I feel remiss in not writing, but before I go on a proper leave from blogging, I feel obligated to explain why the sporadic posts.
Consider this explanation a treatise on licensing.
After a successful arbitration a couple of months ago, I was reclaimed from the ATR pool and restored to a full music position. There were two in the building at the time, and though it could have been played out in various ways at the principal’s discretion, it was decided that low man, a new teacher, would have to become the ATR that I had been, and I would get his general music position. It was a nightmare taking over someone’s classes near the end of a semester, and as little said about those six weeks the better.
Fast forward to the end of January, when principals make plans for the spring semester. Student attendance down, one music position would have to go. The band program was more in line with what principal wanted (who knows what the parents or the union reps thought about this, since the CEPs were not done on time), so general music was going to be axed.
The band position for the spring would involve two introductory bands, an intermediate and a more advanced one, and a new course, a percussion/drumline group. There'd be a spring concert and perhaps a nice stroll in the Puerto Rican Day parade.
I had actually been expecting to be placed into excess again as soon as the principal could find a way to do it. That would have been fine. Dabbling in a variety of subjects from day to day as an ATR — Shakespeare, Italian, health, algebra, volleyball, law and variety of other — was in a bizarre way the implementation of one of my youthful dreams, to become a “Renaissance woman.”
Alas, twas not to be. The band position had to be offered to me, though one could easily ask why, since I had never wanted to teach band and neither asked to or ever even tried to.
DoE regulation: The person with the most seniority holding the license gets the job.
The reason, then, for this ridiculous situation was simple and stupid.
When the DoE replaced the city arts licenses in 2001 with some new ones that were more in line with the state’s K-12 licenses, they gave us music teachers two of them: one for Music and another for Orchestral Music. I had activated the Music one and barely remembered I even held the other one.
No one at the DoE knows a thing about music or they'd have realized that being an orchestral conductor or bandleader is altogether different from being a teacher of music appreciation or directing a chorus. The person in charge of these groups should know how to handle each of the instruments (and none of them are cheap), as well as how to play them, clean them, repair minor problems and replace parts, regulate their use in the room, and transpose parts. I won’t even mention being able to play the piano while you’re conducting, or making an occasional arrangement if the players you have don't match what the music calls for. Heck, I would have liked to know where each player should be sitting.
Horrified, then, at being offered the position, I whipped out my contract — Art.17.B., which allows voluntary excessing — and put my request for me to excessed instead of the band teacher in writing. HR quickly rejected it. That's because the UFT and the DoE have agreed not to excess high school teachers in the middle of the year, so you can’t at this time of the year voluntarily put yourself into it.
Instead, "leftover" educators become teachers without a program, and in this case, they resolved that it wasn't going to be. I was the most senior person holding that dusty, unactivated, all but forgotten Orchestral license lying in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet. The job had to be mine, it couldn't go to the real band teacher. The only option would have been to retire on the spot, but with the financial crisis being what it is, I don’t think so.
So, here I am a bandleader for the first time in my life, a few weeks away from my 62nd birthday. And I must be the only person in the school with four preps a week, three classes of 40-50 on register and a circular 6-R duty that has nothing to do with my skills. Shell-shocked is a good word for it, and it applies just as much to the principal, AP, and the original band teacher as it does to me.
This should go a long way to explain the sporadic nature of my recent posts.
Surviving this semester will mean hundreds of hours of extra work, from learning how to blow, pound, care for, and draw reasonable sounds out of more than a dozen instruments to making up some simple arrangements for the beginner bands and lesson plans for all of them, particularly the new percussion group, which no one at the school has really thought through.
I’m actually thinking of this as a career change, from ed blogger to bandleader, and at this point I have far more experience with the former.
Look out for my next post sometime in late spring, when 17.B. will come in very handy.
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.
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.
AVoiceIn just alerted me to this tidbit by Yoav Gonen in Saturday's NY Post, which I hadn’t seen. Administrators at a Bronx elementary school interrogated a class of 7-year-olds individually about their teacher - and then threatened to suspend those who told their folks, several fuming parents told The Post.
Education officials confirmed yesterday that they were investigating claims that as many as 20 second-graders at PS 70 in Mount Eden were pressured by Principal Kerry Castellano and other administrators to compose written statements about teacher Jonathan Alejandro's disciplinary methods.
Parents said they hit the roof when they heard about it. Students were promised McDonald's and other goodies for keeping mum, parents said.
"It's appalling! I'm raising my daughter not to hide things from me, and they're telling her to lie," said Rosa Caceres, who described her daughter, Loreal Luna, as an "emotional wreck" ever since last month's incident.
Angely Miliano said her 8-year-old son, Michael Mateo, was equally torn.
"My son was crying hysterically because he thought he was going to get in trouble with me," she said.
Administrators denied to parents that they had instructed the kids to keep quiet, but Miliano said she asked her son three times whether it was true.
"He said, 'Yes, they told me not to tell you nothing,' " she recalled.
Alejandro declined comment. Castellano did not respond to an e-mail and a phone call seeking comment.
Looking past the hype (it’s the Post, after all), we have a big problem here in this city. It’s the culture of insinuation, interrogation, and criminality that bedevils our profession and poisons our schools.
Each day since the inauguration, one columnist after another has tried to put into words how good it feels to breathe again, knowing that someone is finally at the helm of this great ship of state who can think, listen, evaluate, contextualize, and act appropriately to fight for the things Americans hold dear.
And then something like this story comes along, and we're reminded that if you're in any way connected to the school system here in New York City, your life is pretty much determined by the questionable vision of a single man, Joel Klein, and the enterprise he’s created at Tweed.
I suspect Obama’s going to make some decisions we won’t all like, but we’re happy to let him take the helm of this great ship of a country and do his best. That’s because his best mostly resembles the best in ourselves.
Not so with Joel Klein.
With him and educrats like him running inner city schools across the country, a lot of people will continue living under a pall, much like the one George Bush and his immoral oligarchy fashioned for us. It won't be made out of transparent cloth like Klein tries to tell us, and it won't be comforting. It will feel heavy, ominous and stifling, to teachers and to parents.
The sad part is that the more our new president gleams at the national level, the more we’ll see this chancellor and others who emulate him for what they are, fundamentally the wrong kinds of people to make decisions for our profession or for the kids we teach.
I blame two columns in today’s NY Times for this post.
On the front page of the Sports section, there’s a picture of a formidable basketball coach doing her thing. Pat Summit's taking care of business. She's giving her all and demanding the same from everyone else. A younger coach she once mentored says:
"As a player, I couldn’t see why Pat would get so upset about a lack of effort, why she would say it was disrespecting the game. Now when I see a lack of effort, something about it just grates my nerves."
Pat’s obviously made a dent on the students she's coached. She's done it her way, and she's applauded for it in living color across six columns on two pages.
She's also one of those teachers Bill Gates is talking about when he says: “’It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one.” That's in the Op-Ed pages, where Nicholas Kristof reminds us that the efforts of this education-dabbler did not really work out. Student achievement has not improved in any significant way, admits Gates years after he started sinking millions into his small-school hobby, and that “In most cases ... we fell short.”
Yes, you effing well did. At our expense and at the expense of hordes of inner city kids. Blow-hard.
I agree with Pat. Teach your guts out. AGAINST ALL ODDS.
I am tired of kids whining when I ask them to take out a pen or a pencil to do some work, or when they suck their tongues in annoyance and roll up their eyes.
I am tired of parents being annoyed when I take the trouble to call them and tell them about their teenager’s unwillingness to work, or that there seems to be a certain proclivity for socializing, or that the standard they've set for themselves is abysmally low.
I am tired of putting crap all over my walls to fit some superintendent’s misguided notion of what a learning environment should contain or look like. (I wrote about that over a year ago in a post called Clutter).
I’m tired of school rules pasted on every square inch of bare wall with kids walking by them in flamboyant disregard, even under the principal’s nose. At my school, the school uniform seems to be just that: hat, doo rag, earphone wires, pants hanging down below the buttocks, and if you’re really hip, iPod and/or cellphone attached to belt.
I’m tired of the “Blame it down” apparatus they’ve set up. When kids hang out in the classrooms way after the late bell, it's your fault. You didn’t usher them in — as if now you have to supervise the halls as well as your classroom all at the same time. When ambulant students wander into rooms they don’t belong in, it's also your fault. Your door should be closed at all times (no excuse you don’t have a window), and locked. Who cares if latecomers keep you busy as gatekeeper for ten minutes and instruction goes seriously off course. Or when a student is seriously disruptive on numerous occasions, no parent can be reached and you already brought it up with guidance: Your fault, you must be doing something wrong. Your fault, your fault, your fault.
I’m tired of defending every email or letter to the file filled with disinformation, distortion, and downright lies. Those comments get immortalized in cyberspace — not on your computer (they’ve only given you a thimbleful of memory) but on theirs — and in print, for three years minimum in the folder the principal keeps on you at school. No doubt there are backup files on all of this stuff at the region and central.
I’m tired of trying to second guess how some morally challenged administrator will turn the chancellor’s verbal abuse regulation (A-421) on its head to score points. It has some very ambiguous wording indeed:
Language that tends to cause fear or physical or mental distress;
Language that tends to belittle or subject students to ridicule.
not to mention this clause I forgot about altogether: Nothing in this regulation, however, prevents a supervisor from counseling or disciplining an employee for inappropriate speech or conduct that is not otherwise in violation of this regulation.
That's why I’ve been thinking about putting a sign on my forehead to announce what I'm all about and just be done with it.
Because I'm very tired of administrators at every level not understanding the differences in teaching styles and trying to codify everything from visuals and speech to behavior, professional skills and judgment.
And I am very, very tired of education dabblers, including software philanthropists like Gates, anti-trust prosecutors like you-know-who, and big businessmen, not understanding what kind of commitment it takes to teach in a New York City classroom.
Or maybe they do, and think that if they keep the pressure on, teachers will jump ship way before they’ll ever get a chance at a reasonable salary and a decent pension.
Now, that's something philanthropists and financial people do know something about, and they're going to do their best, by gosh, to make it happen.
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.
SUBSTITUTE POST: Originally I called this blog:"BloomKlein computers that get it wrong."
That's because I was told by TRS (Teaches Retirement) a couple of weeks ago that the DoE computers had changed my status from "Active" to "Inactive" on October 31st.
In fact, I found out today that TRS got it wrong.
The UFT acted very quickly to help sort this out, and it seems my change of status was the result of a TRS employer error. Moreover, efforts were made to ensure it was not done to a lot of members, particularly ATRs as a group.
I was tempted to remove this entire post, since I was given the wrong information as to who created the error and went after BloomKlein. Then I thought perhaps it would be better to leave most of it, so that people can see that problems like this occur from time to time over at TRS and payroll and you should be aware of them. So, here's the revision:
Still unable to spend a lot of time on the computer as the result of a back injury, it's worth mentioning the following. Consider it an alert.
With my retirement age fast approaching, I got to daydreaming this morning whether I'd have enough money to live on a NYC pension and a couple of annuities. I remembered that on the TRS website, there's a nifty little Retirement Allowance Calculator that could possibly make all one's dreams come true.
Strangely enough, I couldn't find it today, so I decided to give TRS a call. Maybe it wasn't working in the holiday season. The phone was answered by a nice gentleman who found my account and quickly told me that TRS doesn't offer that Retirement Calculator to "inactive" members, which according to his records, I have been — since October.
This news horrified me, since apart from Nov. 4th (which I spent at the Protect the Vote offices down in Manhattan) and the 8 days I was laid up in excruciating pain, I've been quite an active member of the workforce. In fact, restored to the music position I was excessed from a couple of years ago, I have resumed a program of five classes a day with 50 kids on register each. This regimen is not for dawdlers or for the faint of heart.
[Here is where I removed my sarcastic comments on BloomKlein's fake accountability, fake computers and fake expertise, because the DoE was not the culprit in this case. But, it's not to say I don't still loathe them for all that. They've been manipulating data since they've been in office, a real threat to both reality and transparency.]
My advice to anyone who reads this blog: Here's the TRS tel. no. 1-888-869-2877 — in case you want to check for yourself whether your status is as it should be.
Now, see how easy that was? I changed the entire thrust of this blog once I found the error was not made by the DoE or its computers.
Would that principals would change the distortions, exaggerations, omissions, and lies in the letters they write to our files when they find out they've been wrong. Dream on. These days, they're leaving all that garbage right where it is — just in case they may want to build a big case against you down the line.
I haven't written much since Thanksgiving because of a debilitating condition that seems to be on the mend, but I've been able to read a few posts here and there and it's worth the few moments of physical pain it will take me now to draw your attention to the Dec. 13th one over at Chaz's School Daze.
He's made up a list of immediate actions the union should be addressing at this point in time, when corporate forces in our society are doing some pretty nasty things to education professionals.
It's clear from this list alone, without mentioning a single other thing, that the investigatory processes they've designed over at the DoE have much more in common with kangaroo courts than anyone could possibly feel comfortable with in a nation ruled by law, and that teachers — particularly the ones who have been fully certified and who have many years of classroom experience — are being systematically denied the standing to participate fully in the decision-making processes that relate to all aspects of the profession.
There's no doubt about it, that Weingarten and her Unity team are complicit in this refashioning of the profession.
They keep collaborating with a Tweedful of people on manipulating numbers in all kinds of ways — tests, grad rates, school report cards, hiring, etc. — to drive public education into the ground. They sign off on agreements that take chunks out of our job descriptions and make it increasingly difficult to teach children what we know they need to know.
Weingarten doesn't talk straight with the members. She just loves fuzzy language (a loose translation for lies and omissions) and uses it so much in whatever she's "selling" us these days, whether it's in her NY Teacher mouthpiece, or in press releases, or her letters to members.
Weingarten: "I want to thank the ATRs for continuing to press this issue..." In fact, she did everything she could to sabotage the efforts of the ATRs working to build the rally, and you can read all about it at the Support the ATRs website.
Weingargten: "By eliminating the financial obstacles that have prevented principals from hiring ATRs..." The new agreement covers some ATRs (the centrally funded ones), not all of them. There're a whole bunch of ATRs this agreement doesn't help out at all. But she's not saying that.
These couple of examples relate to the ATR rally and the ATR agreement they signed onto, but there's way, way more evidence of her deceit and collaboration in the majority of the NYC ed blogs.
Which leads me to this before signing off for the day:
Thank you to the many ed bloggers who've been carrying the torch on these issues all along, some of whom started their columns way before I started writing Under Assault. I'm especially grateful this week to The Chancellor's (who alerted me to Greg Palast's article on the Klein choice) and Ednotes (for his commentary and all the links in The New Know Nothings).
I'd say it's all good sickbed reading, but you kind of end up feeling much, much worse.
From the pen of Angel Gonzalez, one of the powerhouses behind the ATR protest Weingarten did her best to sabotage on the 24th but which took on a life of its own:"The lack of information, transparency and open debate in our union denies member input into critical issues about pedagogy and historic union rights. An uninformed membership gives even a well-intentioned leadership free rein to function as it pleases. As the economy worsens, we need to take a strong stand in defense of the rights of teachers and communities, rather than to facilitate the erosion of all that has been built over the years."
You can read Gonzalez's whole column over at Ednotes, which Norm posted this afternoon just as I was writing up another example of how Unity keeps gaming the word democracy. It centers around Leo Casey's post over at Edwize on the ATR settlement, and before I get into that, let me just say that anyone can tell from the title where Unity's affections lie: "UFT, DoE Agreement Addresses ATR Educator Issue, Saves Money for Schools." They'll support the DoE's need to save money for schools all right, and throw career security for all union members out the bloody window. That stinks, and Norm is so right when he says "their idea is to give the union leaders a seat at the table while the rank and file gain little."
Weingarten's lost her way. She's been weakening the whole structure of the union for more than a decade, disinforming the membership, letting the abusive, misguided DoE degrade our profession and turn us into facilitators, and collaborating on simply horrible goals for the children entrusted to our care.
I don't like the new ATR agreement, and have already said so in my own column. It lays the groundwork for making tiers for tenured educators, and we don't need no tiers at this point. No one's tenure should be better than or different from anyone else's, but that's what they've agreed to. What we need is solidarity, and that message is not getting out to the rank and file. That's because Weingarten's not sending it.
In fact, none of the oppositional voices in the union like this agreement or the false notion of democracy Unity keeps hiding behind. And these people make up a substantial part of the fully credentialed membership. (We can discount the untenured thousands, since they're mostly too afraid to get involved with union at all at this stage in their careers and are in general too busy with grad school anyway.)
TJC thinks the agreement paves the way for firing ATRs and the membership needs to get educated. ICE member James Eterno put it through a strainer last Sunday on the ICE blog (a must-read), and various bloggers have been posting a fair amount all along on Unity's unrecognizable democracy. Examples can be seen in Ednotes ("That is why unless power within the union is shifted from the top, teachers will be given the illusion they are professionals but treated as drones"), on the ICE blog (pseudo-democracy), in NYC Educator (when only a quarter of the members vote, there's no check on Unity's tactics), and a couple of times already on this blog (here for how distribution and costs makes it difficult to get our message out and here for democracy or demogoguery).
It's funny how it's coming from all sides. In Weingarten's vision of labor unionism, totalitarianism is in and democracy is most definitely out.
Getting back to Leo's blog, here's the comment I tried to post:
Any union leader who backs this agreement should resign.
You people have created 4 kinds of tenure, which paves the way for throwing some of us under the bus in the next contract. That’s cause for concern or condemnation, but not for surprise: it’s the way you always negotiate our givebacks — incrementally, hoping we don’t notice.
This agreement only creates incentives to re-hire SOME of the ATRs back, the centrally funded ones, and Weingarten was very clever in her press release to avoid mentioning there’s more than one kind. She says there more than once that the DoE can hire “from the ATR pool,” avoiding any mention of the fact that there is no incentive whatsoever to hire back ATRs whose positions have been cut and who remain on the school’s budget.
So, here are the 4 kinds of tenure, though I’m sure you’re not losing any sleep over what you’ve done:
1. Tenured educators in real positions, paid out of the school’s budget.
2. Tenured educators in real positions, paid in part by central for eight years; principals get extra money the first year to sweeten the deal.
3. Tenured educators in provisional positions one year at a time, paid in part by central. Principals will get that extra cash only if they keep them on permanently. It’s like an auditioning for your job. Disgraceful that you allowed this.
4. Tenured educators who will remain ATRs, paid for by central or by the school. Obviously, the least privileged category: the teacher’s qualifications and years of service make absolutely no difference to anyone. In fact, the vets are worse off, because two-for-the-price-one hiring still flourishes citywide.
Comment by woodlass — November 29, 2008 @ 12:26 pm
When I checked it today, not being logged on, it seemed to have been removed: there were 6 comments, but not mine. Then I logged in and tried again. Oddly enough, it showed up just the way I wrote it, time-stamped and all. What's going on? Either it wasn't deleted properly by the site administrator, or they've devised a way to make you believe your comment is viewable (i.e., if you're logged in, you'll see it), but it really isn't. That would be a whole other level of deception I don't care to think about. I prefer to think it's just a technical glitch, and they meant to take it out entirely.
I want to take this opportunity to re-visit Edwize's General Rules for commenters. Keep in mind when you read these rules that Unity keeps proclaiming far and wide how democratic our union is. No. 8 below specifically says so, and nos. 4 and 10 imply the same. Then keep in mind how much money is going directly out of our salaries into theirs.
1. You should treat this form of discussion just as you would a face-to-face conversation. There will be no tolerance for foul language, abusive attacks or threatening of members or moderators, or any other form of harassment. If this rule is broken, you will be immediately removed from this blog. Proper etiquette and charity must be observed at ALL times by ALL users. Others here may be as adamant in their opinions and ideas as you are.
[While I did say that anyone who backs this agreement "should resign," it's only an opinion. I didn't use any foul language, and I would certainly be comfortable telling Casey face-to-face that I think he should resign. Even if I had said something a little more threatening, like: "Let's get these bums out of office!" it'd be like throwing a pebble at the Hoover Dam, a threat to nobody, and they'd all probably have a good laugh. That's actually the problem with the totalitarian structure they've built. They've made themselves impervious.]
2. If in the judgment of the moderators we believe that comments are frivolous and non-constructive, we will delete them.
[My comment was hardly frivolous or non-constructive. I think it is totally in the members' interest to know when tenure has been diluted, because the next step is tenure eliminated.]
3. If a moderator has declined your post, please drop that thread. Advice from the moderators that your post is inappropriate should be taken seriously. Your participation is desired, but a person’s right and desire to participate ends where it begins to violate the right and desire of others to participate and harms Edwize’s capacity to maintain a welcoming forum for all. If you disagree with the host or moderator you may appeal in the proper place at http://edwize.org/contact/.
[A forum for "all"? I object to this boldface lie. No need to check the dictionary definition of the word "all," we know exactly who "all" means to the Unity moderators, and it doesn't include the oppositional voices.]
4. All points of view are welcome on EdWize, with the following exceptions: EdWize will limit commenters to one comment a day if, in its sole discretion, the commenter is “trolling“: (We’re not trying to insult anyone it’s an actual term to describe an activity on blogs.)
["All points of view are welcome" — another boldface lie. And I certainly wasn't trolling. The whole agreement is pertinent to my career, having been an unplaced ATR — or a displaced teacher, if you like — for more than a year.]
a. Posts numerous times a day with the intent of dominating, re-directing or hijacking the thread.
[Not guilty.]; or
b. Posts numerous times a day and insults or calls other commenters names or repeatedly makes the same point with the effect of annoying other commenters.
[Not guilty.]
c. Cross Posting articles from other sites, from copyrighted sources or posting the same message to multiple threads is considered spamming.
[Not guilty.]
5. Obscene, slanderous, abusive, attacks, expressions of prejudice and bigotry, or use of profanity by any commenter will not be tolerated and will result in the deletion of the comment and the banning of the commenter.
[Not guilty, but I wonder if they notify you that you've been banned. I didn't get notified yet. It must be something like Guantanamo, where they accuse you and diminish your rights in secret. I'm going to post a favorable comment and see if I've been banned outright.]
6. Comments will remain editable for 20 minutes to allow the commenter to correct grammatical errors.
7. The first comment from new users automatically goes into the moderation queue.
8. The UFT is a democratic organization. However, since the Landrum-Griffin Act prohibits the use of union dues for internal election activity and since the union’s political caucuses run candidates for elective offices within the leadership, comments that argue for or against one political caucus or another will be removed.
[Not guilty on the 2nd sentence. As for being democratic, when does misrepresentation become fraud?]
9. Please use upper and lower case letters, as appropriate, for better legibility.
10. EdWize was built as an advocacy vehicle for labor and education issues, if you are a member of the UFT and need help in any way feel free to contact your borough office, or program directly, or send an email to blog@uft.org.
[Might do.]
Whether this particular comment of mine has been deleted or not, we all know Edwize for what it is: a Unity armband. But, does everyone?
Our first job will always be towards our students, but in this degraded union, we need to be talking to our newest colleagues as well, and to everyone else who's bought the Unity line.
After all, that's what education's all about.
After reading the ignorant editorial in the NY Times today (which I've posted below as well), I thought they should really go and have another look at the meaning of "due diligence":
1 the care that a reasonable person exercises under the circumstances to avoid harm to other persons or their property
2 research and analysis of a company or organization done in preparation for a business transaction (as a corporate merger or purchase of securities)
Then I wrote this Letter to the Editor, who's not doing any of the above or, in fact, his job:
Dear Sirs:
Concerning "A Plan to Hire the Best Teachers" (Nov. 27th), you should look past Klein's PR materials before you go on record.
For one thing, your information is incomplete. The third paragraph of this editorial says that "the central administration budget pays [the] full salaries" of excessed teachers. Central only pays for some of these teachers, those who do not get placed in permanent positions after their schools have been closed. When the school remains open but a teacher's position is closed (e.g., when a program or a position is dropped), the school continues to pay that teacher's salary. There isn't any incentive in the contract or in this present agreement for other principals to hire the higher paid vets in this group. Two for the price of one hiring works against these people regardless of how well they teach, and many have gone more than a year without having been asked on a single interview.
Your rush to judgment in the last paragraph about the teaching skills of these people shows just how successful the DoE's disinformation campaign has been. There are many satisfactory, good, and excellent teachers in this pool whom principals have been given no incentive to hire, but the public would never know. That's because Klein's main goal has been to get as many vets with high salaries out of the system and replace them with newer people, who are not only cheap, but also untenured and malleable. He's done this quite systematically: by labeling a whole group of them of "poor" quality, by changing how teachers are paid, and by not insisting that districts adhere to the contract, which is to try to get them placed in other schools. Did you even know that Human Resources has not been doing its job on that score?
Even your opening paragraph reflects a basic ignorance of what is going in city schools. You say: "The new policy . . . has put an end to disruptive transfers and made it easier for schools to build coherent teams." First of all, what has been most disruptive is the closing of schools and opening of new ones — not something you can blame on the teachers. And what's more destructive than transfers has been the widespread hiring of teacher "trainees," many of whom have no intention on staying in the profession for more than the few years they signed up for. Albany allowed this, mind you, by creating an even lower kind of teacher certification than the one we had before: it permits a newly minted BA to enter the teaching force with only a couple of weeks' training. Should inner city parents be grateful to the city for that? Everyone knows it takes 5-10 years to become a good teacher. A constant turnover of people experimenting on kids would never be acceptable in the suburbs — or to those, I suspect like yourselves, who have the means to send their children to private schools.
As for the "coherent teams" you speak of, when principals hire grad students over vets, the word is not "coherent" but "compliant." Without tenure, these new teachers will do what they're told, even though so many of Klein's directives have been misguided and need to be resisted.
There's a lot of social engineering going on at the hands of this mayor and his chancellor. If the press is not willing to look past their PR, with all the manipulated test data, fuzzy school grading, erroneous calibrations of success and graduation rates, multiple restructurings, and belittling of higher paid teachers, then it too becomes part of the problem.
NYC high school teacher
I was referring to this editorial:
A Plan to Hire the Best Teachers
Published: November 27, 2008
New York City and its teachers’ union took an important step when they agreed to abandon a rule that allowed senior teachers to transfer into any school they wished, often bumping younger teachers from their jobs. The new policy, which allows principals to reject unwanted applicants, has put an end to disruptive transfers and made it easier for schools to build coherent teams.
The new system is not perfect. It has unfortunately created an incentive for principals to pass over the most experienced teachers — who can earn $100,000 a year — in favor of new teachers who cost about half that much. The passed-over teachers, whose jobs are guaranteed under the union contract, end up in a “reserve pool,” where they typically work as substitutes, while the central administration budget pays their full salaries. The cost to the city is estimated at $74 million a year.
The city and the union have now agreed on a new initiative that should cut costs while helping the best reserve pool teachers find permanent positions. Under the new rules, schools that fill vacancies from the pool will receive a small bonus and a significant salary subsidy that holds them harmless for up to eight years.
If all goes as planned, principals will seek out the best teachers from the reserve pool, no matter how high their salaries. That still leaves a crucial question unanswered: what to do with reserve teachers whose records of poor performance make it unlikely that they will be hired.
Within a year or so, the city should know which teachers were passed over for salary reasons and which ones have languished in the reserve pool because of poor performance. Once the data is in, the city and the union will need to negotiate a plan for ushering the inadequate teachers out of the system.
[NOTE: Small updates towards the end in blue print.]For those who think Weingarten's ATR agreement with the DoE on the tenure issue has helped the profession much, think again.
While it's true that some ATRs might get placed in real jobs and some principals might get an incentive to hire them, there's a category of excessed members who aren't even included in this plan. In fact, they've blown some more buckshot at the contract and broken tenure up into categories. Like differentiated instruction.
Thanks a lot. This kind of collective bargaining is really for the birds.Teachers get excessed in two ways, when a whole school gets shut down or when their positions are cut in schools that otherwise remain open. Central will pick up the tab for the first kind (school closings), but all the other kinds of ATRs will be paid for out of their school budgets. I don't know how many fall into each category, and I'm not sure the union does either. If they do, they're not saying.What we have in this new agreement is an incentive to hire back one type of excessed vets, but not all. Don't you love it when equity in the union is not equity in the union?Here, then, are the four tiers of tenure:1. Tenured educators placed in a real position, paid out of the school's budget.
2. Tenured educators placed in a real position, paid in part by central for eight years. Principals get extra money the first year to sweeten the deal.
3. Tenured educators placed in a provisional position for a year, paid in part by central. They can be dropped at the end of the first year (regardless of seniority), but principal will get that extra cash if they keep them on permanently.
4. Tenured educators who remain ATRs, paid for by central or by the school. This is the least privileged category of tenure, and the thing is: your qualifications and years of service make absolutely no difference to anyone. In fact, the vets are worse off, because two-for-the-price-one hiring still flourishes citywide.
Oh, yes. Did I tell you that Weingarten sabotaged her own rally yesterday? Well, it really wasn't her rally, because it's obvious she collaborated with Klein to diminish seniority rights. This rally was forced upon her when the Delegate Assembly voted for it some weeks ago. She must not have gotten her signals out to her Unity people quickly enough to stifle it, so it got voted in by accident and she had to go along with it.She begged the organizers to call it off. Didn't work.She scheduled an "informational" meeting for ATRs at the UFT HQ a half hour before the rally was supposed to start — two subway stops away, mind you.
She moved the time of the rally to 5 pm without telling the organizers.She had people at the City Hall station telling people making their way to the rally to go down to the UFT instead. And she served them wine and cheese down there, when — for solidarity's sake — they should have really been at Tweed.
And of course she kept the meeting running for a couple of hours, so there was no way anyone was going to get to Tweed to hear the enraged protests going on over there.
I also heard she put it to a vote, whether the people at her meeting wanted to walk over to the rally or not. A vote? They override the vote at the DA that demanded the rally be set up in the first place. Please tell me that's not true.This is union-busting of the WORST kind. It came from union management.
You can read Joel Klein’s spiel today in the Sydney Morning Herald on the great job he’s been doing with the NY school system — if you have the stomach for it.
In a whole era of arrogant men and women, ethically and morally challenged and entirely untrained for the powerful positions they’ve attained, Klein’s fabrication of his successful chancellorship really wins top marks. What claptrap. [And by the way, some Australians aren't buying it either — see this link posted on Ednotes.]
I do want to talk about one point Klein makes in amongst all that corpospeak:
Our "children first" reform strategy is based on three principles: leadership, empowerment and accountability.
This is not new, of course, and I must credit Ed in the Apple who wrote back in December of 2006 that Klein and Cerf were up to no good. In a post called “The Education NeoCon Plans for the NYC School System: Privatize and Walk Away,” he asked:
“Who are these “masked men”?
The new motto of the DOE is “leadership, empowerment, accountability,” expect to see it on T-shirts and emblazoned on banners. Makes sense: the three leaders have taught for a total of less than ten years, none has ever lead a school and are thoroughly disliked, or unknown to the hundred thousand employees and million kids and their parents in the NYC school system.”
He also spoke of the hundreds of new empowerment schools the DoE was creating, in a world
where schools are “managed” by outside organizations under a performance contract. In the totally cynical world of politics it might make sense: if schools fail it’s the fault of the outside manager, if schools succeed the Mayor can claim credit.
I know I didn’t listen carefully enough back then. I only remember thinking “What? More restructuring?” It took a couple of more years for me to understand the nature of the war BloomKlein had already started waging against public education.
For the heck of it this evening, I decided to google the three terms Klein was pushing to the Aussies — leadership, empowerment, and accountability — to discover who coined them and who’s been throwing them around.
The earliest reference I found came up in Shropshire Online, “Your Gateway to Services and Information in Shropshire.” On the agenda of a meeting in November 1998 was an Organisational Review that listed leadership, empowerment and accountability among the “guiding principles for the way we work.”
Curious ... a British governmental Tourist Agency.
There was Sandra Donovan, who wrote a paper for the journal Industrial Biotechnology back in December 2006 called "Ten Keys to Successful Technology Commercialization":
Commercializing technology successfully is the result of thoroughly understanding and applying the basic principles [which] include . . . leadership, empowerment, accountability . . . all of which have significant impact on commercialization endeavors.
Biotechnology. Industry. Commercialization. Interesting ...
In May 2007 an announcement appeared for a new staff development initiative at the National Solid Waste Management Authority in Antigua. It would be led by Myrtle Looby, founder and CEO of LEAP Training Consultants. LEAP stands for “Leadership Empowerment Accountability Professionalism.”
Hmmm ... Solid Waste Management.
The journal Design Intelligence had an article by James Cramer in October of the same year on “Global Growth, Design Demographics, and Business Success.” He wrote about a diagnostic analysis called LEAP™, derived from the words “leadership, empowerment, accountability, and processes.” The say they have a way to assess
the culture of an organization as it relates to real world success. Twenty-six critical areas of a firm’s culture under the umbrella zones of professional services, marketing, finance, and operations are analyzed . . This LEAP™ diagnostic has been used for over three years now to identify strategic priorities, to create alignment in merger situations, and to create a meritocracy environment that produces high performance firms.
I hate to admit it, but I'm not familiar with Design Demographics. Does it involve people?
This might, but I can't make heads or tails out of it. Let me just throw it in for good measure:
An application for an award being offered by the Red Cross says that candidates must share six “core values,” one of which is teamwork. They must be "committed to workforce leadership, empowerment, and accountability."
So they've found their way into Emergency Medical Services as well. Nice.
Any ten-year-old can tell you what’s missing in all this leadership, empowerment and accountability.
It’s children, and it’s learning. And we don't need no Joel Klein to tell us that.
Just for the record, the commenting is winding down over at the NY Times post about how New Yorkers feel about Joel Klein becoming the Secretary of Education in the Obama administration.
Which doesn't mean I have to wind down, because BloomKlein's values are so base and I'm so unconvinced that what they favor and how they go about installing their agenda are so bad for the city that we can't afford to put this issue onto the back burner.
37 of the 44 comments over at that post are anti-Klein, most to the max. As for the other 7, not much in there either: 1 just asked for information, 2 couldn't care less, and 2 others hate public education altogether. I guess those people have a choice where to send their kids to school. Two were actually favorable, one of which I left in for a good laugh (#40).1. November 10, 2008 4:07 pm
Quote from Mr. Klein’s Press Secretary: “Along the way he’s angered adults with entrenched interests in policies that have never worked.”
I am a 70-year-old adult who has never had children, have never been a teacher, did not attend the New York City school system, and therefore I have no “entrenched interests” of any sort.
I am APPALLED by the mess Mr. Klein has made of education in New York City.
— cynthia
2. [asks for information]
3. November 10, 2008 4:21 pm
Mr. Klein has failed public education in too many ways: He is obligated to a corrupt and disasterous high stakes test machine that has made our schools absent of learning, soul or life. He is in service to Mayor Bloomberg’s governing philosophy of “screw the public first.” They as policy view parents and students- the client- as in the way. Worse, NYC schools have not improved one iota during his tenure. He runs an expert-less, management first enterprise that scoffs at educators, insults parents and looks at children as data creating subjects. President-elect Obama- select an educator first!
— mitchell
4. November 10, 2008 4:47 pm
A really nasty person
Wants to rid the system of all teachers with experience and replace them with new cheaper teachers.
Paying for results is just a way to show better results. Telling Principal’s to drive teachers who give proper grades a hard time. If no resluts then you are out. So what do many do? They just pass students. An alcoholic teacher who sleeps in class but passes all students is considered satisfactory and one who works hard in every way angive fair grades is considered unsatisfactory. It’s a reign of terror.
Please get someone else and please investigate Klein
— bob
5. November 10, 2008 4:50 pm
I don’t see how Klein is worse than any other education official. The fundamental failure of school systems, all over the USA, is that kids don’t learn to read, write, calculate, and think.
Education is NOT effective in a democratic process. Of course parents should have input, but wasting billions of dollars on PTAs, sports, and other fluff is a problem. Schools should be run more like universities, where trained educators create curricula and organize classrooms. Biologists should create biology curricula, chemists should create chemistry curricula, historians should create history curricula, etc., etc.
— Rick
6. November 10, 2008 5:27 pm
In response to David Cantor’s comment that “The chancellor has spent the last six years building a school system focused on the needs of kids. Along the way he’s angered adults with entrenched interests in policies that have never worked,” I would respond that he’s antagonized parents who care about their children’s education and teachers who care about teaching. For him to call parents “adults with entrenched interests” is surely the most blatant example of projection I’ve ever read!
As for Rick, for him to say that billions of dollars are wasted on PTAs, which raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for schools that are inadequately funded by government, shows that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
— Ellen
7. November 10, 2008 5:42 pm
Joel Klein, like his boss, Mayor Bloomberg, is virulently anti-union. For example, a few years ago he unilaterally denied almost all his teachers sabbaticals that they were entitled to under their collective bargaining agreement.
— Bob
8. November 10, 2008 6:02 pm
In response to David Cantor’s comment:
The Chancellor has spent six years focused on building a system defined by the policy ideas of the Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, Dell Foundation and many wealthy New Yorkers like Caroline Kennedy and Courtney Ross who would never send their own kids to public school yet have no qualms about dictating how my kids should be educated.
And to dismiss parents who care about smaller classes, arts education and shielding their kids from Klein’s relentless bludgeon of standardized testing as “entrenched interests” is despicable.
It should be obvious to all why a Klein role in the Obama administration is a non-starter. Let’s focus on changes to mayoral control of our schools and the next mayoral election to bring an end to this.
— Patrick J. Sullivan
9. November 10, 2008 6:11 pm
Klein is NOT the man. It’s strange that a job of such importance is given to ‘politicians and those politically connected, instead of someone in either of those categories with true experience as an educator and leader.
When Secretary Spellings was appointed, both the Dems and Repubs applauded this decision, but her tenure has been a complete disaster. She simply sought to push rules on the K-16 community with real engagement or understanding.
We need a leader who has true experience, exposure, and knowledge of education. At some level, that should include some time spent as a teacher/professor as well as managerial experience. Not just “business” leaders/policy analysts that think they can just swoop down and make everything “right”. It hasn’t worked in Washington, and we all know that it hasn’t worked in NYC.
— Xilla
10. November 10, 2008 6:30 pm
This letter has been signed by a hundred New York City parents since Friday night:
Dear President-elect Obama,
First of all let us congratulate you on your election. Many of us worked ardently to advance your cause, and today we celebrate the bright and hopeful years before us under your leadership.
We write now as parents in the New York City public school system. We would like to urge in the strongest terms that you select a Secretary for Education with deep practical experience in teaching and learning. We feel that there is a fashion now for placing school reform in the hands of leaders outside the field. In our experience in New York this trend is catastrophic; in our view the administration of Chancellor Joel Klein has disastrously neglected the fundamental needs of children. To lead in education one must understand something about children, about human development, about the history of successes and failures in pedagogy.
Please appoint an experienced educator, a person close to the lives of children, to lead our nation’s education system.
Yours sincerely,
[see pspac.wetpaint.com for a list of names]
— Ann Kjellberg
11. November 10, 2008 7:03 pm
If you think having a typical kid in the NYC system is difficult, try having a Special Ed kid. You are treated like a criminal by the Board of Ed who makes it as tough as they can for you to get these kids an appropriate(non-existent)education. The money spent on endless paper shuffling and legal battles would be better spent ridding the Board of Ed of dead wood and overhauling an archaic system that fails this population. The idea Joel Klein is even being considered as an Education Secretary is horrifying.
— luci p.
12. November 10, 2008 7:03 pm
Joel Klein has drawn the ire of teachers and parents alike.”
That in itself is high praise.
— Jim from Brooklyn
13. November 10, 2008 7:28 pm
As much as I’ve been angered by Mr. Klein, there may be one bright spot should he become Secretary of Education: We will, at last, get rid of him in New York.
— Carol
14. [couldn't care less, doesn't want taxes going to pubic education]
15. November 10, 2008 7:34 pm
I am the mother of 11-year old twins who have been in the New York City public school system since kindergarten, all under Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.
While I would gladly see him leave, I protest as strongly as possible his appointment as Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration.
Chancellor Klein has proven himself to be an autocratic bully, surrounded by people who agree with everything he does because they know their jobs are on the line.
He does not care what parents think and does not seem to believe that parents should have a say in their children’s education. He pontificates at hearings then walks out without listening to parents’ responses.
Klein talks a lot about “transparency” in the schools, but his Department of Education is the least transparent in City government.
Klein is committed to the discredited theory that the only measure of a child’s achievement is the the score on standardized tests. This is despite the extensive research in education that points to the fact that standardized tests “dumb down” a curriculum.
The Chancellor uses the 3rd, 5th and 7th grade tests as requirements for promotion — when the test designers themselves have warned that these tests should NOT be used for this purpose.
Testing and other data collection activity is extolled by Klein as a means towards accountability — yet his own office is not accountable to the parents, children, or teachers. Klein sits in judgment on principals, teachers, and children — but he has not created a mechanism through which he and the department can be judged in turn — for good reason: he has failed.
The Chancellor has also proven himself to be an extremely poor administrator of public funds. He has wasted millions of dollars on a data tracking computer system that not only does not work, but is not appropriate for a school system. He spent extravagant sums on importing consultants from Britain to administer a “quality review” of every school, consultants discredited in Britain itself.
New Yorkers were justly in an uproar last year when Klein’s expensive consultants cut bus service — and thousands of children were left standing on street corners in the cold. From Klein, no apologies, and the system remains in disarray.
Over the years of Joel Klein’s administration, we have seen trained, credentialed educators forced out of his department. It is now filled with lawyers and businessmen whose only experience with pedagogy occurred when they were in school 30 years ago.
Education is not a business. Each year that a child spends in school is his or her one chance to “get it”. If an 8-year old spends a year in 3rd grade being taught how to take a test, and the next year it’s decided that the test was faulty, that child’s loss is forever. Under Klein too many children have lost too many precious years.
America needs a Secretary of Education who is an educator, a listener, and a person who understands that our children are not a collection of data, but the future of our country.
That person is decidedly NOT Joel Klein.
— Linda Levy
16. November 10, 2008 7:41 pm
Mr. Klein is a walking disaster,
Of mismanagement a past master,
Has the wit and the charm
Of a piranha farm,
A dyed-in-the-wool flabbergaster!
— Larry Eisenberg
17. November 10, 2008 9:14 pm
Isn’t it important to have someone who is not afraid of the current bureaucratic structure and enforce the new administration’s policies on education reform?
— John
18. [not for or against him]
19. November 10, 2008 9:46 pm
Now that education is a department under mayoral control, every teacher I know is afraid to publicly speak out against adiministration policies. Pick a free crative thinker with a background in some other discipline than educatiion, e.g. science.
— ***icle***
20. November 10, 2008 10:24 pm
The Secretary of Education should be an educator, not someone who has had a negative impact on the NYC Dept. of Education. There are so many talented people who could provide leadership in this important position. Mr. Klein has not distinguished himself as a positive leader in NYC-the country deserves better.Rachel
— RP
21. November 10, 2008 10:37 pm
I quit after five years of teaching high school largely because of the tremendous negativity in the system. I was a former lawyer who left the profession and obtained a Masters Degree to pursue teaching. I have never worked harder and been treated worse than in the NYC public school system. I credit that, in part, to a culture created/reinforced by Joel [Klein], who constantly belittled teachers and made it acceptable for administrators to do the same.
— Anonymous from Manhattan
22. November 10, 2008 11:38 pm
If Mr. Kristof is correct that Barack Obama is an intellectual, then he will revive a respect for professionalism and appoint an educator as Education Secretary.
Mr. Klein is no educator. Obsessed as he is with voluminous record keeping and standardized assessments, he can be credited with inventing what I call, “bureaucracy-centered pedagogy.” As a New York City ESL teacher, I am compelled to spend more time with paperwork and testing than actually teaching my students.
With Ivy League credentials and publications under my belt, it is safe to say I am not another of Mr. Klein’s alleged lazy teachers standing in the way of rigor.
— Constance Benson
23. November 10, 2008 11:50 pm
David Cantor’s dismissive comment (”he’s angered adults with entrenched interests in policies that have never worked”) is, unfortunately, totally typical of the Klein administration’s low regard for parents, most of whom have no axe to grind other than wanting a well-rounded education for their children.
I can’t think of a single person in my children’s public elementary school who approves of the DOE’s obsession with standardized testing. And while Klein coopts the language of the civil rights movement (”equity of access”), the city’s schools remain shamefully segregated and changes in G&T and early childhood admissions have resulted in fewer minority children in those programs.
President-elect Obama, I (and my children!) traveled out of state to knock doors for you, spent evenings phone banking, bought buttons and bake sale cookies. I realize that you can’t please all of your constituents, but I beg you to listen to the grass roots on this one and not to be fooled by the NYC DOE’s misleading and disrespectful PR machine.
– Brooklyn mom of preK and 2nd grade students
— kk
24. November 11, 2008 12:19 am
I have 2 children currently in the NYC public schools, and I myself attended NYC public schools from grade K-6.
My daughter is an 8th grader, and her class was the first year for whom the 3rd grade NYS test was the promotional criteria. I watched a child who had been an enthusiastic student become increasingly demoralized and crushed by a curriculum that did not offer clear teaching methods, particularly in the mathematics curriculum, and which did not match what was covered on the assessments she was given prior to the test. In the years since, I have seen no improvement in either the ability of the curriculum to match the test, or in the ability of the test to measure any progress in educational achievement.
My son is autistic, and in a 5th grade equivalent class at this time. When I attempted to get information about kindergarten level placement for him, I was unable to find anything pertinent on the DOE website. Being something of an involved parent, I called the phone number provided for District 75 and was told such information was confidential. I ask you, who would I tell? Is educating an autistic child now classified? It took a rather sarcastic email to Mr. Klein to get information that allowed my husband and I to interview schools for our son. He’s doing well, but to be very honest, his school is now attempting to inflict the general education curriculum on his class, and I am beside myself. Autistic children have a great deal of trouble connecting with abstract notions like “How do you feel? How was your day?” Imagine what will happen when someone asks my son, who taught himself to multiply when he was 6, to describe how he chose to solve a problem.
In all honesty, if Mr. Klein is given the opportunity to do for the nation what he has done for New York, I’d strongly suggest we abandon all hope and become a nation of homeschoolers. I don’t care about the ridiculous letter grades he assigns to schools based on some Byzantine calculations. I loathe filling out the annual parent surveys, which ask absolutely no questions that I find relevant, but which are deliberately skewed to produce data that supports his agenda. I want parent involvement to actually have meaning again. I want my children to be taught by methods that may very well be considered didactic, but which actually worked for my generation. In fact, I’d like teachers to have some input on the curriculum, based on what they know works as opposed to what a think tank thinks might work. I’d like principals to have at least 15 to 20 years of classroom teaching under their belts before we place them in charge of an entire school. Otherwise, obviously unqualified individuals like myself (my work history was strictly corporate/financial) could apply for the position, although I suspect I might at least have the maturity to know I was in over my head.
— Christine Burke
25. November 11, 2008 3:05 am
Mr. Klein’s statment from his press secretary David Cantor said:“The chancellor has spent the last six years building a school system focused on the needs of kids.”
Mr. Klein, your claim is bassless and unfounded.
— CR
26. November 11, 2008 6:18 am
The man is unqualified and the SED should never have granted him a waiver to take a job for which he has no qualification whatsoever.
He and all the cronies he brought in are arrogant. Like they are the only ones who put “Children First.” He never spent a day in a classroom and has not the slightest concept what the teachers, Assistant Principals and Principals go through on a daily basis.
He has destroyed many of the finest high schools, especially in minority areas of Brooklyn, with his belief that smaller schools work better. He has brought in Principals who don’t have a clue, who wouldn’t know a good less if they saw one.
He has gotten a lot of good press by playing the role of politician by ripping apart the people who put it on the line every day of their working lives.
His grading system of schools makes no sense. Why tell people their child works in a school that is an F. Why tell teachers that. Why tell Principals that. Are there some schools that have problems; yes of course. But more often than not, these problems are far above what the teachers can do. How would you like walking into a class every day and 3/4 of the students don’t bring notebooks to school. Or get up and walk around the room. And of course, the teachers are blamed.
Teachers who have spent 20 years of their lives working at a high level are told their schools are closing and told go out and find a job. And then they discover that because of this moron, schools no longer get a personnel budget based on one teacher unit but based on actual dollars. So of course a Principal will be very reluctant to hire a teachers making $100,000 when he or she can hire 2 newbie making $40,000 and still have $20,000 to spend. Or teachers go on interviews and discover they are dealing with mental midgets brought in to be Principals by a “Leadership Academy” that doesn’t have the slightest clue. So they rightfully mind their time in the Absent Teacher Reserves and this jerk blames the teachers and wants to take away their jobs because of his inability to comprehend what his policies have done. And then we get the newspapers supporting him and blaming the teachers and accepting his idiotic comments that the reason these teachers can’t get jobs is because they are incompetent. And then nobody questions why most every teachers retires on the first day he or she can to get away from this madness.
And we see the papers and the Mayor trying to tell the world what a wonderful job they have done “improving” the schools. And of course the newspaper editors buy into this.
Maybe New York City does need him to get a job in the Federal government so that we can spread this incompetent’s “wealth” (in terms of educational knowledge).
But as for NYC, it will take decades to recover from what has been done to its school system.
The man has to go.
— Jeff S
27. November 11, 2008 7:20 am
I served as a New York City public school teacher for over ten years. I hold two New York State teaching certificates and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. I currently teach at a top private prep school in New York City. In my experience, Joel Klein’s leadership of the NYC public school system has been a complete disaster. If Barack Obama wants to replicate this disaster on a national scale, Klein is his man.
First, Mr. Klein created a new centralized bureaucracy and tried to micromanage teachers. This flew in the face of all experience and research with school reform, which shows unambiguously that successful school reform is and must be staff driven.
When Klein’s micromanagement predictably failed, he declared victory: “Now that I have brought accountability to the system, it is time for the next phase.” This next phase is management by numbers. Knowing nothing about education or about running a school system, Mr. Klein thinks it is a simple matter to measure the performance of students, teachers, and administrators using test scores.
The result is predictable: teachers are being pressured to teach to the test, and administrators are being pressured to tweak the metrics to make the numbers come out right. This has nothing to do with quality education, but Mr. Klein will get his numbers. At least he will until the whole house of cards collapses in an Enron-type academic scandal.
Mr. Obama, if you want to improve education in this country, you need a master educator, respected by other educators, in charge of the nation’s Education Department.Brian D’Agostino, Ph.D.
— Brian D’Agostino
28. November 11, 2008 7:48 am
As a graduate of New York City’s public school system at a time when the system, for all its many faults, provided an excellent education for many of its students, I would like to see a return to education and the end of those endless standardized tests. All they measure is test-taking ability, which is a skill having nothing to do with learning. No child left behind, indeed! Klein represents the failure of Bush education policies, and should not be rewarded with a federal position. Neither should he continue in his position in New York City.
New York’s public school system has never been perfect, and it had a sad amount of failures even in my day. But to say it is broken and can never be fixed is to doom our future. Klein’s tenure has been an outright failure. Let’s give him an F and try education instead of testing.
— Amy Stoller
29. [liked Klein, trusts Obama to make the right choice]
30. November 11, 2008 9:03 am
And the police-state conditions now in effect in our schools, with the nypd having more authority than principals, thanks klein!
— Wanda
31. November 11, 2008 9:56 am
Deliver the City of New York from the ineptitude and malfeasance of Joel Klein. Appoint him secretary of the US Department of Education and be done with him once and for all.
— Vir Gules
32. November 11, 2008 10:16 am
Response to some of the comments:
To 2. Please read Obama’s ideas on education, which were up online for a while but are taken down from time to time while they construct the site. I made some comments about certain items in his bulleted list at: “A whiff of Educorp” — using assessment to get “quality” teachers (quality teachers come from experience, not from entry assessments), charter schools and merit pay.
To 5: You hit the nail on the head when you say that education should be designed be trained educators. Klein is not an educator, was waivered in by the State, and is a political, corporate appointment by a billionaire mayor. So I don’t understand why you think he’s no worse than anyone else: of course he is, with those non-credentials.
To 10: Update on the number of signatures: 323 right now.
To 12: If drawing the ire of parents and teachers is a good thing, you must be part of the moneyed class who sends their children to private schools and wants the rest of the city ghettoized.
To 14: We are not talking here about the next NYC schools chancellor. We’re talking about a much larger position.
To 18: You say that individual “successes” in the public sphere are more revealing regardless of who’s chancellor. What elitism! The kids who “make it” big through this system are mostly the ones with huge emotional, educational and financial support from home. This guy condemns the rest to any combination of huge class size, failing buildings, circumvented laws (sp. ed), and rescinded programs. No one is extending a helping hand to the kids who have no way out of this muck and get dragged down further.
Send Klein back to wherever he can do least harm, and start mounting a parallel campaign of equal importance to NYC: against a billionaire mayor who has already bought the system and wants to do it some more.
— Woodlass
33. November 11, 2008 12:44 pm
One of the most destructive things Klein has done while Chancellor has been to dismantle the school districts. The districts used to be huge sources of support for the principals and the schools. Those working in the district had once been principals and teachers themselves, and principals report to me that the relationships they used to have with the district personnel were “almost familial.” New principals were mentored by old. If a principal encountered a problem, he or she could call up the district and get advice from people who had once stood in her shoes.
One principal reported to me that during her first months as a new principal, the district superintendent showed up one morning before school, meeting her unexpectedly in the doorway. The two of them sat downstairs at the security officer’s desk and together went over a document the principal had written about her plans. Similarly, the week after 9/11, the district realized that they had a brand new principal in a school and sent a district representative over to spend the day with her, to give her support and make sure she was all right. Interestingly, this was District 2, the same district that had 4 or more schools in the vicinity of the World Trade Center, schools that had had to be evacuated and temporarily housed elsewhere. Obviously, District 2 had a lot on its plate. But the people in the district remembered the new principal they had just assigned to a school and were nursing along, and they were committed to helping her.
Now, in stark contrast, principals report to me that the only time representatives from the DOE show up is on testing days, when they stand and observe, eyes squinted, arms folded, while the principal unpacks the tests and distributes them to the classrooms. Now, because of Klein’s destructive policies, most of the district personnel, many of whom were nationally respected educators, have “retired,” and are no longer available to shepherd our schools.
I am not a teacher; I am a parent who has been a public school parent for 8 years now, and in that time I have seen how hard the teachers and principals work. These are people who not only have experience every day in the trenches, but who have academic backgrounds, advanced degrees, in education. Education is a field, just as law is, or business, and I object strenuously to the DOE’s assertion that Klein and Co. are working against “entrenched interests.” Instead, what they’ve done time and time again is arrogantly refuse to listen to or respect the professional educators who have devoted their lives and careers to educating our city’s children.
— Jan Carr
34. [won't make a difference Klein or anyone else, since school system bad all around]
35. November 11, 2008 6:07 pm
If one is to really vet the selection of Joel Klein, I would hope the Transition Team would speak to parents and teachers alike. Do not believe the hype that the Bloomberg administration is giving the media. You will find that under Klein, education has turned to TEST PREP. Under Klein, more money was wasted on corporations that could have went towards lowering class size. Under Klein, parent concerns go unheard. Under Klein, the Department of Education is flooded with lawyers instead of educators. Under Klein, appointments have been made that ended in disgrace. Under Klein, principals are allowed to abuse educators instead of collaborating with them. Under Klein, little children were forced to wait hours for their school bus in the middle of winter. Under Klein, budgets were cut in the middle of the school year forcing many after-school programs and tutoring sessions to close. And under Klein, principals are forcing teachers to pass students so they can get a bonus.
— Linda
36. November 11, 2008 7:20 pm
Let Klein go to Washington and let’s see how long it takes them to figure out that he knows nothing of building capacity in schools and school systems, that he lacks leadership, vision and compassion. For me, as a parent of a school aged child, he has made it perfectly clear that he has no interest in hearing the voices of the families and teachers he serves. If that is what the Obama camp wants, let them have it.
— Angie
37. November 11, 2008 9:14 pm
As a father of two middle school sons solely educated in the NYC public school system, past president of a PA, currently on the SLT and proud parent who gives school tours to perspective parents, I must speak out. I have heard the words of Mr Klein up close and personal when he speaks about education being partnership between the schools and the parents (as long as the parents abide by all his decisions). He has elevated high stakes testing to an unthinkable degree (the numbers don’t lie, do they Mr Bloomberg?). He had to receive a variance to become Chancellor as he hadn’t earned appropriate teaching credentials .. and feel free to sing the praises, Mr. Klein, of the public schools your children attend.
HE IS NOT AN EDUCATOR. HE IS A LAWYER and that doesn’t make him a bad person, it has made him a bad choice to head the Department of Education in New York. He has hired other lawyers to run his no bid, opaque spend fest, without reducing class size or investing directly into the classrooms. Parents will never have a seat at his decision making table. Oh did I metion, its all about testing, Testing and more TESTING not education, and the buckets of money (that would be far better spent for instruction) have been pissed away keeping score. Years from now, when this failed experiment perpetratred on New York City’s publically educated children is analyzed after having wasted our students’ precious years, will we be thanking the God of your choice because he left NY to run our nation’s education into the ground? President elect Obama, have mercy for the educational future of America’s children…DO NOT APPOINT KLEIN. Hire an educator, just because.
— Don
38. November 11, 2008 9:44 pm
I voted for Barak Obama because I believe tomorrow can be a better day and that real improvements can be made in this country if our leaders use common sense and seek input from a wide variety of views and experts.
Speaking as a teacher in the NYC public schools, if Obama picks Joel Klein as Secretary of Education I will feel my vote has been used in vain.
I’ve been teaching for six years now and like everyone, I know the system has flaws but the way the DOE has gone about solving them makes the cure far worse than the disease. Klein has no clue about education, has no idea what happens in the classroom and has shown no interest in learning and improving. His policies actually make it harder to teach and less likely my students will learn.
Klein’s obsession with flawed testing, inane and inaccurate school grades and wasteful outside reviews would be a disaster if pushed on the rest of the country.
— Alan
39. November 11, 2008 10:19 pm
“Education is NOT effective in a democratic process.” - Rick (#5)
I do not endorse the rest of that post, but those eight words are at the very center of the humungous problem facing American public education from K through 12. Voting for the members of local school boards is so strong a convention in the US, and has been for centuries, that the disconnect and inconsistency is never remarked on. As Rick points implies, and I would emphasize, the one and only area of public education in the US which is indisputably world-class is the work of the Land Grant Colleges - our magnificent network of State University systems. If there was some way of running the pre-post-secondary sector as the state universities are run (with public oversight by boards of regents happening at an appropriately large remove from the administrators of those institutions) we would have a chance to bring about the changes so desperately needed. Otherwise, I suspect that many more billions of dollars will go down many more drains, with very little to show by way of real change for real students.
Or perhaps we could follow Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice: We could empty our prisons in very short order if our K-12 public school system throughout the nation was based on having one teacher for every six students!
Worth a try, I would suggest.
— Old-timer
40. November 12, 2008 10:32 am
[This is Pro-Klein, but so craven and absurd I had to leave it in for the entertainment value.]
Of course Joel Klein has angered educators. He made some moves to introduce accountability and innovation to a malfunctioning system which is in some ways simply a tool of a Union whose last concern is actual education. I am a parent of a New York City public school student and Mr. Klein has at times disappointed me with moves he made. However, those cases were usually due to his concern for the all the children in NYC being in conflict with my parochial interests in my child’s school. In every case, there was and is never any doubt that Mr. Klein thinks of children first.
I wasn’t a Barack Obama supporter, but an appointment of Joel Klein as Secretary of Education would go a long way towards convincing me that our President-Elect has wisdom that is commensurate with his charisma.
— M. A.
41. November 12, 2008 12:29 pm
As a recent graduate of NYC’s public schools, I cannot even begin to relate just how poorly matched and unqualified Mr. Klein is for the country’s top education job. Mr. Klein was a fantastic antitrust lawyer, especially in the Microsoft cases. That is the only salvageable part of his legacy. He should beg for a Justice Dept. job, perhaps senior-level. Personally, I think that if a New Yorker should be Education Secretary, it should be Caroline Kennedy.
— NYCDOE Grad
42. November 12, 2008 12:31 pm
TO “M.A.:
“In every case, there was and is never any doubt that Mr. Klein thinks of children first.”
No one doubts whether Joel Klein thinks about children first. its just that other people are better suited candidates for the job.
— NYCDOE Grad
43. November 12, 2008 12:57 pm
I am African American Single Parent among many other things had enrolled my precious child inot a district three public school on the Upper West Side. We made it though 3 weeks in which i vowed that my children will NEVER be a product of a public school education. Between the Raggedy Classrooms , with No Textbooks a Fifth Grade Curriculum that is fit for Preschoolers a slick hustlin’ Absentee Principal and the SYSTEMATIC RACIST STRATEGY called THE GIFTED AND TALENTED program … I was done . It absolutely amazes me that Middle Aged Adults with a million dollar budget cannot NO will not pull it together to ensure that all children of America have a descent environment to send thier children.
— Karimu Abena Hamilton
44. November 20, 2008 6:45 am
It’d be interesting to know what about Mr. Klein would spark interest in an Obama administration to consider him for such a position. It’d interesting to know.
Mr. Klein has, at best, managed to be an unmitigated disaster. His may claim good intent if he so wishes, but his policies, management style and practices have been unproductive and harmful to the NYC DOE. Worse still, to cover his tracks of failure, he uses watered down assessment tests - the results of which are used as political instruments to perpetuate and justify what isn’t so as to reach for more political gains. He surrounds himself with consultants and businesses that have no pulse on what goes on in the classroom.
What is his position on class size, parent and teacher support and involvement, collective bargaining, salaries, curriculum design, textbook design and selection, and (Lord have mercy) special education.
Yes, special needs children. In Klein’s DOE, providing education to your special needs child is a torture of a thousand cuts and a million deaths. He has set up these painful processes that take parents through this maze of raw frustration. I know because I’m a parent of a SpEd child and a NYCDoE SpEd teacher.
President-elect Obama, mull this one over very carefully. If your expectation is unproductive angst and a sure failure of your education agenda, Klein is sure to deliver. I doubt if he’d fail.
— Emma
