Setting boundaries, or do we

I have found it secretly pleasurable upon occasion to see that NYC Educator reacts to peripheral issues in the real ed world in the same few days I have found myself musing over similar things. Some people believe in synchronicity.

It happened again this morning when I came across his Necktie vignette, which deals not only with the way teachers dress, but with the insistence it takes to get one's point across. At least that’s what I took from the story.


I had been planning to write a follow-up piece this week relating to something I had written last January, in which I described the “look” of many of the newest teachers in the profession:

For the women these items included flip-flops and bodice-type shirts held up by spaghetti straps, and there was often little attempt to conceal the fasteners, color, or fabric of the underwear worn underneath (if any).

For the men, it was a shirt, frequently unbuttoned, and maybe a tie, however loosely it was knotted below the collar; more likely than not, these were complemented by blue jeans, not always in good repair.

Well, spring has sprung, and so have all those naked little toes, as flip-flops once again seem to have made the acceptable teacher get-up list in New York City classrooms. Acceptable to some, at least, the grad students who got provisional certification from the state to man NYC classrooms and who make up such a large percentage of the teaching force these days.

I am trying to figure out why naked toes have irritated me so much these past few years, because I do have an unconventional past, in which bellydancing and tango have played a significant part.

Only some of my annoyance comes from my conservative take on what constitutes appropriate dress for schoolteachers: that it’s important to conceal all body parts associated with bathrooms, boudoirs, and beach. No one has to know what your feet look like. Toes is too much information. Think of it: three inches higher at the heel and you’d be wearing “F...k-me” shoes, the kind some women keep on hand for a hot night out, but whom few would think of sporting in front of a class.


I think what’s probably irritating me more than the “gear” that’s associated with today’s youth culture — the flimsy shoes and bits of clothing, the iPods with wires all over the place, the cellphones in easy reach — is a problem of boundaries. We are having trouble these days figuring out what they are and how they should be set.

Andrew Bierce (d. 1914) defined a geo-political boundary as "an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other." I think we're talking about pretty much the same kind of imaginary lines defining imaginary rights when we discuss boundaries for any aspect of teenage behavior.

Clothing, appearance, and electronics are all part of the boundaries issue. We want kids to dress appropriately (and modestly) for school, yet a segment of the teacher population dresses like the models in Teen Vogue. We ask kids not to bring their cells or iPods into the building, yet some teachers can’t be without these. When men come to school unshaven, obviously thinking it’s okay or even cool to show off a day’s growth, does it help the teenage boy define his own school appearance? Or when a teacher wears an iPod going into school and shows he can’t be without his music, does it help a student understand the pull of immediate gratification or show that it’s possible to go about one’s business without the help of a primal beat?

None of these are neutral activities. They are part of a cultural phenomenon marked by a tolerance for mixed messages and blurred boundaries.


A certain “youth culture” dominates the profession now, and that’s because young adults, perhaps just a few years older than the students they’re teaching, make up a significant sector of the workforce. What we expect teachers to look like and how we expect them to behave has radically changed, and I’m not sure this shift is helping kids just plain grow up.



Talking about synchronicity!

"60 Minutes" on CBS this evening just aired a segment on "The Millennials," the generation of young workers I've just been talking about up above. The show pointed to the flip-flops, the electronics, growing up differently than the way we did, and a whole lot more about this inscrutable group of people.

Take a look here, it's fascinating.

Corporate webs and a press caught up in them

I've been admiring the work done by A Voice at The Chancellor's and Eduwonkette in exposing "Corporations at Work" in education. (Read my earlier post for a selection of some essays in this area.)

As long as bloggers like these keep writing this stuff, we need to be reading it. Actually, this is not really a suggestion. It's pre-requisite for taking this country back.

Progressive Democrats of America sent around an email yesterday containing a passage written by Bill Moyers from his book Moyers on Democracy:

I wish I could say that journalists in general are showing the same interest in uncovering the dangerous linkages thwarting this democracy. It is not for lack of honest and courageous individuals who would risk their careers to speak truth to power — a modest risk compared to those of some journalists in authoritarian countries who have been jailed or murdered for the identical "crime."

But our journalists are not in control of the instruments they play. As conglomerates swallow up newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and networks, and profit rather than product becomes the focus of corporate effort, new organizations — particularly in television — are folded into entertainment divisions. The "news hole" in the print media shrinks to make room for advertisements, and stories needed by informed citizens working together are pulled in favor of the latest celebrity scandals because the media moguls have decided that uncovering the inner workings of public and private power is boring and will drive viewers and readers away to greener pastures of pabulum. Good reporters and editors confront walls of resistance in trying to place serious and informative reports over which they have long labored. Media owners who should be sounding the trumpets of alarm on the battlements of democracy instead blow popular ditties through tin horns, undercutting the basis for their existence and their First Amendment right. (from Moyers on Democracy)

Last month I shouted out to the press to start listening to teacher voices.

I am shouting out to practically everyone now to point your antennae at this corporate webbing and do whatever you can to expose the crap out of it.

ATRs and other expunged teachers: union-busting to the max

Eduwonkette's post yesterday on teacher salaries and ATRs is an excellent "preview," as she calls it, of what she's planning for our masochistic reading pleasure in the coming weeks. I wish we could program her to work automatically on every piece of internet claptrap produced by the Brave New World of corporate education. Something like a web crawler gadget that could debunk the stuff the minute it's put up.

But, I want to emphasize something that must be included in any discussion of the cost of ATRs and the union members waiting around in rubber rooms:

It's not only a case of big senior salaries.

Many, if not most of us learned only this week that once you've been sent to a rubber room, you'll be off the school's budget in 60 days. What had been a disincentive to put teachers out of commission over there (because a principal had to pay two salaries: that of the removed teacher as well as the one who hired to replace him) is now a new TOOL for eliminating unwanted staff — regardless of age, skill or talent.


To spell this out: a frivolous charge, an opinion on someone's competence or personality ("I just don't like them"), or a downright lie can get someone moved over there. And with the backlog they've got in handling these cases, it's a lot more than Out of Sight, Out of Mind. In 60 days from removal, it'll be Off My Budget as well.

So, it is not only a question of pushing senior teachers out of the system. The BoE has been systematically — and with the blessing of our duplicitous union because they have not made an immediate stink about this any place I know of — enhancing the capability of nudging all unwanted teachers out of the system.

Just wait til this catches on.

I've already written something about serving at the principal's pleasure, and Chaz wrote a terrific summary of the current contract fallout for ATRs and other trouble spots  over at his blog. 

This is something I wrote in a comment to Eduwonkette's post, but it's germane to this discussion:

There is an underlying point here that cannot be separated from the discussion: The principals could ALWAYS see or find out how long you've been in the system, which not always meant your salary, but how old you are, and how often and perhaps WHY you changed schools. They also had access to hidden networking in all districts which made it a very un-level playing field for an excessed teacher.

Senior teachers -- who are the most likely staff members to want to teach with a degree of autonomy recognized in the contract but overlooked by UFT and [BoE] alike, and who include many union activists (chapter leaders, etc.) who have gone up against a principal or even a superintendent when they abuse the contract — all of these people are "known" at the district level. I suspect there is even a real list of them.

Principals ask around when they hire people who are in the system long enough to have reputations. The newer teachers not only don't have reputations, they don't have tenure. They are the ultimate inanimate body for any principal: silent, fearful, and contract-ignorant.

As ch. leader a couple of times in my career, I successfully grieved overcrowding in one of my schools for two whole grades. At that same school, the superintendent's office itself tried to get me to change the UFT personnel on the C-30 committee —how do you like that one? Just after being excessed from there (I wonder why), I loudly protested at some off-site music PD that the city was actively replacing music positions with band-aid programs where freelance artists come to the school to teach kids once a week — this was being condoned as a good thing, and we music and dance teachers should just LOVE seeing our positions given away to outside contractors; as they escorted me out of that auditorium, the entire audience of teachers, hesitantly at first, but ever-increasing, broke into a loud applause.

In another school, the principal committed fraud over my signature as chapter leader. New Visions's answer to this: "I think you and he should not be in the same school." So much for fair play.

Teachers with years in the system — and I won't use the term "senior" anymore, because the average years in the system is coming way down as the transience level goes way up — have a lot more stacked against them than bigger salaries. [see here for more on that]

And it is VERY MUCH PART OF this same discussion about what to do with ATRs.

UFT management's been back-sliding on this issue. We need to force them to address exactly what the system loses when the BoE makes it easy to expunge teachers with a certain number of years in this game.

If we don't get to keep our senior voices and fighters, it'll be under Weingarten's watch that the union's been busted.

The educorp octopus has grown new legs

And is it even legal??


Don't even bother to read this introduction and go right over to these two articles at The Chancellor's New Clothes to get a whiff of the sewage system that our politicized departments of education (plural) have become.

The first one is about the May 16 NYS State ELA exam with a reading passage about how a supermarket bagger changed the workplace. (It doesn't say a thing about him getting a management job as the result of his efforts: just that he made a lot of people in the place feel better about themselves.) The passage is excerpted from a book by Barbara Glanz, and the publisher is, you got it: McGraw-Hill.

The second one is about Barbara Glanz herself, because that's what The Chancellor's blog does for breakfast: track things down through the eduswamp. Even more this time, it connected some dots for me about a ghastly corporate model and our very own rubber rooms.

I don't have anything more to say about this just now, except that I am not discrediting the service of any supermarket baggers here. I do, however, thoroughly condemn the governmental agencies that have allowed advocative political economics to creep into a required reading test.

Is there no one at these über-levels who is doing oversight? Or, should I say, is there no one doing oversight who isn't free of corporate connections?

When did education turn into an industrial complex?

“Industry” used to be a word that brought to mind a whole array of positive meanings — from hard work, to labor and its unions, to skilled management that could build whole cities towards the skies, get us all from sea to shining sea in just a few hours, clothe us, feed us, raise us out of ignorance, entertain us and cure us if we got sick.

“Industrial” meant strength, durability, and a no-nonsense domination of the physical environment as much as did minerals, electricity, power and steel.

And tagging along with all this mighty American strength was what all parents wanted their kids to be: “industrious,” diligent, having as Wordnet puts it a “persevering determination to perform a task.” You went to school, and you learned to be industrious.

Boy, has education taken a wrong turn.


It struck me as I’ve been reading the recent blogs laying out the “industry” education has become in this country that we can’t look for warm-fuzzy feelings from that word anymore. The business of getting our kids taught has been taken over by a loathsome machine of education politics, power grabs, and slick PR.

You learn about it when you read up on the corporate model fostered by Jack Welch and his kind (e.g., Mary Hoffman's essay) and on the great book— oops, test — publisher McGraw Hill (e.g., at Time Out from Testing, all over the Schools Matter blog including here, or Wikipedia). The corporate interconnectedness of education business groups have been brilliantly traced by Eduwonkette (Feb. 14th) and a couple of times already over at Chancellor’s (May 9th and 12th). And as much as The New Teacher Project spews its ya-da-ya-da on its website, it doesn’t necessarily make that organization better at the job of training teachers than any other group. They just landed the contract, as did the Aussies in the early 2000s (Andrew Wolf). Did I mention the Gates Foundation yet?


Thousands of inner-city kids pass through our classrooms each year, and we can’t reach them. The overcrowding, the unusually stupid demands on our skills and time, the waste of money, talent and resources, and the easy way administrators, politicos and press dismiss our own experienced voices are choices made not by us, but by arrogant industrial carpetbaggers who may never have been teachers at all. That’s about where we are, folks.


I just heard John Dean interview on Air America this afternoon, who said it will take a run of at least three Democratic presidents to put things right again in this country.


When does the clock start on Joel Klein and on all the enablers that made the likes of him possible?

More importantly: When can we get the “industry” to back out of education?

Picking up where I left off...

Everyone who’s read this blog with any regularity knows that it was created last fall out of anger at the UFT’s bumbling — or intentional sell-off, I still can’t tell which — of the last contract and a serious absence of damage control and union “presence.”

The continued disabilities of UFT management in these areas have undermined the careers of the most experienced and educated sector of the teaching work force, the middle- and late-career teachers. And there is little sign that UFT management will get better at their job defending teachers’ rights as long as they keep feathering their double-pension nests and seek national office.


I have been silent for a few weeks just when I could have been more vocal, as I myself am an ATR, a hot topic in the blogs and in the press.


It turns out, there’s quite a variety of us in this position. There are those who got here through school closings and those who got here through their positions being cut. Some applied elsewhere and found new jobs, others applied and didn’t, some didn’t even get interviews, and some were willing to take what comes and didn’t apply at all. There are ATRs subbing who get daily assignments and those who’ve been given full programs; some report to work and are not given anything to do at all. There are those whose salaries are being paid by Central and those who remain on the budget of their schools. Like all teachers, some are happy in their situation, others are not taking to it very well, some are being treated fairly decently and some are being harassed. You’ll never get agreement on the exact nature of the ATR beast.


What I have been told from people in senior management positions in the UFT is the following, and some of it has been expressed in press reports or correspondence:

a. Weingarten will not renegotiate the contract, as she says in her May 2nd letter to ATRs:

I wanted to personally reassure you that the UFT will not reopen the contract to negotiate any change in the terms and conditions of your employment. We have a rock-solid job security clause in our contract that does not allow the Department of Education to lay off any of our members, particularly ATRs.

b. ATRs will not lose their “jobs.” Of course, that’s the very limited meaning of the word — salary, health plan etc., and pension — not the complete one, which means your career.

c. With the changes to the transfer system, so many more teachers were able to find jobs at other schools than ever before. (That’s such a plus, in their eyes.)

d. There aren’t a lot of attacks on ATRs. Apparently they’re not being U-rated much or harassed. I was specifically reminded that if a principal wanted to push you towards early retirement by sending you to the rubber room, you’d still be on their budget. So, they’d have to keep paying your salary as well as the salary of the person who’d they be hiring to do the job you’re now doing (whether it’s daily subbing or the full-time program).

e. This section has been REVISED, after some ambiguities I didn't yet have explanations for when I first wrote it were clarified in a bit of late-night correspondence. Hats off to Chaz, who answered at least one of those questions in the comments, before I had a chance to post this revision.

I had asked at a chapter leaders’ meeting last week whether principals might be prone to dish out U-ratings to ATRs to keep salary costs down. After all, a single letter in the file can lead to a U-rating, and a U-rating has salary consequences. The response from the reps at the time didn’t solve my confusion, and they may have actually misunderstood my question. So, I wrote to a couple of CLs in ICE, one of whom dug up some wording in the UFT Chapter Leader’s handbook that said “a pedagogue who has not reached maximum may be denied a salary increment for one year.” Does that "salary increment," I wondered, refer only to a Step orto a longevity increment as well?

After some back-and-forth with the other CL and the rep again, it boils down to this: U-ratings do not prevent you from getting either the longevity increments or the raises the union negotiates with each contract. You can read about this in the DoE handbook called Rating Pedagogical Staff Members, which says under Part II.G. (Implications of an Adverse Rating) that U-ratings might cause people to “suffer the loss of annual salary increments.” Steps, it was explained to me, fall into that “annual” kind of increase, whereas longevity does not.

Glad we finally sorted that out, but back to my original question: Would a principal use a U-rating to keep a salary from getting bigger? The reps said there was no history of this kind of thing, but that if the UFT saw a spike in U-ratings at strategic points in the contract, it would . . . Well, it wasn’t at all clear what they would do, but I’m not surprised anymore at the union's incredible willingness to put its head in the sand.

f. Senior ATRs, just when they are interested in building up their salaries for that final calculation based on the last 3 years, are pretty much barred from per session. Oh, the UFT claims of course they aren't, but they’re speaking in a limited kind of way and mostly theoretically. It is true that if you are given a full program and are being paid out of Central, there’s no reason why you can’t be given a per session commitment. I’m sure it’s being done. But if you’re in a school where both you and your position have been cut and you’re doing daily subbing, HR might place you at any point in another school. I doubt in this case that your principal is going to grant you a per session program. That would mean they want your skills in the building, and by excessing you, they clearly told you they do not!

The UFT also claims you can do per session work at another school. Perhaps true, in a campus situation. But mostly, you can’t expect kids at another school to wait around for you, particularly if they’re unsupervised, until you get there from your present school.

The UFT loves glib answers to real-world difficulties.

In addition, the UFT filed an age discrimination suit against the DOE in State Supreme Court on April 7 on behalf of older excessed teachers who had not been given positions (and in some cases interviews either) for reasons of salary or age (see Dorothy Callaci’s “UFT sues Tweed for age discrimination”, April 10).

If this goes anywhere at all, it’ll amount to bupkas. I can’t see any court awarding monetary damages to any complainant for the emotional stress of being pushed out of one’s career and being left unprotected by a contract. So, have a good time with this, fellas, but I’m betting it won’t amount to anything tangible. Unless you call any win against BloomKlein something tangible, and some of us actually salivate at that thought.

---

For anyone who has been out of the country for the past few weeks, here are links to the ATR articles that have recently had some play. (PS: look at the hours some of these guys keep!!)


May 1, 2008 Leo Casey on Edwize.com: “A Manufactured Crisis and an Attempt at a Naked Political Power Play”

May 2, 2008 Ron Isaac on Edwize.com: “ATRS: How Low Can the DOE Go?”

May 5, 2008, 8:14 am: Leo Casey on Edwize.com: “Stubborn Facts, Pliable Statistics and the Manufactured Crisis of Excessed Educators,” who lays out the UFT position that: “the “stubborn facts” are that [the DOE has] no interest in solving the problem so long as they believe that they can use it to win the power to fire educators without due process.”

May 5, 2008, 9:12 pm: James Eterno on the ICE blog: “UFT Officers Agree Not to Reopen the Contract on ATR Issue; Resolved Clauses OK but Whereas Clauses Full of Unity Distortions,” in which he spells out how there is NO job security in the present contract:

Article 17F is no longer about job security but instead covers a voluntary buyout for ATRs. The UFT's claim that there is "rock-solid job security" does not hold up under careful scrutiny. To put it another way, would you rather have a clause in a Contract that says you have job security or have the UFT leadership tell you that you have job security?

How scary is that? And he spells out a lot more over there as well.

May 6, 2008, 2:57 am : Leo Casey on Edwize.com: “The New Teacher Project Responds.” He posts the response of Tim Daly (who heads The New Teacher Project) to the blog he had written earlier the same day.

May 6, 2008, 2:58 am: Leo Casey on Edwize.com: “More Stubborn Facts: A Response To The New Teacher Project’s Tim Daly,” in which he concludes: “Why have the DoE and TNTP spent the last weeks trumpeting to all who will listen a cost that the author of its own analysis now concurs was misleading?”

May 6, 2008, 5:03 am: NYCEducator.com: “Mayor Mike's Kinfolk Issue a Report,” which also talks a lot about New Teacher Project and their nefarious mission to obfuscate statistics and do the Chancellor’s bidding.

May 7, 2008: Eduwonkette: "Joel Klein Blames Idle Teachers for $4 Gas, Subprime Crisis," which recommends a third party study to address the suspect anaylsis.

May 8, 2008: Michael Spielman at UFT.org: “UFT: Tweed created job barriers for ATRs,” which mentions the The New Teacher Project: “a nonprofit organization that has millions of dollars of contracts with the DOE, runs the city’s Teaching Fellows program and manages Hiring Internal Support Centers for the DOE.”

May 8, 2008: Ednotesonline.com: “The New Teacher Project.” Slightly tangential, but lists all the people involved in running the NY Teaching Fellows program. Lots of outgoing bucks there.

May 11, 2008: Leo Casey on Edwize.com: “Watch What They Do, Not What They Say…” He says that at least one school is posting an ATR position, which just shows to go you how topsy-turvy the world is for ATRs.

---

I'm thinking of creating a pool or two on the outcome of all this for ATRs. Gotta make up the cash losses somehow.

Moving on

A couple of emails I've received in the past few days have been so upsetting that I will be suspending this blog for the time being.

I don't recognize this country anymore.

The first email I got was about the descent of America into fascism under this president. The 14 Characteristics of Fascism outlined by Lawrence Britt in 2003 is illustrated in a short video, but here this is his breakdown:

Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

Supremacy of the Military Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

Rampant Sexism The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

Controlled Mass Media Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

Obsession with National Security
Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

Religion and Government are Intertwined
Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

Corporate Power is Protected
The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

Labor Power is Suppressed
Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed .

Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

Fraudulent Elections
Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Copyright © 2003 Free Inquiry magazine

The second email alerted me to Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, an event sponsored by the Iraq Veterans against the War. It consists of testimony from vets and civilians about what's going on over there under our name. You can see bits of live testimony on their website and read some of the testimony in The Progressive and elsewhere. It's as chilling as it is humbling.


The last email I got was about a new twist in the presidential campaign, and this I knew nothing about. CNN apparently mounted a Faith Forum this past Wednesday, where the candidates could elaborate their positions on religion. I heard on an Air American broadcast this afternoon that atheists, agnostics and seculars of all kinds were not permitted entry. So, not only is religion being used to vet candidates for a secular office in a country whose citizens are protected by the First Amendment, people who are not religious were barred from the event altogether. This article by Michael Hess outlines the essentials:

CNN's "Faith Forum" an Outright Religious Test for Public Office

Wednesday, April 16 2008

Religious freedom organization objects to using religious faith as a litmus test for politicians seeking election

Nearly a year ago, when CNN broadcast a presidential faith forum last June, the Freedom From Religion Foundation issued a statement condemning the imposition of a religious test for public office.

CNN has jettisoned any pretense of objectivity and professionalism by continuing to make candidates genuflect before religious leaders, parrot piety, and pledge allegiance to religion.

The founders of our nation felt so strongly that there should be no religious test for public office that they prohibited it (see U.S. Constitution, Art. VI). That constitutional bar is meaningless in today's political climate, if politicians, in order to be electable, must not only sing in the choir, but sing from the same hymnbook. When did "faith" become a qualification, much less a prerequisite, for public office?

Sunday's so-called CNN Faith and Politicis Compassion Forum, bizarrely taking place at the obscure Messiah College in Grantham, Penn., involved such questions from CNN's hosts as:

"You have actually felt the presence of the Holy Spirit on many occasions. Share some of those occasions with us."

"Do you have a favorite bible story?"

"So you believe God wants you to be president?"

"Do you believe that God intervenes in hisory and rewards or punishes people or nations in real time for their behavior?"

"Senator, if one of your daughters asked you--and maybe they already have--'Daddy, did God really create the world in six days?' What would you say?"

"Can you tell us how he [your pastor] helped bring you closer to God?"

This is a journalistic embarrassment, not bona fide campaign questions. CNN and hosts Campbell Brown and Jon Meacham of Newsweek should be ashamed. The event had no secular representative, but boasted as audience questioners a Catholic, a rabbi, the head of the Southern Baptists, a Muslim. Only one question (from the Muslim) mentioned nonbelievers in passing. Not all the questions were on religious topics (thankfully). But the ugly assumption of the compassion forum was that religion has a monopoly on virtue, and that nonreligious people cannot be part of a debate on compassion. CNN ought to show some compassion . . . to its thinking audience!

While the GOP candidate, who has freely courted the religious right, felt free to skip this forum, the Democratic contenders have been so brainwashed that they fear above all being labeled irreligious if they boycott such "events." What a dismaying development. It's a no-win situation for the candidates, for (bored) viewers, and above all, for the Constitution.

Who needs a religious-right lobby when we have the media taking over the religious agenda?

It is no less true now than it was 5 years ago that the BoE of this great city is being run by an arrogant and venal chancellor. What he does no longer surprises me, because every decision he's made has been unsound and inexplicable. It will take a decade or more to undo the destruction — shades of Naomi Klein and her shock doctrine.

Weingarten and Co. have disappointed and will no doubt continue to disappoint. Fortunately, there are plenty of other ed activists who will keep deconstructing her statements and strategies, and these people are very good at what they do.


There's a lot of work to do in America, and it's time to roll up my sleeves.

Sheep meadow: going green at the DA

It was a quick response our girl made this afternoon, when a member posed a question about all that paper at the Delegate Assembly that just gets thrown away and really needs to be recycled. Couldn’t bins be provided to collect it in?

“That’s a wonderful idea,” said Weingarten, or words to that effect. “I wish I had thought of it myself.”


Wait a minute, hold on. The papers that were giving the delegate so much grief in their un-recycled state were the handouts quite a few people go to a lot of trouble to print up. I’m not just speaking about the literature produced by ICE, TJC and the other opposition caucuses. There’s a whole range of stuff out in the lobby that people should be reading: revised agendas, minutes of the last DA, notices of union events, copies of newspaper clippings, articles, Unity materials, and other kinds of documentation.

The delegates coming down to 52 Broadway once a month should be collecting whatever’s being distributed before the meeting and bringing it back to their schools. They should be posting it on UFT bulletin boards or in teacher cafeterias. That’s part of their job. The last thing one would expect is that a delegate to this assembly reads a handout, considers it garbage, and throws it away on the spot.

And the last thing one would expect from the president of the union is to say: Yes, throw it away before you leave the building. Great idea. I wish I had thought of it.

The correct answer should have been: “No way! You have to take that stuff back to your school. This information isn’t just for you, it’s for as many members as you can get it to. Are you nuts?”


The thing that really bugs me about Weingarten’s cavalier attitude to this informative, political, and absolutely essential reading material is that she doesn’t recognize two of the most important functions of the delegates: to collect information and disseminate it downwards.

She jumped so quickly on the recycling idea because doing anything to foster an intellectual, activist, and democratic membership is not her goal. Controlling the membership is, and in that scenario it’s of no interest to her whether we read these handouts or use them to wrap fish parts in when we get home. Apart from the minutes and the agenda, which are probably legally required, the paperwork Unity supplies is there for show, and the paperwork produced by the other caucuses is something she has to put up with to pretend Unity is playing fair.


To Weingarten we’re all just sheep — there to believe everything she tells us in her reports, there to rubber stamp everything on her agenda, and there to use as little of our brains as possible. Baaa, baaa, baaa.

The fact that ANY delegate or chapter leader in this union would even consider throwing these handouts out before people at their schools could read them shows you how much the sheep in this union have been cowed.

Tom Chapin gets it

A masterful video on the stupidity of
teaching to the test:

Not On The Test
by John Forster & Tom Chapin 

© 2006 Limousine Music Co. & The Last Music Co (ASCAP)

Go on to sleep now, third grader of mine.
The test is tomorrow but you'll do just fine.
It's reading and math, forget all the rest.
You don't need to know what is not on the test.

Each box that you mark on each test that you take, 

Remember your teachers, their jobs are at stake.
Your score is their score, but don't get all stressed.
They'd never teach anything not on the test.

The School Board is faced with no child left behind
With rules but no funding, they’re caught in a bind.
So music and art and the things you love best
Are not in your school ‘cause they’re not on the test.

Sleep, sleep, and as you progress
You’ll learn there’s a lot that is not on the test.

Debate is a skill that is useful to know, 

Unless you’re in Congress or talk radio, 

Where shouting and spouting and spewing are blessed
'Cause rational discourse was not on the test.

Thinking's important. It's good to know how
And someday you'll learn to but someday's not now.
Go on to sleep, now. You need your rest.
Don't think about thinking. It's not on the test.

Serving at the principal's pleasure

It was a little over a year ago that we started hearing that phrase a lot, “To serve at the pleasure of the President.” Alberto Gonzales said it, Republicans used it to defend the firing of all those US Attorneys, and William Safire etymologized it in the Times, from whence this:

It seems to me that the pleasure principle could use some updating in our political discourse. . . . The political meaning of pleasure is far from “delight” and even further, one hopes, from sexual gratification. It means “control,” which will always be shifting and disputable in a flexible, balance-of-power system. In future commissions and laws, we should strike pleasure and insert “sole authority.” Archaisms are fine reminders of the lexical past . . . but not when they undermine semantic reality.

There's nothing in any contract ever signed by the BoE and the UFT that accepts the premise that educators serve “at the pleasure” of their principals. Yet they are doing just that, worse than ever. It's just another dirty little secret in BloomKlein’s war against veteran teachers.


No one's talking about all the legitimate reasons for letting someone go, like poor attendance, being without lesson plans, or even criminal behavior. A contract is a contract, as are the other laws and regulations that obligate employees.

But what’s going on across the city is way more than firing teachers for just cause. It’s become a battlefield here, and BloomKlein is not on our side. (There’s not much evidence they’re on the parents’ or the kids’ side either, but that’s for another discussion.)

In this restructured and chaotic bureaucracy they call a Department of Education, there's a remarkable shift away from the kind of balance-of-power system described by Safire towards a de facto “sole authority." Principals and superintendents will have their way with us. They're not firing people outright all that much, but empowered by Klein’s minions and a union that refuses to draw a line in the sand, they are nevertheless managing to thin the ranks.



Here is a sampling of this chancellor’s battlefield strategies in this “theater” we call NYC public education. All will demoralize the average teacher and set him thinking of early retirement:

Letters-in-the file that can no longer be handled by a grievance (Art.21.A.5). The union claims that members now have a right that is “superior” to a grievance, in that you can remove negative material in the file after three years, but only if it's not used for any disciplinary action (Know Your Rights, Feb. 28).

What a crock. The whole purpose of a deceitful letter is to make sure it is entered as evidence into a U-rating, discontinuance or 3020a procedure. If the union says it can’t be removed from the file in these cases, who then is it protecting, the BoE? The principal? It sure ain’t us.

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Tolerating a malicious use of the Evaluation and Observation System described in Art.8J of the contract. First of all, where did the wording in this clause:

the traditional classroom observation by a principal or supervisor which includes pre- and post-observation conferences and written feedback/comments

get changed to:

Ask for both pre- and post-observation conferences, in writing if necessary.

That's in Know Your Rights also, which clearly implies these conferences are something you have to go around requesting. Re-interpreting (i.e., weakening) the contractual language is either union complicity or union stupidity, take your pick.

It’s hard to keep track of the cases of teacher abuse on this score. We hear that pre-observation conferences are frequently scheduled inconveniently, skipped, or otherwise mismanaged. Observations, too. In one school, for example, a principal thought he was allowed to pop in for the formal observation on teachers any time during a whole week! Written feedback often includes lies, and important explanatory material can be purposely omitted. Your letter of refutation might just as well be sent directly to the dead-letter department at the local post office for all the good it will do.

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Wrongful arrest of teachers by police (here and here), and why unless the crime is egregious and front-page news are handcuffs necessary? Does anyone think a teacher would flee the classroom or the principal’s office if he's not being arrested for a specific crime and just being asked to discuss a matter outside of the school building?

Gimme a break. If teachers are the felonious types these cases imply, there’d need to be a lot more pre-employment checks on us than just a set of fingerprints to keep the potential bad guys away from children.

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The monstrous acceptance of bad behavior by administrators who abuse and demean staff, particularly in front of kids. They're not going to get any slap on the wrists by this BoE, and you can't file a harassment charge against them on your own. Only the UFT can do that (under 23A), and mostly that doesn't happen.

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The monstrous acceptance of bad behavior in the upper grades, when kids should know better. An entire culture of rudeness, vulgarity, insults, false accusations and the like has taken root in our system and there are no stipulations anywhere in the BoE’s regulations that call for a student's actual apology.

The continued shortage of guidance counselors and social workers, the large class-size caps and tolerated overages that simply don’t match the magnitude of this social issue, and the revolving-door detention rooms all speak to the BoE’s complete ineptitude and/or unwillingness to recognize that one heck of a lot of kids need to be counseled or re-introduced to the basics of social intercourse.

Abuse is abuse no matter whose mouth it comes from. It permeates some schools and is very depressing. I would like to know why the BoE chooses to look the other way on this issue.

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Hearings for 3020-a charges that end in bargaining with the arbitrators over the amount of your fine. I heard that at the center of many of competency cases is insubordination, so you’ll go back to the classroom, but you'll only get there with a fine. This practice of bargaining your fine is both inappropriate and unacceptable. Maybe it's a special BloomKlein method of trimming the salaries of the most expensive employees.

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Activities of OSI (Off. of Special Investigations) specifically designed to catch a member off-guard. The UFT can publicize its “Don’t say anything to anyone without union representation” as much as it wants, but the vast majority of teachers are people with a heightened sense of morality and service, ergo their choice of profession. They also have as a social group an unusally healthy respect for their rights and obligations under the Constitution and the laws of the land; they know in their very bones that these are designed to protect children as well as themselves.

Educators are not, however, legal eagles, and they don’t think like such animals in situations that cry out for a measure of self-protection. Your sophisticated “gotchas” will be successful, but they don’t guarantee any wrong has been done.

---

Union-bashing, political posturing, encouraging the press to bad-mouth teachers, etc.

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With the contract under this chancellorship rendered meaningless in so many ways, we are now all serving, whether we like it or not, at the pleasure of the principal.

Graphic illustration

Let’s make it really simple.


This is how principals used to staff their schools:

Roughly a third of the faculty are pretty new at the job, learning the ropes. Most have their Masters degree or are finishing it up. They look to learn things from the teachers who have been around for a while and often admire them for their easy way with kids and how they manage their classes.

The middle third of the staff really has a handle on most things. Class management fine, they know their stuff and can experiment comfortably with new lessons and methods as they come along. They're settling in for the long haul, enjoy teaching and accomplish much. They can still run up and down 3 or 4 flights of stairs without any effort.

The last third, the vets, generally know what they can expect from the student populations and the profession itself. They are pretty secure in their style, don’t have any illusions about the job, and disdain jargon and untested methodologies. (They don’t like untested administrators much either.) Most know what works and avoid what doesn’t. Some look towards retirement, most keep plugging away. A surprising number still like teaching and hang in there, they say, for the kids.

Those schools are long gone in BloomKlein world.


Just for fun, a couple of us plotted the faculty of our school the other day and discovered the NEW model for staffing city schools :

This man-made disaster is characterized by youth, a lot of people without permanent certification, a kind of institutionalized arrogance (best described by learnersinherit), and tremendous turnover.


The whole dynamic in schools has changed under this chancellorship. Purging the ranks of experienced teachers, Klein has aimed to cut salary costs and cut blowback. In these he has succeeded, but in educating students and giving them safe, stable, and uncrowded environments he’s failed miserably. He doesn't want you to see the data for faculty experience and longevity. It's shocking, and it is dangerous to society.


Teaching is a craft, and it’s done best when apprentices are nurtured until they become practitioners, and when practitioners — those mid-career and the veteran teachers who used to make up two-thirds of the faculty — are relied upon to carry the educational weight of the school.

The BloomKlein model reduces schools to a culture of perpetual newness, confusion, and inexperience. How on earth can this be the environment of choice for thinking people.

Studying contract: a PD everyone can enjoy

If you’re looking for the best ways educators can spend their time twice a month “developing” themselves, I can think of few topics more essential to our working life than studying contract.


It came to me after I finished reading Chaz’s article on probable cause, which is one of many posts in the blogosphere that focuses on something ambiguous in the current contract. The hearsay issue he discusses (Appendix H) has dangerous implications for teachers, perhaps even illegal ones. The ICEblog examines other clauses (e.g., 55/25 here, and letters in the file here), and doublespeak and obfuscation problems are explored by Ednotes (excessing), on this site (the stealth linkage of merit pay and 55/25), and elsewhere.

We need to spend more time studying contract.

And not only us. Principals and APs should show more interest in spending time with it as well, because as much as the contract has been weakened by union management's inexplicable passion for collaboration and BloomKlein’s ruthlessness, many administrators will still try to circumvent it. Some guess their way through the protocols or work from articles long since superseded. Others use it maliciously, or bend it with the help of weak or misguided CLs. A few just don’t know it well enough and can really hurt us through sheer ignorance, especially when it comes to charges.

Perhaps it’s the Board’s own grievance hearing people who would most benefit by contract PD. They’ve been denying pretty much everything at Step II, and nobody can convince me it’s always the grievant who’s wrong. Wouldn't it be nice if they too sat down on a regular basis and studied contract.

It’s a daunting task to get a handle on this tome of a Memorandum, and if the truth be known, I barely looked at it for the first ten years of my career. The vets did, though. I remember seeing them refer to their dog-eared copies all the time.

We all need to study contract.

I’m sure if we did this regularly in afternoon PD sessions — picked it apart, exchanged experiences relevant to particular articles, analyzed the ramifications of this or that, explored the history of the changes, posed questions and made up hypotheticals — we would get back two things we lost as a union a long time ago: perspective, and solidarity.

The Press: "Teachers won't go on record."

YES THEY WILL !

Many of us are really concerned that newspaper reporters aren’t, for whatever reason, telling it like it is.

Maybe their hands are tied by corporate policies. Maybe they already know of colleagues who have been axed for muckraking and are as fearful for their jobs at the paper as we are in the classroom.

Some teachers have become ed activists, though to become familiar with a spectrum of educational, sociological and political issues and actually discuss them in a variety of fora is time-consuming. Doing it on top of a full-time teaching job can just about knock you out. It requires a kind of dogged dedication to an unpaid task, not to mention some sacrifices on the homefront.

But there are those who are doing this work, and it is sad that the majority of events concerning public education get scheduled on school days, when teachers cannot attend them.

Some of these events are hearings or legislative sessions, others are conferences mounted by educational organizations, like AERA or the Manhattan Institute. It’s difficult to schedule these things other than during the day, and of course membership requirements sometimes restrict entry. But, there are political ramifications to these constraints. Those with the most hands-on classroom experience in present-day classrooms are just not in the room. They're teaching.

So, what happens? The politicos and ed “authorities” get to deliver their sometimes questionable messages in a relatively protected environment, similar to the town meetings that candidates arrange with all those stacked audiences. The speakers at these conferences might have to take a few elephant-in-the-room questions from the likes of Ravitch (ed historian), Scott (union historian, retiree), and Haimson (class size warrior), but they can for the most part avoid a barrage of adverse reaction and the embarrassment that may go along with it. That’s because the people who know what’s going on in schools are just that, in school.

It's the reporters as well who don't get much of a chance to hear from working teachers at these events. I'm not convinced all of them really want to. If one is in a self-protective mode, I can understand that, trust me.

But where does that leave us educators, and where does it leave the kids or the parents? Do we keep plugging away on these blogs, redouble our efforts in letter-writing, become more activist in our schools and put our jobs at risk?

I wrote Jennifer Medina this morning (extracted below), but it could be sent out to any of a number of other education reporters in the city’s pressrooms:



Corporate tyranny has to be exposed, because that’s just what it is, and the media who prop up their bias towards public education are very much part of the problem.

So, press. Try contacting us. We're taking calls.

Surviving limbo: a handbook for ATR subs

You'd think that the union would have figured out a way by now to give all us excessed teachers who ended up in the Absent Teacher Reserves a little support. Information, I mean. Helpful hints on how to get through the day. A trick or two.

If the union is so gung-ho on staff development (and it really is), wouldn't it have been an excellent time to give us some? It's not as if any of us ATRs got any training in how to be a sub when we went to school. We didn't student sub like we student taught.

The fact is union management hasn't bothered, and I'm not all that surprised. Weingarten only got around to calling a meeting for the ATRs last November, months after all the excessing took place and only after a whole lot of people banged on a whole lot of doors to force her hand. If the truth be known, neither the BoE nor the UFT seem much interested in helping us out. Both camps would prefer if we'd just slink away.


So, in the absence of any tangible support from either of these, I thought I'd put together a little handbook for ATRs of my own. Unlike Joel Klein, who had virtually no experience running schools or classrooms when he became chancellor, my earlier teaching experience (20 years' worth, in fact) had some value in my new ATR job. I've assessed the trouble spots and can write something up that might possibly shorten the learning curve for fellow travelers.

Here's the first draft, and I expect there to be additions and changes as I grow into my new job. Because I have no illusions: this is what the last part of my teaching career will be looking like.

Maybe others will offer some suggestions. Maybe even the UFT Legal Department could contribute some pointers about contractual obligations and loopholes. I know for one thing there's a stinking issue of parity: regular teachers get to have per-session activities, but ATRs are pretty much barred from these. An ATR can't commit to the school he's working in, and the principal who has just given him a one-way ticket out of the place sure isn't going to grant him an ongoing activity after school. It's a NoWin-NoWin situation for ATRs, and the union has begged the issue.


So, without further ado:

THE ATR HANDBOOK

Part I: THE MINDSET

1. You are an inconvenience to your administrators and are essentially being tolerated. Do not try to be a goody-goody or get them to like your work, because bottom line, they don't actually want you on their budget.

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



PART III: PROCEDURES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Part IV: DOCUMENT EVERYTHING, for example:

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


Part V: HONE YOUR TECHNIQUES, and SHARE THEM!

Welcoming The Chancellor's New Clothes

There's a new edblog in NYC with a whimsical name, and it's gone full throttle against BloomKlein's strategies for getting some people out of and other people into the teaching force.

Check out the incisive post on the NYC Teaching Fellows program called "Indoctrinated and In Shambles," which deconstructs bits from the NYCTF overview, website, eligibility page, and success statistics PR. The earlier posts run up to that one very smoothly.

They're just getting started over there, but I expect they'll be laying bare a whole lot of stuff the emperor — oops, chancellor — would prefer people never to know.

Legislating on what you don't know much about

Do you get the feeling that legislators really don’t know what they’re doing anymore?

I’m not talking about the smorgasbord of sex scandals we’ve been treated to, or the logjams in Albany or Washington that indicate our elected officials don’t spend much time staff developing themselves in the basic skills of governance.

I’m talking more about how good these people are at judging what’s best for the profession of teaching: where are they getting their facts, and do they have the time, interest, or skill to really assess what their advisors are telling them.

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At Lobby Day up in Albany a couple of weeks ago, a whole bunch of us went in to speak to our local assemblyperson, who, like many others, was not even in the building. Instead, we got to talk to — for want of a better word — a kid, an aide in his early 20s, whose face showed he hadn’t a clue what we were talking about. He took no notes, remaining alert, tense and frozen. He was probably praying he’d be able to respond intelligently to a couple of our points and remember a handful of things he could report back to his boss on. It was decidedly uncomfortable, for him and for us, who had given up a day to make the trip.

I don’t trust that elected officials know enough about education to legislate it, and I don’t know how we can get them to absorb what they need to know about teaching in underfunded schools and hostile environments.

Jennifer Medina’s reported in the NY Times last Tuesday that the Assembly passed a bill the week before that would keep school districts from linking teacher tenure to the test scores of students. Not bad for starters, but she went on to mention that the School Board Association director thinks legislation to toughen tenure standards keeps getting “watered down.” The rules on tenure passed last year, applying to teachers hired after this coming July 1st, say that tenure decisions must include, among other things, “an examination of how well teachers use data.”

I can’t imagine any legislator knows how to use data in the classroom. What I can imagine is how people whose business it is to use data try to persuade them that data is essential to good teaching.


Here’s an example of data in the classroom from when I was in high school some 45 years ago, before computers were invented and way before BloomKlein and their ilk could squander $80 million on computer projects like ARIS.

A teacher gave a test. No one got 100, even the best and most reliable students. He took the highest score and raised it to 100, then put all the others up the same number of points. Looking us square in the eye, he then told us that (a) he had misjudged our capabilities, and (b) he was disappointed in us. We got the point that it was not so much the mark that counted, but that our standards for ourselves were too low. Now, that's what I call a good use of data!


We don’t need test data to tell us how to teach. We need the time to assess our students’ work and speak to them individually about it. We need the time to look over their shoulders, offer comments in the margins of their papers, read over the details of what they write and the computations they make, we need time to correct their spelling and their grammar.

This does not come from legislation on the use of data. This comes from legislation on class size and making sure that when teachers are in school, they’re helping kids acquire skills instead of doing data entry and custodial duties or attending staff development sessions of negligible importance.