The Education Wars IV--Killing Off Traditional Public High Schools

The war against public education continues unabated, and New York City Public Schools is the guinea pig in the effort to destroy public schools nationally.

There is no longer any pretense on what Mayor Michael Bloomberg nd Chancellor Joel Klein wants to do with the large traditional high schools in New York City. They have targeted them for extermination and use the space for small and possible charter schools. In turn, there will be hundreds of additional ATRs added to the ATR ranks, many of them senior teachers as the replacement schools only hire the young, cheap, and nontenured teachers. The media rags, the New York Post & Daily News will rant about the over 200 million dollars the DOE must pay for the over 2,000 ATRs and demand a time limit. Meanwhile, our union will remain defensive and hunker down and hope the bad press will go away.

What about the children? Bloomberg & Klein do not care about the children. For them it is "education on the cheap" and "blame the teacher" for the administrative mismanagement of the schools. Since I am familiar with Queens, let's see how Tweed caused this mess in the first place and the falling of the dominoes associated with the closing of the large traditional high schools.

Pretty soon there will be no real teachers' unions. They are already seriously compromised.