Marc Epstein is an experienced history teacher in New York City whose school–Jamaica High School–was closed as part of the Bloomberg reform plans. Marc holds a Ph.D. In Japanese history, but he is now part of the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool, a large number of teachers whoever schools were closed. The teachers now roam the system, assigned for a week at one school, then another, their skills, knowledge, and experience completely discarded.
In this article, Marc asks the unavoidable question, what happens when the reformers have won? What changes after they have abolished unions, tenure, and the public control of public education? There are many ways to write this scenario. This is Marc’s.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Perhaps the end game is just what it seems: reduce costs and give over public monies to private charters with little care for quality. That’s the MO everywhere else in the privatization scheme, so why expect it to be different in this case?
The decline in the standard of living of 90 percent of the people means an across the board decline in the quality of services. Mediocre education will be a big part of that story. The only question left is what will it cost.
The top 10 percent of the nation is funding efforts to capture congress to meet their needs, to capture state legislatures for the same reason, to take control of the courts….so why not the schools?
If teachers’ unions don’t form an alliance with other unions outside education to revive an alternative to oligarchy, we will get….oligarchy. Their kids will go to Fieldston and other expensive private schools…and to Harvard. Everyone else’s kids will just have to fend for themselves in a Dickensian world on steroids. You know, like what most kids around the world do right now.
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I think it might be too late. It seems we already have an oligarchy.
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I am honored to say that I know Marc, and I have to express my opinion that using him to bounce from one school to another acting as a substitute teacher is a complete waste of resources and talent. Marc is one of many HUMILIATED EDUCATORS who wait anxiously for the Bloomberg era to end, and for the reformers to be sent packing. Slowly but surely even the President of the United States who initially swallowed the big lie,are starting to recognize that selected few have become enormously wealthy over the past decade. What must be called a decade of educational disaster must be placed doorsteps of the reformers mansions. God bless Diane and Marc and the thousands of teachers working night and day to provide children with the education they so rightly deserve.
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Once unions are gone and the teaching profession has been decimated, the erstwhile “reformers” will be free to bow to the fact that high stakes student tests are not an accurate measure of teacher “value.”
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It’s all about money.
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They aren’t actually interested in improvements. They are interested in profits. When it fails, they will just say “whoopsie” and fly away to their new vacation home in Fiji to think of new ways to profit.
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One of the many reasons I did not vote for the ’05 and subsequent contract was because of the ATR provision Randi agreed to along with other givebacks. That contract not only weakened teachers, but also the union as a whole. And it went on to serve as a blueprint for other contracts around the country. When you say an experienced teacher has no worth, or as Klein put it, “undesirable veteran teachers”, it sends a terrible message to all who want to enter the field. Randi and the UFT never responded to this even after the NYTimes printed it:
Klein Halts Plan to Make Schools Take Unassigned Teachers
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By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: September 2, 2006
On the eve of the new academic year, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein abruptly scrapped plans to impose a hiring freeze that would have forced principals to fill any last vacancies with unassigned teachers already in the system.
Mr. Klein said yesterday that it was more important for principals to choose their own staff than it was for the city to place potentially undesirable veteran teachers who must stay on the payroll even if no school offers them a position.
The decision to lift the freeze, just hours before it was to begin, was aimed at bolstering Mr. Klein’s position in a labor dispute over 44 unassigned assistant principals. To circumvent provisions in their contract that would force the assistant principals on principals who do not want them, Mr. Klein said he would created unneeded jobs for them, wasting as much as $5.2 million.
His stance on teachers once again allowed Mr. Klein to portray himself as a champion of autonomy and authority for principals.
City education officials said they believed most of the unassigned teachers would find jobs in the system. But Mr. Klein’s move raised at least a possibility that the city could be forced to pay the salaries of as many as 1,500 unassigned teachers, at a cost of nearly $100 million.
Officials said that 1,001 veteran teachers had yet to find positions and that about 500 newly hired teachers were also awaiting assignments.
Mr. Klein said unassigned teachers would be used as substitutes. “We will assign them to permanent substitute basis,” he said. “That may have some cost implications, but it’s costlier, I believe, to force individuals on a school.”
The number of teaching vacancies fluctuates, but has ranged from about 400 to 800 recently, ahead of the opening of school on Tuesday, said Elizabeth Arons, the system’s chief executive for human resources. Last year, the system carried 200 to 250 teachers without regular assignments on its payroll.
The city and the principals’ union — which represents both principals and assistant principals — are locked in a bitter contract dispute, and Mr. Klein has said that the seniority provisions are a major impediment. The provisions allow veteran assistant principals without assignments to bump junior colleagues who are not permanently appointed, potentially upending efforts by principals to build cohesive teams.
The union, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, said management failures by the chancellor’s office, rather than the contract, were the reason the 44 assistant principals did not have jobs.
Last year, the teachers’ union agreed to relinquish similar bumping rights in exchange for a transfer system that allows teachers to apply for openings citywide. Mr. Klein said yesterday that those changes were among the most important of his tenure because principals for the first time “have the authority to hire people who are aligned with their vision, their mission.”
Jill S. Levy, the president of the supervisors’ union, said she was willing to negotiate changes but has accused Mr. Klein of blaming the contract for his own failures. The union said 37 of the 44 vacancies were caused by the administration’s closing or downsizing schools.
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The end game is the conversion of a public institution with a commercial industry.
The end of America as a democratic nation and a return to feudalism.
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Edit — “into a commercial industry”
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Some commenters have already alluded to this, but the only way to understand this is to think like a businessman: What you tell your potential investors, customers and regulators doesn’t have to be rational, sensible or even true. It just has to be convincing enough to get what you want.
In the case of changing public policy, it’s even easier than marketing a good or service, because you don’t even have to trick people who have a stake in the outcome. You only have to convince politicians, who are not typically bright or informed and particularly susceptible to the lure of power and influence (’cause that’s who runs for office).
When viewed through that lens, it all begins to make that much more sense. Most corporate ed reformers probably are fully aware that they can’t do education better or even cheaper than the public schools are doing it now. But by the time it becomes obvious to the public, the lies will have accomplished their purpose and there will be no going back.
I’ll use a local example. When Wal-Mart first came to my small town, they came with the promise of jobs and lower-cost merchandise and used that to convince our local politicians to give them cheap land, TIF deals and waived zoning regulations. After they had been in town for a while, it became obvious that the jobs paid so little that nobody really wanted them anyway, the goods were cheap, but junky and the service and selection were reduced to the point that there were lots of things you couldn’t or just didn’t want to buy there. But by that time, many of the local businesses were gone and were never coming back, so you had no choice but to buy what Wal-Mart offered, which frees Wal-Mart up to jerk their employees around even more, provide even junkier merchandise and even lower levels of service.
This is what they’re doing to education, except instead of being partially financed by public dollars, as was our Wal-Mart, these operations will be fully funded by tax dollars and virtually risk-free to the investors.
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damn, dave.
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That is a great line “It has to be convincing enough to fool you to go along with them.” think about how weak their arguments are and what does that mean for the general public? Not very good. We have to remember that the latest polling shows that only 15% of the public believes in evolution. Not very good for a society which has to deal with science, reality, to go ahead.
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Your post reminds me of a professional development we had on UDL, Universal Design for Learning which is replacing much of self-contained special education. As with all of these catch-all reforms, some of them are positive. Some special education students do much better when main-streamed with the right supports for teachers, but some are disastrous. when she asked for comments about UDL I said it reminded me of the closing of all the mental hospitals in the 1970’s. I told her my husband was in charge of a homeless shelter which had become the place where the mentally ill now congregate without the necessary funding and support, and I feared the same for UDL.
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Marc and Jfraad make a really important point about recognizing that nothing is a “silver bullet and that there are tradeoffs with changes. Jfraad wrote, ” Some special education students do much better when main-streamed with the right supports for teachers, but some are disastrous.
Marc wrote, “The movement to remove mental patients from the horrors of state hospitals in the ’70s and place them in group homes echoes in the arguments against our public schools and the need to “deinstitutionalize” students, moving them into charter schools. However, the litany of abuses documented in the group homes by the Times should give anyone who thinks that the smashing of one troubled institution and replacing it with another is the magic bullet.”
Some state hospitals were closed because they were shameful, disaster areas. But because something is new does not mean it is better. Just allowing people to create group homes does not guarantee that they will be great places.
In a similar vein, some of the new schools created twenty years ago in Harlem’s District 4, when some large schools were closed, were terrific (like Central Park East). Some were not. Some of the Pilot Schools created by district teachers in Boston were great, others not. Starting over does not guarantee success. It’s an opportunity, but not a guarantee.
Is it possible to retain the best of existing programs,and use their expertise to help struggling programs? Is it possible to empower effective, visionary educators who have ideas about new, potentially better approaches (as the Pilot Schools in Boston and LA have done, and as some of the nation’s charter laws have done)?
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Gates, Broad et al are such a joke. They suggest using modern methods for their personal finances, life and businesses, yet, they suggest going back to the dark ages for our children and teachers. Are they schizophrenic? It looks like it to me. Perhaps they require institutionalization. Maybe even the rubber room or maybe they need to join the military and be put into combat and see what they say then. They are getting just what they want destruction for their control of the pieces. However, maybe the LAUSD elections and the new superintendent in San Diego are turning points. Let us hope so and try to make it a fact.
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Just wait. Half of the charter folks will get bored or burned out (or busted) and the other half will discover one size does not fit all and eventually throw in the towel.
Look at the percentage of small business start ups that fail. Why should charters be any different? And the rest…
The only charters that survive will be the McCharters. Fast food education. Wendy’s burgers and Starbucks everything are the same shape and taste everywhere you go. Even BK stopped advertising “Have it your way” differentiated burgers because it was too time consuming. So why should math or reading be any different? Looks easy from the outside.
So – serve up a menu of common core standards (least of the concerns), purchase and publish teacher proof units, hire teach for awhilers and give them the script, put uniforms on the kids, and test, test, test.
In the meantime – the next generation of truly talented professional teachers won’t be able to find a job and the next generation of educational leaders will have drunk the quick fix and test kool aid.
Still – the privatization and charter movement will continue unless something in the public sector changes. Taxes are high. People are out of work and don’t get skyrocketing public pension costs etc. And too many Americans have forgotten that we all pay for schools, parks, roads, bridges, and the future whether you use them or not.
Reform endgame? The overused metaphor of the perfect storm.
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Here’s a few clues —
Chomsky: The Corporate Assault on Public Education
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