these classes like all the others, with 34 students.

When administrators soak everything they can out of a faulty contract for monetary reasons, kids suffer and teachers suffer. No bonus they pocket at the end of the year can add to their personal karma or put integrity back into the system.

Last night I shook hands with Salieri

This was a BIG DEAL for me.

Imagine you’re a music teacher, and imagine in the course of your career you witnessed the invention and promulgation of old school rap, beat-boxing, hip hop, gangsta rap, freestyling and battling, not to mention the demise of melody, a reliance on meandering and nonsensical vocal ornamentation, pyrotechnical preferences of practically the entire gospel world, a burgeoning of Latino music, and the interpretation through lyrics, rhythm and harmonies of the most primitive ways humans are capable of using and abusing each other sexually and otherwise.

Take all of that and try to teach Mozart, to 50 kids at a time.

In fact, why limit oneself. Try to teach classical music in general, or how a composer actually composes, or the difference between genius and ordinary talent, or what it’s like to write with a quill pen, or any of the subtle emotions expressed by the Bard himself when he spoke of music in his plays:

“If music be the food of love, play on.” (Twelfth Night)
“In sweet music is such art” (Henry VIII)
“Like softest music to attending ears!” (Romeo and Juliet)
“Music, ho! music, such as charmeth sleep!” (Midsummer Night’s Dream)
“’Tis good; though music oft hath such a charm” (Measure for Measure)
“Solemn and strange music, marvelous sweet music” (Tempest)
“As they smelt music: so I charmed their ears” (Tempest)
“Music of the spheres! Most heavenly music.”(Pericles)
Sings heavy music to thy timorous soul (Henry IV, pt 1)
Will whisper music to my weary spirit. (Henry IV, pt 2)

While rappers play brilliantly and mercilessly with the language and singer songwriters ply their trade from coast to coast, kids all over pour their passionate hearts out into lyrics of their own — notebooks full of them, written to the objects of their affection and the perpetrators of their hormonal torture.

Yet they’re worlds away from Barnfield’s miraculous description of music and lyrics in a sonnet of some four hundred years ago:

If music and sweet poetry agree,
As they must needs, the sister and the brother,
Then must the love be great ‘twixt thee and me,
Because thou lovest the one, and I the other.
Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such
As, passing all conceit, needs no defence.
Thou lovest to hear the sweet melodious sound
That Phoebus’ lute, the queen of music, makes;
And I in deep delight am chiefly drown’d
When as himself to singing he betakes.
One god is god of both, as poets feign;
One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.

 

So, how do you teach the art forms of centuries ago to our big-city teenage poets?

The movie Amadeus was a godsend to me: it could captivate the imagination of any kid between the ages of 11 and 18 and put classical music within their reach. I taught it meticulously, thoroughly and tirelessly 10 times a year or more, putting the sound of Mozart’s works into the minds of thousands of kids.

I taught them what it means to be born with great, inexplicable talent, and what it means to be so much in awe of it that you burn up with jealousy. They saw the palaces of the aristocracy with their vast spaces and polished door handles at forehead level, the musician servants in their black tails perpetually vying for the patron’s love, a world where music was performed live or not at all. They heard the exquisiteness of an oboe solo perhaps for the first time (Salieri describing it here in the movie) and the sweet harmonies of the Finale of The Marriage of Figaro. Even Piffmonkey, one of the kids who left a comment at the end of this YouTube clip, had to admit: “Yeah i know what you mean!!! when i first watched this part i started to tear! but i was in class.. so i just made it look like i was yawning. ;) ”

I couldn’t help myself using this movie to explain European culture, art, talent, musical proficiency, languages, customs, clothing and wigs — anything and everything. Even when I saw the kids grappling with all this strangeness, coming as they were from a world so far away, I knew it was the right way to give this music to them. And make no bones about it, they were traveling huge distances to get to where I was coming from. You could tell from their comments:

“Hey miss, you mean dey didn’t wear Reeboks in doze days?”

Seeing Mozart enter a scene: “Hey, dat’s George Washington!” and when Constanze followed: “And dat’s Betsy Ross!”

“Hey miss, you mean they only talked about music in those days? They didn’t talk about anything else?”

“If Mozar’ talked so dirty, how come he’s in the Bible?” (Mozart, Moses, it’s all in the past)

“Hey miss, when ’re dey doin’ the second movie about Mozart? You know, like Rocky II?”

So here I am last night at a play reading downtown (at the Red Bull Theater), sitting no more than six feet from the edge of the stage, when in walks F. Murray Abraham himself. Salieri!

As much as I loved the reading, I could barely contain myself for the next two hours knowing I was going to have to go up and thank this actor for making my entire career as a music educator so effortless.

I took the famed hand of Antonio Salieri himself, warm and honest, and shook it heartily, gushing how much Amadeus meant to me all these years trying to make classical music come alive. He said, “You know, that movie is already 25 years old! Can you believe it?” I said yes, I knew that, because that’s practically how long I’ve been using it. I told him how it fascinates them, students remember the sound of Mozart and his genius many, many years after they leave my classroom. 

He said: “Oh, so you must be the reason kids come up to me talking about Mozart,” or something like that, and I said perhaps so, because it’s happened to me as well. I can be in the subway in the middle of Harlem and a kid can call out “Mozart!!” from across the tracks when he sees me.

There was too much substance for us to laugh at really, all we could do was marvel for a moment at the movie’s universal appeal. He told me that in a month he’d be seeing the movie’s director, Milos Forman, again and was going to tell him about our conversation.


I felt some kind of circle was now complete.

I met Salieri.