Marc Epstein, a teacher for many years at Jamaica High School (targeted for closure) here describes the Bloomberg years in New York City public schools and how difficult it will be to unravel the changes he imposed:
Bloomberg’s School Disaster
When Mayor-elect de Blasio announced Carmen Farina as his choice for schools chancellor and pointedly added that she was an educator, a metaphorical puff of white smoke appeared on the horizon for most of the city’s 75,000 schoolteachers.
That’s because after a succession of four chancellors over the past 13 years who had no professional education experience, it was if the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy had finally come to an end with Farina’s succession.
The hope is that Farina, with 40 years of experience that includes two decades in the classroom and another two decades holding administrative positions as principal, district superintendent, and deputy chancellor, has a fair idea of what has gone on in the school system over the past 12 years of mayoral control.
But there is also a fair amount of anxiety. The fear is that political forces outside of the school system reaching as far as the White House have a vested interest in seeing to it that unraveling public education continues unabated.
There’s even word from Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan helped put the kibosh on one of the candidates on de Blasio’s short list for chancellor.
Within hours of the Farina appointment the editorialists began espousing their anti anti-Bloomberg position. Anyone who might seek to undo Bloomberg’s accomplishments is a regressive Neanderthal according to the Wall Street Journal, Daily News, and New York Post.
Should Farina maintain the status quo, the fate of public education in New York City will be sealed. What’s more, she will enjoy the accolades of the media, a media that has become heavily invested, both figuratively and literally, in the narrative put forth by Michael Bloomberg about business solutions and data driven decision-making.
That’s because Bloomberg, with his vast wealth intact, despite having spent more than $600 million dollars on his mayoralty, will continue to shape the narrative with commissioned dynastic histories and the use of his own news empire.
In addition, Rupert Murdoch and his Newscorp, which includes the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, are heavily invested in the “education revolution.” Murdoch boasts former chancellor Joel Klein as his vice-president in charge of education operations too.
So if this to be the party line, and Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Farina want to begin undoing the damage of the past 12 years, they would do well to expose the train wreck that has become the New York City school system under Michael Bloomberg sooner rather than later.
For the past 12 years New Yorkers have been treated to a steady drumbeat over the airwaves and in print that posits that Mike Bloomberg was able to housebreak an unresponsive, unmanageable, sclerotic public school system and head it in the right direction.
He accomplished this by taking on the teachers union, introducing business-tested management techniques, creating a new kind of school principal purposefully chosen with little classroom experience, but trained in these business techniques, reconfiguring the school districts, closing failed schools and creating hundreds of new schools that offer a wide variety of school choices to parents who could shop schools to their heart’s content.
The numbers would determine all decision-making on the macro and micro level, because numbers don’t lie. Principals were given control over their budgets so they could run a school unencumbered for the first time.
And, every editorial page, intellectual journal, and radio wordsmith, bought Bloomberg’s spiel hook, line, and sinker. They’ve bought it despite irrefutable reports of poor student test performance, record numbers of students entering college unprepared, and an on-time graduation rate of 3% at New York’s community colleges. What’s more, they celebrate a budgeting system that gives the principals an incentive to hire younger, cheaper, inexperienced teachers, over more senior teachers that Bloomberg wants pushed out of the system.
The simple truth of the matter is that all of Bloomberg’s claims are counterintuitive. Numbers were manipulated in the service of his prejudices and ideology. The multiple reconfigurations of the state’s largest department actually destroyed institutional memory, and hence accountability.
State education laws regarding services are flouted with impunity. English language learners and more advanced ESL students are denied mandated instruction. The “litigate and be damned” attitude has defined the operatives at the Tweed Courthouse.
The only ones held culpable in Bloomberg’s education universe were the average teachers, and that was good enough for the pundits and Wall Street. But culpability should never be confused with accountability!
A young schoolgirl drowns on an improperly chaperoned field trip and the assistant principal who was supposed to go on the trip is let off the hook because he was busy with the school budget. Oh, there were no parental consent slips either.
Before Bloomberg, heads would have rolled possibly as high up as the chancellor, but for Joel Klein it was just another day at the beach.
A student becomes ill but is left unattended because there is no nurse in the building and the Dean’s office was instructed not to call 911 for fear that an emergency call would damage the school’s safety record being monitored in the new data driven accountability system.
It turns out the student suffered a stroke and was left permanently impaired. Her name disappeared from the enrollment list, and it was only because a lawsuit was brought against the city, and the illegal memo was leaked to the Daily News by someone in the school that the story saw the light of day.
An investigation was conducted. The chancellor promised a full report. But in Bloomberg’s universe, time heals all wounds. Nobody was held to account or lost their job. No report assigning responsibility was issued, and the city quietly settled the lawsuit.
Two weeks ago science experiment went terribly awry. All the facts aren’t in, but it appears all sorts of safety regulations were ignored.
But that’s to be expected when you have supervisors who haven’t been seasoned by years of experience or are petrified by honest reporting because they fear that bad news could lead to the demise of their school.
This has become a school system that simply can’t handle the truth. I’ve been writing about the schools for a decade, and for the first time my name has been sent to a conflicts of interest board about the content of my writing.
It’s not because I’ve become rich doing it, mind you. It’s because a thuggish ethos has became part of the DNA of the New York City schools and you speak your mind at your peril. Learning, inquiry, and dissent are being systematically flensed from the classroom and the schoolhouse in much the same manner it was done in totalitarian societies.
The net result is that the school system that Mayor de Blasio inherited is not a “mixed bag” of good innovations and things that need tinkering with, but a $25 billion dollar a year city department that is in a death spiral.
Large bureaucracies fight their battles with the tools they are given. Time and again history demonstrates that a bureaucracy can be bent to the will of the political forces running them in ways that are inimical to its mission and its very existence.
During the Korean War it seems that the generals running the war had far less intelligence capabilities at their disposal than they had when they were fighting WW II.
So what did they do?
An expert in army intelligence during this period once told me, “they fought the war they had with the tools that they were given. That’s the nature of bureaucratic organizations.”
Which brings me back to the New York City school system. My belief is that the breakdown in accountability, the widespread dissemination of doctored statistics, and the predisposition to hold the classroom teacher responsible for everything that has gone wrong in the schools has deeply compromised institutional memory. And without institutional memory, a bureaucracy of this breadth is doomed.
As a consequence, nothing short of a South African post-apartheid style commission that examines the past decade of mayoral control will suffice.
This is imperative because a well-funded chorus of writers and journalists continue to churn out a hagiography of the Bloomberg era, and portray it as a Golden Age of public education when all the evidence indicates that there has been no progress at great expense to the children and taxpayers of New York.
It should be composed on one level of well known people whose impartiality is beyond reproach and include representatives of all segments of the teaching, clerical, and administrative pool.
If the past 12 years are simply papered over, and Bloomberg’s gutting of the school system is treated as a “work in progress” that wasn’t completed because three terms as mayor didn’t give him enough time, then Farina and de Blasio will ensure that a once great system now at its tipping point, plunges over the public policy cliff.
It’s subpoena and perp walk time!
Well done Dr. Epstein! That’s why I signed the petition for having you named Chancellor!
Beautifully worded, factually based, rightfully disturbing and nothing short of prophetic. This piece should be placed into the hands of both Farina and de Blasio this very day.
This is a wonderful explanation of someone who is able to see through the Bloomberg smoke and mirrors bull shit. To me personally, it is sad how the media has played up the Bloomberg years and the days of the real reporting media are over and now dominated by money and more money. For example the daily news and the ny post are such trash publications that cater to Bloomberg and no matter what Bloomberg feeds them they go with it because money talks and these trash publications would be out of business if they weren’t getting funds from Bloomberg. This article failed to mention the ATR situation at the DOE which was created by Bloomberg. This is a system where teachers, guidance counselors, social workers, secretaries, assistant principals and other educators are put out and “rotated” to a different school every week. The system known as ATR is an attempt by bloomberg to attack the union by punishing educators from the very schools that bloomberg closed. The schools that bloomberg closed were fake attacks on the educators at the school claiming that the school is a “failing” school. The result is many of the educators at the school were “excessed” and then put into the pool of ATR to rotate to a different school every week. The closing schools then were flooded with charter schools such as evil witch Moskowitch charter schools. Bloomberg gave Moskowitz success charter schools the run of the mill in any school she wanted and then she demanded painted walls, updated computers, etc while the regular kids rotted in hell.
wow
I agree with patrickwalsh.
Beautiful piece. Thanks, Mr. Epstein.
Powerful piece!
Two observations:
The first is timely in that today marks the 5th anniversary of “The Miracle on the Hudson” – the miraculous landing of US Airways Flight 1549. I suspect that those passengers and their families will be forever thankful that Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III and First Officer Jeff Skiles had accumulated the experience, wisdom and judgement that they had when they brought the Airbus A319 to a safe landing on the Hudson River after the jet lost both engines after goose strikes just after taking off from LaGuardia on Jan. 15, 2009. That US Airways continued to employ these two experienced pilots stands in sharp contrast to:
“What’s more, they celebrate a budgeting system that gives the principals an incentive to hire younger, cheaper, inexperienced teachers, over more senior teachers that Bloomberg wants pushed out of the system.”
We can all be thankful that Bloomberg was not running US Airways at the time . . .
And the second:
“He accomplished this by taking on the teachers union, introducing business-tested management techniques, creating a new kind of school principal purposefully chosen with little classroom experience, but trained in these business techniques, reconfiguring the school districts, closing failed schools and creating hundreds of new schools that offer a wide variety of school choices to parents who could shop schools to their heart’s content.”
And those business-tested management techniques have not yielded the improvement claimed, once again supporting Larry Cuban’s and Dr. Ravitch’s mantra of why schools are not and can’t be businesses.
A fuller take on the tragic story of the young student who drowned suggests that there was more going on at this particular school than Mr Epstein suggests:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/nyregion/16drown.html?_r=0
“…there was more going on at this particular school than Mr Epstein suggests:”
which is even more support for Mr. Epstein’s expose.
2old2teach
Say more.
Thank you, Mr. Epstein. The accolades above say it all for me, too. One note to add regarding BLOOMY’s (or should I say “failed Leadership Academy’s inexperienced principals) treatment of ATR’s- these misplaced teachers were further denigrated by being treated as if they were RUBBER ROOM MATERIAL. They were, as such, paid highly to clean out book rooms, collate papers, walk around lunch rooms (under close scrutiny lest they mess up)… I could go on and on. Good for them that they were well paid by a system trying to rid itself of “who knows what.” But woe to the untold damage done to otherwise, good and caring teachers misplaced by megalomaniacs.
“Should Farina maintain the status quo, the fate of public education in New York City will be sealed. What’s more, she will enjoy the accolades of the media, a media that has become heavily invested, both figuratively and literally, in the narrative put forth by Michael Bloomberg about business solutions and data driven decision-making.”
This is a very real concern, and I for one will hold off on the accolades until I see what Farina actually does. It’s already looking like not much is going to happen with PS106 – doesn’t sound like that principal is out of a job.
I’m disappointed with what’s happened so far at PS 106Q, too. At the very least they’ve missed an opportunity for now to set a new tone for the families and teachers who have to contend with only slightly less spectacularly corrupt and/or inept school leaders.
However, I think any expectation that Fariña would be able to or would even want to execute a 180 from the Bloomberg years is perhaps a tad unrealistic. Whatever the circumstances behind her departure, she was hired for arguably the most important job in the entire DOE under Bloomberg’s watch, and the lengthy profile in today’s Times shows that her approach shares some similarities with those of the reformers, at least at a school level.
What you describe here is an American Cultural Revolution and the only comparisons to this description are Hitler’s Cultural Revolution in Germany that led to the rise of the Nazis; the slaughter of the Jews, and then Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China followed by his Cultural Revolution that led to tens of millions of deaths and the destruction of the public schools—such as they were in China. The result, when Mao died, the literacy rate in China had plunged to 20% and mobs of teenage bullies called the Red Guard were allowed to persecute and terrorize millions of teachers and their own parents.
The only difference is we can’t pin/pen this destructive and insane American version of a Cultural Revolution on one man: Hitler or Mao. Instead there are many Hitlers and Maos in the United States will billions of dollars who have egos inflated by ass kissers that cause these men to believe they can do no wrong.
Today’s American dictators/monsters are not elected or supported by the people but use their great wealth to bribe and manipulate people to believe their agendas with propaganda filled with lies and misinformation.
Isn’t this exactly what Hitler and Mao did? And they both gained control of the media first as some of these billionaires have done. For instance, Murdock’s media empire is the second largest and most influential in the world behind only the BBC.
However, instead of one tyrant to deal with, the United States has a small army of them each with their own fiefdom [with private armies to protect them] reminiscent of the Middle Ages.
How do we combat the narcissistic egos of Bill Gates; the Koch Brothers; the Walton Family; The Bloombergs—-for instance—and a greedy Wall Street that already gave us the 2007-08 global financial disaster that is now being called worse than the Great Depression of the early 20th century.
The United States survived Joseph McCarthy’s campaign of Red Terror in the 1950s because he was an elected official who could be voted out of office once his agenda, brand of insanity, was widely recognized.
America ended slavery through the democratic political process and a brutal Civil War.
Women earned the right to vote and own property through the democratic political process.
Children were freed from serfdom slavery in the early 20th century through the democratic political process.
But today the United States may be faced with its biggest challenge, because a few of our modern-day billionaire tyrants have discovered the key to achieve their individual agendas for America: destroy the political democratic process and censor/mute the voice of the people by owning and controlling the traditional media.
The public schools have always been led through the political democratic process—something billionaires can’t control 100%, and these are men who are used to being in control without a democratic process.
The teachers’ unions are also political democratic organizations where teachers vote for the people who lead their local, state and national unions and the teachers vote and debate what those unions should do so both the minority and majority view has a chance to debate issues and influence outcomes through elections. And like every democratic organization there will always be losers who are unhappy because they didn’t get what they wanted.
But what we have here is a few very wealthy and influential tyrants who want to control the process and the only way they can do that is to destroy the democracy that made the Untied States what it is today.
And when we look closely under the hood to see who these men really are, they are no different than Hitler or Mao because they believe that they are the only ones who can fix what they see as a broken system that isn’t really broken once all the facts are known—facts that are being suppressed/ignored by most of the traditional media these tyrants now own/control.
My wife and I have discussed this issue so much she’s sick of talking about it, because she grew up in China and starved through the Great Leap Forward and then was sent to a labor collective for three years near the end of the Cultural Revolution. And she sees that what is happening in the United States with its public education system is no different than what happened in China when she was a child and then a teen.
While we were still dating, my wife wanted to see what kind of teacher I was and visited my classroom sitting in the back to observe, and we raised a daughter who attended nothing but public schools while my wife’s sister and her Caucasian friends warned us that would destroy our daughter’s future—that is how effective America’s billionaire tyrants have been in brainwashing many Americans to believe the public schools are broken.
But I’m a stubborn person and I refused and was the only voice that said the public schools were not broken because I was a teacher who saw that in the same classroom some students would be incredibly successful at learning while others resisted the education that was offered to them screaming and kicking every step of the way.
Because my wife visited me in the classroom, she saw that what I told her was true and our daughter stayed in the public schools.
The schools are not broken and in almost every classroom there are students often with supportive parents who are very successful in the same classrooms where other kids fail miserably because they don’t have the same type of supportive parent.
In fact, today, America’s public schools are more successful than they have ever been in the history of this country and only an ignorant, stupid and biased person could believe otherwise.
What’s failing in America is not the public schools but cultural elements [influenced by race and poverty] that make up a very diverse population—the 3rd largest population in the world after China and India.
Today, our daughter is in her fourth year at Stanford and she already has been working part time for about two years in her first job with a biomedical start-up as the assistant to the CEO. After her first year in Stanford, I asked her how many of her 40 to 50 public school teachers from K to 12 were incompetent. She thought about it and said TWO.
As a child she knew that she was the one responsible for her own education, and I often told her that even if one of her teachers was incompetent she could still learn in that classroom and she did.
Lloyd Lofthouse, great comment! I would repost it as a blog entry, but can anticipate that the horde of critics who watch for any mis-step on this blog would descend en masse because of your international references. So, I urge readers to read your comment, which contains much wisdom.
Diane:
Are you endorsing the notion that the current reforms are akin to “Hitler’s Cultural Revolution in Germany that led to the rise of the Nazis; the slaughter of the Jews, and then Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China followed by his Cultural Revolution that led to tens of millions of deaths and the destruction of the public schools—such as they were in China.” This strikes me as unnecessarily hyperbolic.
According to NCES, in 2011-12 out of 98,328 public schools there were 5,696 charter schools or roughly 5%. Out of an enrollment of 49,256,120, 2,057,599 were enrolled in charter schools or roughly 4%.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_216.20.asp
What you say is true. There are almost 100,000 public schools in America divided up between 50 states and 13,600 democratically run school districts versus maybe only 5,000 private run Charters.
But every cancer starts small and if not discovered and medically removed early can lead to a higher risk of death.
If we learn anything from history, we should learn that most tyrants—for instance, McCarthy; Hitler; Stalin; Mao—started small and then became an almost terminal cancer [with public support] that could have been stopped much earlier if people had organized and protested in large numbers.
When Hitler first came to power, the world had a chance to stop him but didn’t. No one wanted to get tough. By the time he was defeated, more than fifty – eighty million people had been killed with Europe and Asia left in shambles.
Even democracies have their petty tyrants but usually on a smaller scale than McCarthy—more like regional tyrants. However, today’s billionaire CEOs are not regional. They have a global reach.
If we recognize and stop this cancer in its early stages, then the damage doesn’t lead to a phyric victory sometime in the future to set things back on a sane path and that’s only if we are fortunate enough to stop the tyranny before it destroys us.
You may be interested in reading this from the Democratic Underground: The Rise of Corporate Tyranny in the United States [I just found it]
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389×6205149
Pull Quote: “There is nothing ‘free’ about the right wing corporate version of so-called ‘free markets’. Rather, through the amassing of great wealth and power and the use of that wealth and power to legally bribe our elected officials, they have stacked the deck in their favor so as to acquire monopoly control over so many aspects of our economic and political life.”
It is so much easier to stop a movement while it is small.
Lloyd:
Your statement remains inappropriately hyperbolic as is your new analogy to cancer.
It is perfectly reasonable to argue that in general our public schools are doing just fine and that reforms are both unneeded and likely detrimental. But it is also reasonable to argue that more choice and a more coherent national curriculum could well lead to our schools doing even better. To liken your opponents in this debate to Mao and Hitler is totally unjustified.
Are there bad characters among the reformers? Yes. Are some of them driven by largely political or pecuniary interests? Yes. Do textbook publishers charge too much for their books? Yes. But to label folks like Joe Nathan tools of the greedy corporate elites, genocidal fascists or worse is both outrageous and factually inaccurate. If the CEO your accomplished daughter works for actively supports charters does that change the nature of who he or she is?
Bernie,
First, I didn’t mention “Joe Nathan tools” so you are putting words in my mouth. I don’t even know who that is.
I suspect from your comment you may be one of the more clever spin masters for someone like the Koch brothers or Walton family as you have tried to trap Diane and me by putting words in our mouths. Either that, or you have been fed what to say by some conservative talk show host like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. They’re good at one-liners like that are seldom if ever backed by evidence from reputable studies. Something that Diane’s book, blog and my blog are loaded with often from reputable primary sources without the need to cherry pick facts.
As for Hitler: he didn’t start out killing people. He started out by stereotyping the Jews and blaming them for all of Germany’s economic woes. That was the first step. Later came the mass killing to get rid of the Jews.
It was a step by step process that included cherry-picking facts that led to stereotyping and blaming a segment of the population for problems that existed in Germany. What’s worse here is that in the United States there is no failing public education system—a manufactured crises that doesn’t exist.
It is a bald-faced lie. When we take the time to understand the history of public education in the United States for the last 114 years, the only conclusion reached is that public education in the U.S. is more successful now than at any time in the history of this country.
And what the Koch brothers and the Walton family, for instance, have been funding in their propaganda war that’s filled with lies and cherry-picked facts that stereotype public education, teachers and teachers’ unions as failures is similar if not the same as what the Nazis did before the death camps and what Mao did to launch the Cultural Revolution.
If the billionaires are successful and shut down the public schools in America, will there be death camps for teachers? I have no answer because we haven’t reached that destination yet but the tactics being used by the critics of public education who are funded by these billionaires is comparable to how the Nazis started out.
Then you claim: “it is also reasonable to argue that more choice and a more coherent national curriculum could well lead to our schools doing even better”.
That is the core message funded by the billionaires mentioned in Diane’s book so you have just revealed the flag you follow.
First, there has always been school choice in the United States. The public schools offer 13,600 school districts to choose from and almost 100,000 schools.
Parents who care enough may easily find a school close to where they work. It isn’t that difficult for most urban Americans. The information is on the Web for—if I’m not mistake—every public school in the nation and in California I know that each school must make public a school report card that shows each school’s AYP standing compared to every other school in the state.
That’s how my wife and I selected the public schools our daughter attended—not to find a better school because that’s an oxymoron, but to find one far from the street gangs that often accompany poverty and lower AYP scores in the schools those kids attend.
And the price for housing and rent often is not that much different. In fact, in the district where I taught there were two traditional high schools. One was in a blue collar middle class community on the west side of the 60 Freeway and the other one where I taught—on the east side of the freeway—was surrounded by a barrio dominated by violent teen street gangs. It took only ten to fifteen minutes to drive from one high school in the same district to the other one. In fact, back in the 1980s, the district where I worked offered a window each year for parents to enroll their kids to the high school of their choice in the same district.
Nogales High School’s AYP score in 2013 was 710 with a graduation rate in 2013 of 86.65%. This is where I taught until 2005.
Rowland High School’s AYP score in 2013 was 838 meeting all the state’s requirements for AYP growth, and the graduation rate for this high school was more than 90%.
I suspect you will say everyone can’t afford to move. If you are thinking of that as an excuse to support your bogus claim that there is no school choice, you’re wrong there too. Less than ten miles from where I taught in another district there was a high school with an AYP of 900 (the highest AYP was 1,000). The difference was not incompetent teachers. The different was the quality of the community that fed students into the school and parents who did their homework and cared enough to be more involved in the child’s education. It doesn’t take much of an effort for caring, involved parents to find a safer school away from poverty and relocate a few miles and still be close to work.
In addition, there are more than 30,000 private schools in the nation and for parents who want to send their kids to private schools on their own dime, that’s an option. But reputable studies show that—on average—private schools tend to do worse that public even with the selective students. I wonder why that is? I think the answer is because private schools don’t have to hire highly trained teachers as the public schools do. A private school can hire just about anyone to teach without even a criminal background check. But to just get a job in a public school requires you to be fingerprinted and have an FBI search to see if you have ever been convicted of a felony.
No, I don’t think offering more school choices to parents for kids to attend private sector, for profit schools or nonprofit with administrators paid salaries in the hundreds of thousands and even millions is going to lead to better quality school. If you have read Diane’s book or read most of the posts on her Blog you would already know that this idea of offering more choice between private and public isn’t working. But it is channeling hundreds of millions of dollars from the taxpayers into the pockets of private sector con-artists and hurting public school in the process.
Lloyd:
I am emphatically not putting words into either your or Diane’s mouth. You chose to use what I see as a highly inappropriate and hyperbolic historical analogy. Diane’s statement on your comment is what it is.
Nor am I trying to “trap” you or Diane. Why should I? I have a strong dislike for the any argument that trivializes what happened during the 30s and 40s in Germany by inappropriate references to Hitler. I am not alone, hence, Godwin’s Law.
I am truly puzzled as to what evidence you have that suggests I am anything but someone who simply sees things differently. Do you have anything to back up any of your assertions?
You seem to be tracking Diane’s blog so I am also puzzled as to why you do not know who Joe Nathan is. He is a regular commenter here and is the Director of the Center for School Change in Minnesota.
http://centerforschoolchange.org/staff/
He frequently defends Charter Schools from some of the wilder statements made here.
From all that I have read and seen here, his motivation is exactly what he says it is, which you can read at his Center’s website.
How would you characterize the parents of the 2 million children who have chosen to send their children to Charter Schools? How are their choices different from your own decision regarding your own daughter’s school. Are they not also doing the best they can?
For the record, I never said there was no school choice. In Massachusetts you can apply to send your children to adjacent school districts. We made use of that option.
What I actually said was:
It is perfectly reasonable to argue that in general our public schools are doing just fine and that reforms are both unneeded and likely detrimental. But it is also reasonable to argue that more choice and a more coherent national curriculum could well lead to our schools doing even better. (Emphasis added)
You may disagree with my viewpoint, but your own examples illustrate that there is significant variation in outcomes among schools that are geographically proximate. Some of this variance in outcomes may be down to difficult to change SES related factors – but is it all? Are there ways to off-set these SES factors? Clearly some proponents of Charter Schools think that is the case. A few more years of data will help clarify the extent to which they are correct.
Bernie, of course not. Please don’t put words in my mouth. I have enough words of my own.
Diane:
So help me out. How else should I interpret your praise of Lloyd’s comment and your urging folks to read it?:
Lloyd Lofthouse, great comment! I would repost it as a blog entry, but can anticipate that the horde of critics who watch for any mis-step on this blog would descend en masse because of your international references. So, I urge readers to read your comment, which contains much wisdom. emphasis added
Is my criticism of his comment without merit?
Bernie1815,
Speaking of hyberbole and colorful metaphors, I think you’re a virulent cancer, but thank goodness the mindset of the majority of people who read and post here – even if they are uncomfortable with my metaphor – will not allow you to metastasize here.
Go elsewhere Bernie and spread your disease to the Broads, Klein, Rhee, and all those other host cells you’re you’re dying to invade and be a part of . . . . . They’ll welcome you with the warmest of claws, fangs, and horns.
You’re incurable, Bernie, but I would venture to say – and I coujld be wrong – the majority of us here choose to stay politically healthy . . . . . .
AGAIN, Beautifully worded, factually based, rightfully disturbing and nothing short of prophetic.
To dream the impossible dream rests on dreaming. In order to dream, one MUST be
sleeping. Should we become AWAKE, we would see Public Education IS a Bureaucracy,
governed through a number of departments or sections, each with limited jurisdiction or
authority.
“When I think back on all the crap I learned in High School, it’s a wonder I can think
at all…” Paul Simon
A bureaucracy, or CORPORATE top-down structure, no matter how you “Color” it
will produce Corporate top-down structure, corporate culture results.
Expecting a Bureaucracy to construct a method, for the pursuit of knowledge, pretends
a sense of “Community” exists.
“Because of its cooperative nature, the pursuit of knowledge cannot be disentangled from a sense of community where each participant acquires the ability to listen to different points of view, weigh their respective merits, and synthesize the best aspects of each view into a more sophisticated vision. Here everyone must enjoy an equal voice so that no one’s contribution can be routinely dismissed because of an individual’s status.
Consequently, institutions of learning that operate with a corporate top-down structure — where brute power continually preempts the force of the better argument — inevitably undermine the learning process within the classroom…”
The Rein of BUREAUCRACY is challenged by the “Rein of Error”, no doubt.
If the Bureaucracy remains, what will change?
The student in critical condition in the lab experiment was part and parcel of Bloomberg’s “small school” revolution. the teacher in the class was licensed in Physics not Chemistry, and handling chemicals is not part and parcel of a Physics teacher’s repertoire. In a small school expertise get lost. In addition, small schools lose lab-technicians, and teachers have to prepare their own labs. This also is an invitation to accidents. When the Fire Department visited the school it said that the majority of schools did not comply with necessary fir safety. Again, this is just another part of the smoke and mirrors of the Bloomberg disaster.
Are you suggesting that this experienced award winning Physical Science teacher, Anna Poole, who was using chemicals in what was apparently a physics/chemistry experiment is not qualified? Apparently this is a popular experiment that has gone badly wrong 7 times in US school labs since 2006.
http://www.oneidadispatch.com/general-news/20140105/before-nyc-school-chemistry-lab-explosion-feds-warned-of-danger
Are you suggesting that the experiment would have been safer in a larger school or that the presence of a lab technician would have made methanol less volatile?
Bloomberg may well have a lot to answer for, but these examples are pretty weak stuff.
Until it’s your kid, your career, your reputation, your school, your community, your family, your life….it’s all “pretty weak stuff”. Pathetic.
Oh Linda,
Give it up.
Don’t you know that Bernie knows best.
Bernie had been through it all, sort of like Oprah. He’s lived life and lived educating children far more than you and me, no?
King Bernie, just another self proclaimed monarchy, a chip off the old block, is always ready to bole-weevil his way through the cotton field.
Time to get the dust cropper and spray some pesticide . . . .
Beacon was founded 9 years before Bloomberg took office and it is no longer a small school (it has about 1250 students ), but why let facts get in the way of a feckless attempt to make political hay out of a terrible accident?
Get a grip, everyone.
To be clear: The Beacon School was founded in 1999 by the Alternative Schools Sup. The first year it had capacity (full boat of 9-12 students) was in 2002/3; when Bloomberg was in office. That founding staff, which includes a current principal from Philly who (miraculously) is still listened to by some about NYC school policies- was augmented by the addition of other ‘important’ NYC people (Meryl Streep’s brother among them). It’ been called the paradigm of boutique schools and I know, as fact, that others who have opened boutique schools since have turned to Beacon’s original application for guidance.
I hope that give enough context to some of the references above.
Get a grip? really?
Thanks, Marc, for:
“a metaphorical puff of white smoke appeared on the horizon for most of the city’s 75,000 schoolteachers…That’s because after a succession of four chancellors over the past 13 years who had no professional education experience, it was if the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy had finally come to an end with Farina’s succession.”
You made me laugh out loud!
Cheers to Carmen Fariña: here’s looking at you, kid! (looking carefully at you…)
One thing that struck me in Lloyd Lofthouse’s intriguing first comment [11:53 AM] is that it should make us think about the effects of self-styled “education reform” on the way that the general populace thinks and reacts.
For example, let’s just take the “speak bitterness” aspect of the Cultural Revolution under Mao Tse-tung. Considered as an airy abstraction, it sounds like it could and should have been empowering and liberating to the vast majority. IMHO, it didn’t work out that way in practice. In fact, this “radical” practice helped create the unequal and inequitable China we see today. But why get people angry, distracted and used to the public abuse of others? Leaving aside such recent examples as the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq…
Consider this: it’s not too far-fetched to point out that the current social re-engineering of education by the leading charterites/privatizers employs something very similar under the general heading of “teacher bashing.” Think of: lazy LIFOs; evil teacher unions that protect child predators; mislabeled professionals who are actually grossly overpaid babysitters; haters and racists who despise and abuse their charges, and so on. Add to this such nonsense as: public schools uniformly do too much at the same time that they do too little, or ‘everyone knows about’ the grievous misuse of public funds and trust and private business do so much better, or the failures of public education are so monumental that they pose an existential threat to the country. I stop here because it is nauseating to repeat such cognitive dissonance.
Like their Maoists counterparts, the leading charterites/privatizers want to create a general atmosphere of reflexive mistrust and unthinking hatred between and amongst the general population. Hence in both cases a strong inclination to convince the average person that their only salvation lies in “Waiting For Superman” — like a Michelle Rhee or John Deasy or Paul Vallas or Tony Bennett or Steve Perry or the like.
Cult of the Personality, anyone?
Is that the whole picture, down to the smallest details? No, but I don’t think this mischaracterizes much of what we are now experiencing. A “pattern on the rug,” as the owner of this blog has put it on more than one occasion.
Final note: rumor has it that the owner of this blog once penned a book called THE LANGUAGE POLICE. I do not think an attempt to shut her up, or put other people’s words in her mouth, has any chance of succeeding.
Of course, what do I know? I am just a most insanely KrazyTA…
But if the language police come after me, I hope they bear in mind what some of the HS students I worked with taught me…
“Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, haters gotta hate…”
Do I hear some gnats buzzing?
😎