Ten Cents Says the District Will Keep This Principal

It doesn't matter if she is being "investigated," in the end she will keep her job at that particular school.

It takes an act of God to remove a principal--REALLY remove them, not reassign them--from a school district:

An angry Brooklyn principal was caught on tape berating teachers after they trashed her on a crucial school survey, the Daily News has learned.

Public School 38 Principal Yolanda Ramirez is under investigation for threatening teachers after she received harsh reviews on last year's survey.

The News obtained a secret recording of Ramirez lashing out at her teachers for nearly 40 minutes, telling them their brutal answers could cost the school - and all of them.

"If you don't trust me, you air that in the school," Ramirez is heard saying in the tape from June 2009, just after she learned the survey's results.

"You don't put that out there for the public because if I were to begin putting out some of your dirty laundry, a lot of you wouldn't be here."

Lots of good stuff in this article. Gotham Schools presents the survey and its results.

The worst "punishment" a principal will receive is reassignment to another job; a teacher wrongfully fired loses EVERYTHING.

Video:

The Education Wars: Lousy Principals

When the blogger quoted in the previous post mentioned lousy principals in NYC, he linked to this article wherein a teacher and a principal completely screwed up with dealing with a student who marked on a desk--after all, the teacher should have simply asked the student to remove the graffiti--yet the principal doesn't admit to doing anything wrong:

Education officials say it was a "mistake," but the principal of a school where a 12-year-old girl was arrested and cuffed for doodling on her desk won't back down, the student's mom said Friday.

Alexa Gonzalez no longer faces a suspension for scribbling with a lime green marker, but principal Marilyn Grant told her mother, Moraima Camacho, that agency policy dictated that she calls the cops.

"[She said] that it wasn't their fault that it was something they had to do," Camacho said of her meeting with Grant at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills. "She doesn't consider it doodling."

The more principals screw up, the better they do.

She'll probably be named Principal of the Year.

The Education Wars: Oh, the Wonderful Days of Yore

when principals were actually once teachers who had taught for many, many years in the public education system and were just a few years from retirement (65--not 50--by the way) and who actually demonstrated a love for children and a deepseated passion for the profession of teaching.

Not anymore. Now we have principals who are barely out of college--and I mean traditional college age students--who teach only a couple of years if that before taking on a job which gives them absolute power over teachers. More often than not, they are people who can't teach, who don't know the law as it pertains to teachers' property rights, who don't know their asses from holes in the ground as in the case of my last principal who wrongfully fired me when she didn't one damned thing she was supposed to do by Nevada law or the union contract or FMLA.

Worst of all there is NO real accountability of principals. This is the real problem in public education, and it is the result of the simple fact principals are not closely supervised, and they need to be.

From this blog:

In the good old days for an educator to become a Principal it took many years of working their way up the ladder. First, the educator spent a minimum of ten years in the classroom, earning the respect of his or her peers. Then the educator spent a minimum of five years as an Assistant Principal, which included teaching one or two classes. Finally, the educator was offered a Principal position and while some principals might have had problems with their staff the vast majority of principals were respected by the staff due to their experience as a educator who rose through the ranks. However, than came the non-educators who came to dominate the upper levels of the DOE, lead by Chancellor Joel Klein who turned the New York City public school system upside down and not for the better.

Under the non-educator, Chancellor Joel Klein, we saw the formation of the "Leadership Academy". This program was a shortcut for people who had little or no experience in education to become a Principal, The problem was that these "newbie" principals have no classroom experience and had not worked in a school environment. The result has been a deterioration in principal quality. I previously, wrote about this here. It is these inexperienced "Leadership Academy" principals who have been told to run their school as they please that have caused the ATR crises and overcrowded "rubber rooms". However, the greatest problem is that these principals lack "common sense" as reported by Joanna Molloy of the New York Daily News and that brings me to the two dopey principals at JHS 190 and PS 52 who caused the City extreme embarrassment and ridicule. Remarkably, the Principal of JHS 190 actually defended her actions. Unbelievable! Even the DOE's mouthpiece, the New York Post had an editorial on these stupid principals. What will eventually happen to these principals? Probably nothing but a letter to their file. Yes, principals do get letters to their file. As for being reassigned to the "rubber room"? That's not happening.

The thing is, these principals get away with murder. No matter how flagrant their violations, they rest assured the district will ALWAYS support them (with taxpayer money) from the hearings clear through the Court of Appeals.

The public is totally unaware of the gross imbalance of power between teachers and administrators and how vulnerable teachers really are in this sick system.

The Education Wars

One of the major reasons there are serious problems in public schools is the fact principals are too damned young for the job; they have less classroom experience, and they are more likely to lack the maturity needed for the job, especially when dealing with older subordinates.

Some of them are trained in corporate America's ideas, but the real problem is they may know a little bit of pedagogy, can deal with the parents a bit, but they don't know squat about employment law, special education law, and how to deal with people they supervise. Employee relations are what get these kids in trouble, and these principals ARE kids--time was when principals weren't much under fifty and were most likely just a few years away from retirement, meaning well into their sixties. They used to get these jobs in order to increase their retirement benefits, but they had the maturity and wisdom to deal with their workers. Of course there were bad principals, but it isn't like it is now. It seems bad administrators are rife in public education.

They are younger than their predecessors, have less experience in the classroom and are, most often, responsible for far fewer students. But their salaries are higher and they have greater freedom over hiring and budgets, handling a host of responsibilities formerly shouldered by their supervisors.

...

Nearly 80 percent of the city’s principals were not on the job in 2001; Chad A. Altman, the 28-year-old head of a Bronx elementary school, was still studying public policy at Carnegie Mellon University when the mayor was petitioning Albany for school control. Indeed, 22 percent of today’s principals are under 40, compared with 6 percent in 2002; about 20 percent of them have less than five years of teaching experience, double the percentage in 2002.

This is scary shit. What the fuck is a 28-year-old doing in charge of a school? There is NO real classroom experience there. There is no experience and no maturity there. Age discrimination against older workers is rampant in education, and if principals sack you, they don't understand that lying under oath or committing perjury, even if it's an arbitration hearing, is not only a criminal offense, but they can have their licenses revoked. That's what happened to me in my case as my principal, who committed perjury at my hearing, was only 39 years old and had been a principal for five years. Many are not knowledgeable about special education law, so they try to cut corners on the law and threaten teachers if they don't get their way. These and other problems are exacerbated by the fact principals have almost unlimited power, since there is no real oversight by superintendents and school boards, neither of which is on site. And when these principals are in trouble when teachers complain, the higher ups do everything in their power to keep these unstable types in their jobs.

Why is the quality of principals so poor? Karen Horwitz over at NAPTA has a theory:

On a business level, Education has to be able to attract bright, competent idealists since idealists do not care about money and will work diligently for low salaries. If the truth comes out that being a teacher is not an opportunity to really help children, and that teachers do not have equal rights, idealists would avoid this profession. EducRAT$ would be left with only materialistic types. Given that materialist’s value money, only those with unmarketable skills consider teaching and do so out of desperation – it is a relatively easy degree to obtain and they will be hirable. Hence incompetent and unstable types will increasingly dominate a marketplace known for limited salaries, while idealists will use their marketable skills where they feel respected and can find meaning.

This explains the increase in teachers with odd behavior, including those having sex with their students and those who cannot spell, do math, or even possess common sense. This profession has opened the door to a different caliber of people in order to maintain the kind of army that EducRAT$ need to hold our schools hostage from parents. I suspect that the courts realize that allowing the truth about teachers being denied constitutional rights will diminish the quality of teachers even more and thus they need to keep the truth from the public. As the courts work to support the EducRAT$ that are intentionally dumbing down our schools, they are a huge part of the reason reform will not happen in our schools. Rather than face the fact that we have criminals running our schools, our courts are trying to plug the holes in the dam that these criminals are causing and advance an agenda of deceit to attract better teachers. Not only is this foolish, but it makes a case for what our forefathers taught us: if we stop becoming a nation of laws, our nation will self-destruct. Since, as it pertains to teachers, our courts legislate from the bench rather than follow the existing laws, they remove the checks and balances against the criminals running our schools, while euthanizing the only governmental watchdog.

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Since principals are usually promoted from within, school districts have a much worse pool from which to select. Currently there is a shortage of principals nationwide, and few but the most unscrupulous, unethical, or just plain stupid people apply. The really good ones have tended to take early retirement.