Peter Goodman describes a “debate” of sorts in New York City, whose mayor is searching for a new chancellor to replace Carmen Farina.
Does New York City need a disruptor, like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, or a collaborator, following Farina’s tradition?
From what I read, the only voice in favor of a disruptor is a former official in the Bloomberg-Klein regime and the editorial writer of the New York Times.
Turmoil and instability and upheaval are not good for students, teachers, or learning.
I hope the next leader will be an experienced educator who has had experience in the classroom and as a principal and superintendent.
I hope it will be someone who knows the New York City public schools well and who is prepared to reach out to teachers and parents and students to build trust.
Please, no more disruption.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We are living in the aftermath of Bloomberg’s disruptions; a generation of children educated in a multitude of failed policies that really changed nothing. Leaving no child behind meant a system where all children, save those with strong educational support at home, we’re left behind. We need an educator, not a business person or polical hack. We need someone who will look poverty and need in the eyes and show that our kids need better nutrition, better health care, mental health support and guided preparation for what life is going to toss at them.
Were*
We need a leader that believes in public schools and is willing to invest in community support for poor students. Disinvesting in public education and demonstrating partiality to privatization have failed to deliver equity and justice to poor families. It has only served to weaken the capacity of public schools to serve the neediest students. It is time to change strategy.
It looks like the ed reform circus has pulled up stakes and left Detroit. I saw a piece in the local paper on how they’re trying to refocus on improving schools instead of “creating new governance models” or testing new ed tech product on low and middle income children.
I hope they get a breather and time to think and reflect on what they want in a local school system before someone parachutes back in for the 15th consecutive “disruption”.
Teachers have good reason to be suspicious of any program fostered by Gates and company. He is largely responsible for much of the test and punish agenda under the Obama administration. I read the blurb on “distributive leadership,” and it sounded very familiar to what I experienced when the school in which I worked changed its culture which resulted in improved student scores. The main focus for us was not on improving scores; collaborating to change the culture and serve students better were. The scores were a byproduct of the collaboration. When I read this, I realized Gates had not softened his views on standardized testing.
“The Gates Networks, the UFT-Department of Education PROSE schools, the Performance-Based Assessment Consortium, all move schools and kids forward, all make teaching more rewarding.”
I wonder if this is a reboot on the CCSS as “college and career ready” are mentioned in the Fair Test description. If New York is interested in expanding this initiative, they will need an authentic, experienced educator at the helm, not an MBA or an economist.https://www.fairtest.org/new-york-performance-standards-consortium-fact-she
While the tone has improved under De Blasio/Farina, and most of the policies are not as outright vicious, there’s very little collaboration (unless you count the UFT functioning as a company union as “collaboration”) and psycho principals and superintendents have been given a free hand to torment teachers and students alike.
A collaborative approach requires people that know how to work with others to build consensus. “Psycho administrators” would torpedo the level of trust needed in a collaborative setting. Collaboration requires listening to and being respectful of colleagues. The top down management style will not work in a collaborative initiative. Administrators would have to be retrained and monitored to ensure they can function and provide leadership in a collaborative school.
The Koch brothers and their ALEC organization support total disruption, no social safety net, and more poverty without a guaranteed public funded education for all students … the only students that will be allowed to have an education will be the ones that Koch’s ALEC organization approves. The rest will be forced into the poverty-to-prison (to increase profits and wealth of the few that include the Koch brothers and the 2,000+ members of ALEC) pipeline.
Nothing will be well in NYC or elsewhere until educators finally understand the false idea at the heart of our educating these days: that generic skills can be taught. They cannot. Yet that’s exactly what our schools –especially elementary schools — strive to do, above all else.
Proof? The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Performance states, “Research clearly rejects the classical view on human cognition in which general abilities such as learning, reasoning, problem solving and, concept formation correspond to capacities and abilities that can be studied independently of the content domains”
Let me break this down:
Generic problem solving cannot be taught.
Generic critical thinking cannot be taught.
Generic reasoning cannot be taught.
Generic conceptualizing cannot be taught.
Yet these generic skills are exactly the sorts of things we’re trying to teach. Teachers across NYC daily labor to “teach” kids inference making, the skill of determining shades of meaning, the skill of understanding complex texts, and other “skills” enumerated in the misguided Common Core standards. But such generic skills simply do not exist.
We are defrauding our kids and parents when we tell them we’re teaching these things. We only know how to elicit these things, not teach them. And cognitive science tells us that eliciting these skills in one domain does not make you better at it in another domain. We force kids to elicit these skills ad nauseam in the faith that this will strengthen these skill muscles. But cognitive science debunks this idea.
Here’s what can be taught:
Particular pieces of literature.
Particular episodes of history.
Particular science concepts.
Particular foreign languages.
Particular information about health.
Particular knowledge about civics.
Etc.
All of this knowledge shines a floodlight on hitherto dark domains, and thereby enables us to employ our INBORN thinking skills on new domains. Knowledge is teachable. Skills are not. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the main work of schools, the real heavy lifting, is not “teaching skills”; it is feeding kids knowledge lucidly and memorably, and asking them to recall it and process it so that they internalize it. We are starving our kids of mentally-nutritious knowledge in the vain hope of imparting and strengthening generic mental skills and cannot be taught and need not be taught –because they do not exist.
If you read E.D. Hirsch’s “Why Knowledge Matters” or cognitive scientist Dan Willingham you will be convinced of what I say.
THIS, not labor unions or governance structures or lack of competition, is the #1 thing holding our kids back. And it hurts poor kids the most because they don’t get as much knowledge from home. I hope the new superintendent get this. I hope she or he reads more and more widely than so many of my education colleagues.
I’m not remotely sure that Fariña was all that collaborative, having left a whole lot of Bloomberg operatives in place. There’s a cesspool of anti-teacher sentiment in DOE legal, trying to disrespect or dismantle our Collective Bargaining Agreement by any means necessary. I never saw Fariña taking a stand against that. As a UFT Chapter Leader, I spend a whole lot of time dealing with people who look at 40 classes of over 34 students and declare there are zero oversized classes, or read unambiguous contract language and improvise absolute nonsense into it. Bloomberg’s people still populate the DOE at multiple levels. As far as I can tell Fariña has done nothing whatsoever to change that.
I think next time someone mentions “disruption” the writer should be able to cite exactly which disrupted urban area NYC should try to model itself after? Chicago? Detroit?
How dare any NY Times editorial board writer call for trying to make NYC look like Detroit and Chicago. They should be called out for being terrible, terrible people to promote that and investigated for their contacts with the privatizers whose agenda they represent instead of parents.
Same thing as we search for a new superintendent in Los Angeles. We need collaboration, not attacks. Unfortunately, Ref Rodriguez is still part of the decision making, even as his multiple count, open-shut election fraud case heads to court. Spoiler alert: He’s guilty. Spoiler alert: Los Angeles is in for more trouble.
Most of the admin I know hardly look on Farina as a “collaborator.” To the contrary, they find her DOE to have been petty and vindictive. Her parent engagement “pillar” has been a complete and utter farce, too. Good riddance.
“Collaboration”
“Collaboration”, what we got
Between the billionaires
Common Core and other rot
Pearsonal affairs
I’m a NYC teacher and just got through a week of navigating through the walking wounded. We have children who are doubled and quadrupled up into small apartments with other families. We have High School English Language Learners sitting in classrooms of 34 having no idea what is being said – a recipe for disengagement and dropping out. We have children coming from settings of violence and substance abuse. Yet, as long as our bulletin boards are up to date when some big wig comes for a walk through, we’re good. What we need are more counselors and lower class sizes. Anything else is lip service.
Another problem that NYC schools must overcome is the negative publicity by people like John Stossel. In his column written Feb. 16, titled “Success Academy is aptly named”, he once again presents a one-sided argument touting their amazing success. It was published in my local paper, the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, on the 17th. I’d like to write a rebuttal and love Diane’s article in The Nation from Oct. 13, 2014 about Success Academy. But where can I find more current statistics? I have been searching through nysed.gov, rather poorly, I’m afraid. Any suggestions? Thanks!