Q&As on the Q&As

Another Q&A appeared in the NY Teacher this week, this one on the new Schoolwide Bonus Program leadership negotiated us into while we were looking the other way. It's downright creepy how this plan was sprung on us at the Delegate Assembly, cunningly connected to the 55/25 pension plan they've been working on at the same time.

There's a kind of Cheneyesque darkness to the thing, not only for the secrecy and precipitous unveiling of this plan, but for the unsettling feeling that we're being asked to sacrifice a bit of our professional ethics to something quite foreign to us: venality.

Smothered in legalese is also a satanic bargain, that schools voting the bonus plan down will get a mark against them:

A school’s agreement to participate in the bonus program shall be considered, along with other criteria, as a positive factor in determining whether the Participant School is to be phased out or given a year’s moratorium on a possible phase-out. Nothing herein alters applicable law with regard to school closings. [Memorandum, Oct. 23, 2007, no.6]

To make that connection — rejecting a bonus plan means you endanger the existence of the school itself — is absolutely immoral.

You just can't sell something as smelly as this, and leadership knew they'd have to pitch it to us big-time. Unfortunately, their fuzzy Q&A leads to a lot more Qs than even their PR department could handle, and here's why.


From their Q&A:

How does it work? “... the DOE will make a lump-sum payment to that school to be distributed among its staff.”

New Q: The whole staff?

A: Well, no, not really. Just the UFT members, which means nothing for the aides or the custodians. Gee. I was under the impression that all staff have the potential of contributing to the success of a school, not just the members of our union.

How much money will the educators in the school receive? “The school's total award for 2007-8 will be calculated by multiplying the number of full-time UFT-represented educators ...”

New Q: What about the people teaching or providing services in more than one school?

A: I dunno.

How much money will the educators in the school receive? “This must be done fairly” [They say a “compensation committee” will be formed annually, of 2 UFT members, the principal and a designee, and the money will be divvied up by consensus.]

New Q: Has a committee ever been able to achieve “fairness” across the board?

A: Practically unheard of, actually. Congress has been trying for 218 years and it hasn't got things "fair" yet. Optimum fairness, if such a thing were even possible, would be assigning equal shares to everyone, but then who’d need a committee at all? As for consensus, the threat of forfeiting the whole sum puts an awful lot of pressure on any dissenter in the group.

How do we know this will be done fairly? “... this is an experimental two-year pilot program that will be subject to a comprehensive independent evaluation.”

New Qs: What would you be evaluating, divisiveness? coercion? If the test scores went up after the cash was given out, do you really think you could connect one with the other? What if the scores went down even though the teachers got their bonuses and worked "harder"? Does that mean the project failed? Who picks the evaluators, and who determines how “independent” they are?

A: As with most projects with hidden agendas, a “comprehensive independent evaluation” is smoke and mirrors, might even end up in yet another no-bid contract.

Where does the money come from? “In the first year the funds will be privately donated."

New Qs: What do these private donors expect in return? And more to the point, could better use be made of these funds than bonuses to individuals?

A: As to the first question, it's hard to know, but they won't be donating from the goodness of their little corporate hearts. As for better uses of this money, it's so obvious, it's painful. Start with smaller class sizes, textbooks, equipment, and after-school programs, then go from there.

Is this just the first step toward individual merit pay? “It is a positive program to strengthen schools. It focuses and provides a benefit to high-needs schools. It promotes teamwork rather than divisiveness, makes the voice of front-line educators equal to that of administrators, and is available to all.”

New Qs: But what does it mean that the program will “strengthen schools”? Where is the benefit to a “high-needs school” that teachers get a bonus? (I thought they were already taking their jobs seriously.) Does it really say the plan promotes teamwork rather than divisiveness, in spite of the friction caused by the elections, or the fact that some subjects involve high-stakes tests and others don't, or that we know already that some staff have a rather cozy relationship with the principal and the designee? Will the front-line educators really be equal, equal, equal to administrators? And as far as the plan being available to all: I thought committees have the right to shut out anyone they want to from these funds. It can't be available to all if they decide to carve some people out of this pie.

A: Um ...... uh ........

Will this ratchet up the exclusive focus on test scores? “The scores are pivotal in deciding when a school closes or must be redesigned....”

New Qs: But, why are scores so pivotal? How did we get here, that schools are closed and restructured based on tests? Why does the leadership buy into bureaucratic definitions of success?

The Big Q: Why does leadership keep selling out?

We can't let Bloomberg define success

It's unusual that a single article exposes what we're dealing with here in New York, not with one, but with two quotes that make your blood just boil. See below for what I wrote a couple of hours ago about the great pseudo-defender of teacher rights, and now a few words about one of the pioneers of America's new caste system.

"In the private sector, cash incentives are a proven motivator for producing results,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “The most successful employees work harder, and everyone else tries to figure out how they can improve as well."

True enough in his line of work, but not in ours. In fact, I can think of many kinds of jobs where a little more cash can crank up the volume to get a few more things done. Telephone marketing, cross-country trucking, manual labor, to name a few. Many of us including myself would certainly go for cash bonuses if we were doing any of these worthy jobs.

But not teaching — or for that matter, healthcare, or manning an emergency room, or putting out fires. These jobs are not done "better," and we are not more "successful" at them, with cash incentives.

For all his intellect, Bloomberg’s sociopathic soul always shines through the vacuous remarks he makes about how to educate kids. His corporate world is riddled with white-collar crime, yet he wants to hold businesses in “the private sector” up to us as models of good institutions with worthy goals. There's no match here, as much as he says there is.

It's hard to believe that the man actually doesn't know what being a "successful employee" is in the field of education, or how educators measure their own successes. We certainly don't rate ourselves by tests or seek rewards for what we do well in the form of cash.

A "successful" teacher holds the room together with most kids on task when they’ve all just come in a huge variety of moods, from deeply depressed, to hungry, to love-starved, angry, ready to work, jealous, giggly, pre-occupied, fearful, and downright horny. A successful teacher can turn an apathetic expression into a moment of joy, like when a student “gets” a concept he’d been having trouble with a second before. That’s a “eureka” moment worth its weight in gold.

Success means when parents and teachers work together to change aberrant behaviors and help students take control of the harmful things they do to themselves and to others. A successful teacher can reverse a bad attendance record. Sometimes success means just the ability to survive in overcrowded classrooms with no textbooks or inadequate equipment — which, trust me, won’t get fixed even when they get around to lowering the numbers by one or two bodies or putting a few extra dollars towards extra computers or more Snapple machines. And it means being able to turn kids away from gang-think, and get them to see there are other kinds of worlds that would serve them better.

Sure, we have notions of success that are similar to Bloomberg’s, like acing a test, or giving a relatively error-free performance, or even just graduating from high school. How could we not, having been through the educational mill ourselves and enjoyed these kinds of successes.

But their world, the corporate one he holds up as a model, is deeply flawed, and no one should be buying into those limited and possibly fraudulent notions of “success” that revolve around test scores and silent submission to administrative directives that don't make sense.

The savings-and-loan corporations of the 80s, Enron, Arbusto Energy, ChoicePoint, Blackwater, subprime lenders: these are some of the greatest “success” stories in Bloomberg’s corporate world — before the muckraking, that is, and before some of the directors got caught and put in jail. People get “successfully” rich working in these kinds of institutions all along the way, and when they're particularly clever, they get to keep their assets even when they serve hard time. That must be a super mark of success. And you could say that politicos and lobbyists like DeLay, Frist and Abramoff were supremely successful at what they did as well, though they dragged the country through the mud.

But to educators, these companies and what these players are all about are some of the most destructive and immoral by-products of capitalism in America.

“I am a capitalist,” Bloomberg says according to the article in Ny1, which means he swims comfortably in these same murky waters.

This is not good for the education of our kids, and because he is unethical at heart and ruthless, we're not saying anything he doesn't already know.