If You're a Teacher and You Dare Challenge

anything your principal asks or tries to force you to do, you can lose your job, but if you're the Chancellor of the New York City public school system, you are a law unto yourself, and you can even defy a court order:

On Friday, Judge Joan Lobis of the New York State Supreme Court nullified Chancellor Klein's decisions to close 19 middle and high schools in New York City, ruling that his actions were illegal.

This court's judgement was an important step forward for the rule of law. It was also a confirmation of the necessity for a genuine public process to inform and improve arbitrary and rash decision-making at the NYC Department of Education.

Klein's proposals to close these schools has been met with tremendous protest from thousands of parents and teachers alike, because of the devastating effect on their children, their communities, and the public school system as a whole.

...

Predictably, the Chancellor disagreed. As quoted in the NY Times, he said, "I think the process was robust...We literally met with thousands of people who expressed their views. We heard them, and in the end, we disagreed."

Despite the court decision, Klein said that none of the schools originally slated for closure would accept students, and he would send out high school admissions letters over the weekend, with none of these schools included.

Even those 8500 students who had listed these schools as one of their top choices would be assigned other schools, and would instead receive a letter, "stating that, should the schools remain open, they may select one of them."

By this action, the Chancellor signalled that he intends to close these schools down regardless, by starving them of students.

I'm sure "Democrats" Duncan and Obama are cheering this on.

Education is Supposed to be About the Kids,

but does anybody seriously believe anything will happen when the kids DO speak out?

The story:

The Bloomberg-Klein machine that runs, and is destroying, the New York City public school system has made some powerful enemies, including the students from University Heights High School in the Bronx. These teenagers may not prevent New York City Mayor Moneybags and School Chancellor King Klein from moving their school off of the Bronx Community College campus and exiling it to the south Bronx, but in their struggle to save the school, they have learned how to be organizers and agents for change. Bloomberg, Klein, and their wealthy friends better watch out. Their attack on this school has provided these students with the best education they could possibly receive and has have helped to create a new generation committed to the struggle for social justice.

Moneybags and King Klein think the fight is over, but to paraphrase the immortal words of American Naval hero John Paul Jones, the student of University Heights High School "have just begun to fight." The students are exploring the possibility of getting a court injunction against the move. They claim that they and their parents selected this school because of its affiliation with a college and that Bloomberg, Klein, the Department of Education, and BCC are violating that contract.

On Tuesday over 240 University Heights High School students and about 20 parents attended DOE a meeting in Staten Island that was held there to make it difficult for the students to mobilize and attend. The teachers' union supplied them with a bus and a community organization supplied two smaller buses to transport people. The rest of the students traveled to the hearing with their teacher, Pablo Muriel, by subway, ferry, and a long walk up to the school. Many of the students spoke eloquently, and King Klein was forced to acknowledge their presence.

Pablo challenged Klein, who that morning in a radio interview claimed to be concerned about underperforming schools serving minorities communities. He wanted to know why they were effectively destroying a minority school that had such a strong track record and had a student body that was willing to travel for hours to defend their school. Pablo demanded that the Panel for Educational Policy vote "no" on the move and send a message to students that the democratic process works.

The Education Wars: So What About Those Unions?

In NYC at least, and actually all over the country, they can't be trusted to do what is right by teachers and will cut deals with the districts:

It's not enough that the city hires grad students, calls them "teachers" the first year on the job, and uses them to kill tenure and push veteran members out of their jobs. The UFT accepted that. It talks a good game, but it's positioning itself beautifully: when we lose tenure and the ATRs are all fired, they can claim it's not their fault.

And it's not enough that know-nothing administrators — sometimes unsuccessful, unmotivated, or unlicensed teachers themselves — get absurd freedoms to evaluate us. The UFT accepted that, too, and even gave up the right to grieve the truly wicked stuff.

And it's also not enough that the Steve Brills, Nick Kristofs and so many others of the capitulating press continue to heckle from the sidelines, passing off the EdDeform press releases as if they were real news. The UFT buys into the same jargon just as much as the press. It took them way too long to reject the profound deception of the school report cards and faulty test data.

Now the UFT has signed on big time to the new Gates project on teacher evaluation.

The Gateses don't know ONE thing about teaching, and THEY are going to be trusted with knowing how to evaluate teachers?

This is all about buying off public opinion and destroying public services for private profit.

The New York Times continues to spew anti-teacher bullshit talking points right out of Broad or Gates that the "problem" in education is with the shitty teachers, especially those who cost too much in pensions and salaries.

It's a sickening article, by the way:

Around the country, education researchers were beginning to address similar questions. The testing mandates in No Child Left Behind had generated a sea of data, and researchers were now able to parse student achievement in ways they never had before. A new generation of economists devised statistical methods to measure the “value added” to a student’s performance by almost every factor imaginable: class size versus per-pupil funding versus curriculum. When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.

This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year.

That belief has spawned a nationwide movement to improve the quality of the teaching corps by firing the bad teachers and hiring better ones. “Creating a New Teaching Profession,” a new collection of academic papers, politely calls this idea “deselection”; Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, put it more bluntly when he gave a talk in Manhattan recently. “If we don’t change the personnel,” he said, “all we’re doing is changing the chairs.”

The reformers are also trying to create incentives to bring what Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, calls a “different caliber of person” into the profession. Rhee has proposed giving cash bonuses to those teachers whose students learn the most, as measured by factors that include standardized tests — and firing those who don’t measure up. Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year. (The average pay for a teacher in Washington is now $65,000.) A new charter school in New York City called the Equity Project offers starting salaries of $125,000. “Merit pay,” a once-obscure free-market notion of handing cash bonuses to the best teachers, has lately become a litmus test for seriousness about improving schools. The Obama administration’s education department has embraced merit pay; the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which finances experimental merit-pay programs across the country, rose from $97 million to $400 million this year. And states interested in competing for a piece of the $4.3 billion discretionary fund called the Race to the Top were required to change their laws to give principals and superintendents the right to judge teachers based on their students’ academic performance.

Yeah, if more teachers are treated like shit, more people will go into this field. There are already TOO MANY PEOPLE IN EDUCATION, dumbasses, and that's why they are treated like absolute shit.

By the way, the "problems" in education aren't with the teachers; there are problems outside of public education's control, and the REAL problem inside schools is with administrators.

Don't expect these billionaires to know jack shit about it.

The Education Wars: BloomKlein's War Against Teachers

If NYC teachers lose their job protections, NO teacher in the United States is safe from capricious or frivolous firings, as what yours truly went through:

Citing a Post story about a rogue Queens teacher who manages his real-estate empire from a Department of Education "rubber room," schools chief Joel Klein pleaded with lawmakers yesterday to ease limits on the firing of educators.

The chancellor, in Albany to testify against proposed budget cuts, said the "absurd" restrictions on firing teachers devoured precious resources at a time when the city can least afford it.

"On Sunday, the New York Post ran a front-page story about a teacher who has been reassigned to the rubber room for more than seven years," Klein said.


"In the event of layoffs, I wouldn't be able to get rid of this teacher. Instead, I'd be forced to lay off other teachers so this reassigned teacher can continue showing up each day to a rubber room," Klein said.

Teachers deemed unfit for classrooms are sent to such "reassignment centers" while the city crawls through the lengthy termination process.

Dishonesty by Klein, as usual. This isn't about the rare bad egg but about getting rid of older, more expensive teachers and replacing them with young cheapies who last only two or three years at most.

The Education Wars: Will the UFT Succeed?

The United Federation of Teachers in NYC is suing to block closure of 19 schools. These closures are part of BloomKlein's jihad against the city's public education system.

Snip:

The city's teachers union will file a lawsuit Monday in a bid to block the closure of 19 schools - ramping up its already antagonistic relationship with City Hall.

The United Federation of Teachers lawsuit accuses the city of violating the state mayoral control law by failing to account for the impact of the shutdowns on the community.

Advocates complained last week that the Education Department did not give proper notice about replacement schools before the Panel for Educational Policy voted Wednesday to approve the closures.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was in talks about joining the lawsuit, sources said. NAACP officials refused to comment yesterday.

The Education Wars: NYC School Closures

Are New Yorkers finally realizing just how bad BloomKlein are?

The Education Wars: School Closures

A city panel has approved of 19 school closures in NYC for "poor" performance.

The Education Wars: Do New York Teachers, Students, and Parents

live in a police state? It sure seems like it. From the Norm's Notes blog:

Last Thursday afternoon, January 21, on E. 79 St., across from the mayor’s mansion, parents, students and teachers peacefully protested against the Bloomberg Administration’s proposals to force mass closings of public schools and their takeover by charter schools. They were exercising their constitutional right under the First Amendment to publicly demand that these policies that undermine the public school system and deprive their children of an adequate education be stopped.

Meanwhile, a reporter on the scene caught on videotape the actions of police who were taking photographs of the protesters from the roof and inside a private school across the street. In 1985, the federal court ruled that it is illegal and a violation of civil rights for the New York City police to take photos of protesters, unless they have cause to believe that a crime may be committed. The city signed a consent agreement that year, restricting police surveillance according to these rules, called the Handschu Guidelines. In the case of this peaceful protest, there was no such cause. The video is available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbNRt-5OZ68

The protesters are asking for a full explanation as to why the pictures were taken and how the police plan to use the photos. The protestors also want to know whether any videotaping of them was done. Finally, they are considering filing a complaint with Judge Charles S. Haight Jr., the federal judge who has continuing jurisdiction over the enforcement of the Handschu Guidelines.

More

The press conference asking some questions:

Part 1

Part 2


Teachers and those concerned about education really have NO rights.



Meanwhile, BloomKlein are doing a great job with the city's schools--NOT. From the NY Teachers.net board:

We all know BloomKlein does what it wants and feels no need to
justify anything.

I worked in a large (1600 kids in an 800 capacity building) middle
school. We always did ok, stayed off SURR and out of corrective
action till 2001. Then we were in corrective action. Large classes
were our biggest problem- I had 36 kids on year, 38 in another. The
principal was old school and knew little about instruction but
picked admins who did. The school was always quiet and under
control. Most of the teachers were good. You never saw kids in the
hallway, excessive rowdiness, graffiti.

Long story short, we were "restructured" on a whim in 2004. We were
not SURR. Ironically, class size became even bigger because
classrooms became offices. We did ok at my school but the two new
schools were an unmitigaged disaster- kids having sex in stairwells
(not from my school) vandalizing, one kid took a crap in the
hallway. The kids who went through those two new schools got
totally screwed because the admins and teachers could not control
the building. These things did not happen when we were one large
school. I would imagine that it was also cheaper to run a large
school with one principal and 3-4 APs vs. 3 principals and 5-6 APs.
After five years, one of the schools is STILL a mess and the other
is better, but only marginally. Turnover in both schools is very
high and those teachers regularly seek jobs with us (and kudos to
my principal who will take experienced teachers- a few are
returnees from pre-restructure.)

As others have said, Bloomberg wants to put charters in. That's the
rumor in my school now, that we will get rid of our 5th grade and
allow a charter. He also needs to place his Principal Academy
people. Two of the four principals who have gone through the other
schools in my building are/were from the PA and both are abysmal.

The Education Wars: The Sidewalks of New York

We certainly can't have the peasants spoil the view:

The protesters want to march back and forth along both sides of 79th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, in single file, on Jan. 21, from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Mr. Bloomberg lives on the north side of the street. While the New York City police have frequently turned down permits to protest on the north side, in 2003, they allowed a group protesting the closure of firehouses to march on both sides.

The plaintiffs decided to press the issue as a civil rights matter. The suit, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District, argues that just as protesters are able to march outside Gracie Mansion, where mayors normally live, so too should they be able to protest outside Mr. Bloomberg’s house, where he conducts political activities like receptions and fund-raisers.

On Tuesday, the Police Department offered a compromise: the protest could proceed on the south side of 79th street, Ms. Cavanagh said. The plaintiffs turned down the offer, saying the city should not be able to pick who protests on the north side.

The Education Wars II: The Sickening Joel Klein

In this link, NYC Chancellor and Bloomberg hack Joel Klein tries to make excuses for charter schools, which are being peddled in order to dismantle public education entirely.

It's a scary, barf-inducing interview.

The Education Wars II: NYC Schools

Some people who know the horrid situation in NYC schools have put together a book which can either be ordered on demand through Lulu or else one can read the entire book in a free download here.

A snip from one of the essays:

The administration’s insistence on ignoring the views of parents and community
members has gone hand-in-hand with an accelerating attack on the whole notion of
the neighborhood public school—which often anchors communities, particularly in
low-income neighborhoods. The DOE’s much-vaunted small-school initiative,
subsidized by private money, flooded comprehensive neighborhood high schools
with the high-needs students that the small schools had been allowed to
exclude—including high percentages of English Language Learners and students
with disabilities. In the few new high schools built, the administration refused
to allow preference for admissions to neighborhood children.40 When the DOE
centralized admissions for elementary schools, which had previously been controlled
by the individual districts, families of pre-Kindergarten students were obliged
to re-apply to Kindergarten at their schools.41 In the spring of 2009, the
administration put hundreds of Kindergarten students on waiting lists for their
zoned neighborhood schools.42 These policies appeared designed to undermine
the support of neighborhood residents—and their elected officials—for their
local public schools, further easing the administration’s plans to charterize and
privatize the system.

The chancellor continually promoted the success of charter schools, which were
given space in public school buildings, causing a loss of classrooms for the
traditional public schools that were forced to share their space. Yet these charter
schools were provided with the ability to cap enrollment and class size at low
levels—a privilege not accorded traditional public schools, who were essentially
denied this opportunity by the administration’s refusal to use the state funds that
had been allocated for class size reduction according to their intended function.43
The chancellor’s unrestrained praise for charter schools and his comparative
contempt for traditional public schools was bizarre in light of the fact that he
had been put in charge of improving the public schools; if charter schools were
indeed more successful, that surely resulted from his own failure of leadership.

These policies, and the widening inequities that have resulted, have led to profound
dissatisfaction among many parents and educators alike. A 2008 survey by the
United Federation of Teachers revealed that 85 percent of New York City public
school teachers believe that Chancellor Klein and the Department of Education
had failed to provide them with the resources and supports they need to succeed.
Similarly, 85 percent said that the chancellor’s emphasis on testing had failed to
improve education in their schools.44 In a Quinnipiac poll taken in March 2009,
New York City public school parents disapproved of Mayor Bloomberg’s
handling of education by 54 to 41 percent.45 The year before, in another poll,
over 70 percent of parents identified class size reduction as the most important
reform, and over 80 percent said that problems of overcrowding and/or excessive
class sizes had remained the same or worsened over the last few years.46 A majority
of parents felt that the overwhelming emphasis on standardized testing had
caused too much stress for their children, and many said that the school system
was being run like a business rather than an educational enterprise. They also
believed that the DOE had mismanaged finances and had embarked on too
many confusing reorganizations.

The Education Wars II

Stephen Brill, who wrote a hit piece on public education teachers for the New Yorker regarding NYC's infamous "rubber rooms," doesn't know what in the hell he is talking about.

No reporter has a clue what REALLY goes on with teachers who go through these kangaroo hearings since they are usually conducted in secret.

However, being re-assigned to a “rubber room” is often as simple as the Principal doesn’t want you, and doesn't want to train you or assign you to a class that is appropriate for you. The Principal can pick up the telephone or open his/her email, and let someone know at the NYC BOE that teacher X stole something, scrubbed test scores or harmed a child, and need not have any evidence or proof. The teacher is not informed of the allegation until the Gotcha Squad has “proven” the allegation, and he/she is on the subway, in a bus, or is driving to a TRC. Often, the employee does not know even then why he/she is going away from the students who are waiting in the school. The NYC BOE would like to get rid of the Union protection and fire the individual on the spot, but the UFT stops the firing of any tenured employee, and gives the employee a chance to gather evidence and prove his or her innocence. The UFT also provides, as I wrote above, some of the best lawyers in town, free of charge to its members for 3020-a hearings.

But the NYC BOE is not interested in finding the “right” classroom for an employee, and does not want people who have a conscience, are courageous, are too experienced, lose a loved one and must attend funerals, gets sick or has operations, or in any way impedes the business of education. Notice I did not say “educating.”

But even this blogger doesn't have it right:

A tenured teacher accused of incompetence or misconduct not only has Union protection from being fired until the charges against him or her are "proven" by a preponderance of evidence, but the teacher also gets free legal representation from NYS United Teachers, or NYSUT, based in Latham New York. Most of these Attorneys are the best in the business, they know the rather unusual procedures followed at the arbitration hearings, they know the arbitrators, they care about their teacher-clients, and do thorough jobs.

The charges by school districts, my friend, are usually made up. Evidently she hasn't heard how unions collude with administration, and how the school districts commit all kinds of criminal acts, including perjury, fraud, bribery, witness tampering, and all kinds of other acts, which if committed by you or me would be grounds to throw us in prison. She evidently hasn't heard the hearing officers are typically in the tank for districts. She makes lots of good points, but she hasn't actually been THROUGH these jokes of "due process." She has observed, but she hasn't been a target. In the next paragraph, however, she alludes to the core problem in public education and why there needs to be huge reform of the system.

The problem with public education in a nutshell is because of the way school districts are set up, principals, unlike managers in private sector jobs, are NOT closely supervised. Their "supervisors" are typically clear across town and are usually clueless as to what is going on. The principals, drunk with power with the knowledge they will NEVER be held accountable for their actions, for they have the school district's vast legal apparatus and oodles of taxpayer money from which to feed in case they DO get into trouble, abuse teachers who get in their way, such as yours truly. Then it's over for the teacher--ALWAYS--even if the teacher "wins" a kangaroo hearing. The administrators, unless caught in bed with students, go on to bigger and better things. No wonder the public education system has been fucked up for years.