Arthur Goldstein is pretty damned angry at Mayor DeBlasio. The city just loaded billions of dollars of tax breaks onto Amazon and multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, even giving Amazon one of the Department of Education’s buildings in Queens. But Goldstein’s students are crammed into crowded classrooms.
Where are the city’s priorities?
I’m shocked that the city has space to turn over to Amazon but can barely find any for schools. I suppose it’s an extraordinary privilege to be able to provide Jeff Bezos a new helipad, while rolling out the red carpet for thousands of high-paid workers, who may or may not even live here. From my perspective, teaching 34 students in half a classroom, I’m not particularly concerned about where the world’s richest man parks his business, let alone his helicopter.
I’ve been working at Francis Lewis High School in central Queens since 1993, and I can’t recall a time when we’ve been so pressed for space. While I bemoan my half room, some of my colleagues are teaching in windowless converted book storage rooms. After years of complaints, admin found a way to air-condition them. Despite this, the air quality is still sub-standard, according to recent tests conducted by UFT….
It’s all about priorities, and the city that so long claimed to place children first is failing spectacularly to do so. In three or four years our school will have an annex, but who’s to say the DOE won’t just dump another thousand kids on us so we’re as overcrowded as ever?
There might be a time to lavish billions in subsidies on Jeff Bezos, but that time is most certainly not now. Our schools and our kids are more important, by far, than bragging rights for Amazon.
Is this fair?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is this fair?
Absolutely not!!!!
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I’m shocked that the city has space to turn over to Amazon but can barely find any for schools
I’m shocked that DeBlahsio is gambling with the futures of NY school children! Shocked!
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Neoliberalism provides all advantages to corporations while the needs of humans are ignored. It seems to me like a variation on trickle down economics. If we take care of corporations, then people will be able to benefit from their largesse. But we know, it does not really work this way, especially when corporations are unwilling to pay a living wage.
Like Goldstein, I was an ESL teacher that also suffered from space issues during my career. I had to move my classroom about every other year for at least thirty years. The biggest conflicts I ever had with administration was over space. ESL is generally on the losing end as the parents do not complain about the way in which students are crammed into spaces. Moving a classroom is a daunting job, particularly after I started working in a K-5 building with lots of materials. While I am grateful for the books and materials I had, I lost about a week in the summer to pack up my room and a week at the end of the summer to get ready for the new school year. None of this was compensated time, but I had to do it in order to get ready for the new school year. Frankly, teachers that work with special populations often are not a priority for administration. I also worked in windowless closets,(in violation of NYS law), on a stage at one point, but mostly in small rooms. I even managed to score a couple of regular size rooms, but this was a rarity. A window was a gift from God as it meant we could get out in case of fire.
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Correction: The biggest conflicts I ever had with administration were over space.
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More like Amazon got Seattle and Queens. Middle class, retired, and children will be driven out by increases in cost of living.
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This has already happened in Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn. Any areas in close proximity to Manhattan are gentrification targets. Amazon will accelerate the process. If the state and city refuse to build schools, charters will be happy to pick up the slack.
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In revolutionary France, outrage by middle class critics of the ancient regime morphed into the Paris mob, stirred up by a bread shortage and the writings of John Paul Marat. That mob marched in the thousands to the palace at Versailles and would have torn the king and queen to bits had not cooler heads prevailed.
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Bill DeBlasio has been an enormous disappointment. I feel like I left New York just in the nick of time. Can you imagine what this increase in population will do to an already grossly dysfunctional transit system? (And I haven’t mentioned Arthur Goldstein’s excellently made point about budgetary priorities for the lives of all New Yorkers.)
Shame on everyone involved in this travesty.
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The only positive thing that can be said about mayors like DeBlasio and Garcetti is that they’re better than zealots like Bloomberg and Villaraigosa.
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True that.
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I agree, LCT, but hate to damn with faint praise.
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Bat signal going out for the Mayor’s great defender . . . .
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These disgraceful conditions in public schools have worsened for years while NYC teachers pay dues to the UFT/AFT run by Michael Mulgrew now and Randi Weingarten before. Politicians of both parties will ignore any shameful dispossession, indignity, or inequity as long the victims put up with it, don’t fight back, which the teacher union leaders refuse to do, waiting for the out-to-lunch Dems to tell them what to do. Public schools will continue to be looted and dismissed until teachers get rid of their fake leaders and install chiefs who come out swinging. Parents like teachers b/c their kids need schools; and society needs its schools, cannot manage unless 3 mil teachers supervise 50 mil kids daily in k-12; wildcat strikes out west last spring showed how crucial teachers are and how they can win by walking out but only if they refuse to go back in too soon for too little to allow their fake leaders to exhale.
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Perfect, sir, and thank you. I was constantly amazed at the UFT’s apparent apathy through all of this, and wonder when, if ever, my erstwhile union (I’m in the NEA up here in Massachusetts) will do to stand up for New York City’s parents, students, and teachers.
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From what Goldstein is reporting, it sounds to me like nothing has changed since I taught in California for thirty years (1975-2005).
I taught in classrooms with dead animals under them or in the walls and the stench from the rotting bodies made it difficult to impossible to teach. To compensate, I spent my own money to buy portable air cleaners with HEPA and charcoal filters to combat the smell so my students wouldn’t barf or refuse to come to class.
After many complaints the district sent in a crew to clean up the mess with the dead animals. They waited until Christmas break one year to get the job done.
I taught in classrooms with leaky roofs and it took decades for the district to fix that problem. No telling how much mold there was in the walls and under the old, thread bare, filthy carpeting that remained after the new roofs were installed.
I taught in a classroom with bulging floors so steep that student desks would slide down the slope into the other rows at the bottom of the bulge. Instead of fixing that problem, that classroom was turned int a storage room and they moved me to the classroom that ended up with dead cats or possums in the walls and under the floors.
I taught in classrooms so crowded with desks that you could only walk sideways between the rows and if the kids moved their desks out of alignment, the space between some rows vanished.
One year, the district decided to repaint the school I was working at when school was in session. The fumes from the spray paint made my students sick: throwing up, infections, allergy attacks and many students staying home sick. I had to move my students from the classroom to the library and teach them there to escape the pain fumes.
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While I taught in substandard places, the building was clean and well maintained. I worked in a suburban NYC school that was 70% white and middle class. It seems the darker the students get, there is less political will to address the problems. It is a sad commentary on our society. There is so much money in LA, NYC and D.C, it seems ridiculous that there is nothing but duct tape to fix the problems.
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How many public school district administrators are minorities in the US?
I did a Google search and found this: Schools and Staffing Survey
Every state is listed so I’ll only share the results for California:
17.2 percent of public school teachers are Hispanic, 70.5 percent are white, 3.2 percent are black and 6.1 percent are Asian.
And if you scroll down the list, the only state with fewer white teachers is New Mexico. California is in 2nd place for the smallest number of white teachers.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s_001.asp
The Atlantic did publish “Where Are All the Principals of Color?”
As the public-school population continues to grow more diverse, the percentage of nonwhite school leaders has remained relatively stagnant.
“According to an April report from the National Center for Education Statistics, the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing school data, the percentage of black or Hispanic public-school principals has barely budged over the last 25 years. During the 1987–88 school year, 87 percent of public-school principals were white, 9 percent were black, 3 percent were Hispanic, and 2 percent were American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian American, or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander. More than two decades later, in the 2011-12 school year, the percentage of white principals had declined slightly—to 80 percent—while that of Hispanic principals inched up slightly (7 percent). The percentage of principals who were black or from another ethnic group showed no substantial change, at 10 percent and 3 percent, respectively.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/06/principals-of-color/488006/
With too many white administrators in positions of power in the public schools, I think it is safe to say that the ratio of decisions based on racism is higher explaining why schools with majority-minority populations are neglected.
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In the ’90s before all the ‘reform’ distraction, there was a solid attempt in the NYC area to recruit and develop minority administrators. NYC and surrounding areas had many minorities and women in leadership positions in those days. It is great for minority children to see people that look like them in leadership positions.
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I lived in a house that had rats rotting in the walls. What was interesting to me was how you’d have good days with basically no smell, and then days that were very, very bad. This when pretty much every day was 95 degrees. Never understood how that worked.
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“I taught in classrooms with dead animals under them or in the walls and the stench from the rotting bodies made it difficult to impossible to teach. To compensate, I spent my own money to buy portable air cleaners with HEPA and charcoal filters to combat the smell so my students wouldn’t barf or refuse to come to class.”
We had a Christmas song that went with that phenomenon – Mickey Roasting on an Open Fire. It happened every year for a couple of weeks after the heat was turned on.
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There is a real shame out there…. one that defines contempt.
The government that spends moe hen has our GNP on weapons, has a 50 year ol computer that serves the VA, and it is so fouled up, that thousands o four GI’s can no clear up huge debs for education and homes.
The government actually said, there are too many claims to fix,
I cannot make that up. But we knew that was going to happen when the wonderful guy who ran the VA was kicked out, and the post was filled by a swamp creature.
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I’m beginning to think that Amazon’s retail is just a side job, like Facebook’s social media platform. Amazon has gained an enormous amount of data willingly submitted from the cities which vied for the honor of giving them tax breaks. Monetizing the data is a gift which keeps on giving.
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“SICK!”
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