Mayoral control of the schools was never a good idea. The current race for mayor of New York City demonstrates that it is a horrible idea. The leading candidate at the moment is Eric Adams, who was a police office, a member of the legislature, and borough president of Brooklyn. Certainly he has deep experience in municipal affairs.
But his plans for education are unsound. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
Mercedes Schneider lives in Louisiana but she spotted Adams’ platform on the running the schools and called him out for the worst plan ever proposed.
She writes:
Eric Adams is running for mayor of New York City.
He wants to assign hundreds of students to a single teacher because technology could allow it, and it costs less.
Of course, in Adams’ mind, the ridiculous student-teacher ratio is fine because *great teachers* with technology (aka, kids on laptops) produces “skillful” teaching. Consider Adams’ words in this February 2021 candidate interview with Citizens Budget Commission president, Andrew Rein, when Rein asks Adams about how much a “full year school year” would cost.
Apparently, Adams’ plan is the well-worn ed-reform idea of cost-cutting excellence:
Think about this for a moment, let’s go with the full year school year because that’s important to me. When you look at the heart of the dysfunctionality of our city, it’s the Department of Education. We keep producing, broken children that turn into broken adults and live in a broken system. 80% of the men and women at Rikers Island don’t have a high school diploma or equivalency diploma. 30% are reported based on one study to be dyslexic because we’re not doing what we should be doing in educating, we find ourselves putting young people in a place of being incarcerated. That must change. And so if you do a full year school year by using the new technology of remote learning, you don’t need children to be in a school building with a number of teachers, it’s just the opposite. You could have one great teacher that’s in one of our specialized high schools to teach 300 to 400 students who are struggling in math with the skillful way that they’re able to teach.
Let’s look at our best mastered teachers and have them have programs where they’re no longer being just within a school building. We no longer have to live within the boundaries of walls, of locations. We can now have a different method of teaching and I’m going to have the best remote learning that we could possibly have, not just turning on the screen and having children look at someone or really being engaged.
When market-based ed reform hit Louisiana in 2011, one of my concerns as a classroom teacher was that I might be rated “highly effective” and *rewarded* with increased class sizes. That thinking was and still is an idiotic core belief of ed reform: A “great teacher” can continue to be great no matter how thin that teacher is spread in trying to meet the educational needs of any number of individual students.
When Michael Bloomberg was mayor, he once proposed a similar plan: Identify “great teachers” and double the size of their classes. No one thought that was a good idea. Adams wants the neediest children to be online in a class of 300-400 students. They will never get individual attention or help. Dumb idea.
But, wait! There’s more. After Adams got negative feedback for his proposal, he backtracked and said he had been misquoted or misunderstood. Leonie Haimson writes here that if most people learned one thing from the pandemic, it is that remote learning has limited and specific value. If students need extra attention, they will not be likely to get it in remote settings.
Remote teaching hundreds is a bad idea, but there are some teachers who are much better than others, and their glory is sadly bottled up in their classrooms. How about videotaping their lessons and turning them nto professional development for other teachers? In Japan, teachers routinely watch each other teach. Or offering the videos as supplemental lessons for students a la Khan Academy —for viewing in class or (wishfully) at home?
While good teachers have many common traits(they have a thorough knowledge of subject matter, they care about their students, they learn from their successes and their failures), good teaching can’t be packaged or scaled up. It is a partnership between the students in the class and the instructor. What works in my class this year won’t necessarily work for you or even for me next year. I have a colleague who is an amazing teacher, but there is no way I can teach my class the way he teaches his. There is also more to teaching than listening to an abstract lecture on pedagogy delivered by professors who have never taught in your discipline(or who may not have even liked it when they themselves were students). I learned to teach gradually–first as a tutor, next as a student teacher, then as a TA, and finally as a college professor. I am still learning.
Not sure where you’re from, Ponderosa; but in NYC we’ve been doing peer observations for a while, now. Both pre-pandemic (real time classroom…both mentorships and peer to peer)and for the past year, via remote. I don’t believe it’s mandated, but my six sites have done it for years and I have colleagues in other schools who’ve been doing the same.
Adams sounds like the typical authoritarian type. He would keep control of the schools under his thumb so he can run them like a fiefdom. He plans to also remove the charter cap. He shows very little understanding of the issues confronting education. He proposes extended classes during the summer, evening and weekends. Who is going to pay for all the additional instructional time? These suggestions would cost the city a lot of money as well.
Probably influenced by the conservative “science of reading” proponents, Adams proposes that all students should be tested for dyslexia! That is an absurdly wasteful suggestion, especially since no one can effectively diagnose dyslexia in kindergarten or even first grade. it is generally recommended to wait until certain developmental issues subside in third grade. Many five, six or even seven year olds will reverse letters, but it does not necessarily signal “dyslexia.” If Adams’ plan were adopted, the city would have a huge over representation of students in special education.
By the way, here’s a recent article by Stephan Krashen on variability of reading scores in California. http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/great_plummet.pdf
Quite a long while ago–I don’t remember exactly–I read a speech on education by Bill Gates, and in it he pointed out that the big costs in education were a) salaries and b) facilities and that both could be dramatically reduced via remote learning–one teacher, with technology, reaching a great many students.
The same utterly ridiculous idea. Oh, and guess what? If education became all remote learning all the time, those people who were in the computer biz would make another bundle. Such a nice deal for Bill. Such serendipity!
So, it was that idea that led him to create his monstrous inBloom (which would have acted as the nation’s gradebook and have made Bill the de facto monopolistic gatekeeper for all curricula because every curriculum publisher would have had to play ball with him) and to pay for the development of Lord Coleman’s puerile bullet list, the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] so there would be one list to key depersonalized education software to.
All those sics, btw, indicate that the Common Core State Standards are none of those things. They are common only in the sense of being base or vulgar. They are not core. They weren’t developed by the states. And they don’t rise to the level of “standards.”
So, Adams, when talking about education, was spouting the same utter nonsense, and when called out for it, he has denied what he clearly said.
Unfortunately, when an extremely wealthy guy like Gates has an idea this bad, he can foist it upon the rest of us.
Gates is so stunted, so blinkered that he actually seems to believe that he was doing us all a favor by trying to do to education what he did to personal computer operating systems and software–turn it into a vehicle for generating obscene amounts of money for him.
And for this he is, or has been until recently, idolized.
Foist. Truly a word for the new millennium.
Applying free market principles to a public institution is counterproductive. The principles of business are very different from the principles of education. Public schools are part of the public trust. We must not allow the wealthy to steal our public asset. Most of the privatizers only see the billions of value in public education, and they want to get their grubby hands on public funds. Privatization is not “all about the kids.”
Once a monopolist, always a monopolist.
There’s a lot to like about Mr. Adams, but this was, ofc, ridiculous. Here’s how he could make up for this: Hold a meeting with Diane Ravitch and learn from her.
What’s to like about him? His support for Stop and Frisk? The fact that he owns rental property that he doesn’t pay taxes on? His support for the real estate industry that is buying up property and making housing prices unaffordable? His numerous ethics scandals?
Actually, I think that Adams vocally opposed Stop and Frisk. I know very little about the guy–only what I read in a few articles I scanned.
I should add, I’m very glad I don’t live in New York, because I’m not seeing any good choices with any likelihood of getting elected. As bad as Adams is (and he’s horrible), Yang is a thousand times worse.
The best choice – Maya Wiley – was endorsed by progressives AOC, Jamaal Bowman, and surprisingly, by Hakeem Jeffries, who represents the leadership of the DNC that you often think works against progressives. Not this time.
Actually, if Maya Wiley becomes Mayor, there is no way she can possibly be perfect enough to fend off attacks from the mainstream media that amplify all her failures and ignore any good things she does, much as de Blasio was. It doesn’t bode well. I suppose the best bet is for someone who the mainstream media won’t attack — like Kathryn Garcia — to win and not be as much in the pocket of the pro-charter folks as she appears. Perhaps if Albany doesn’t obey her pleas to allow charter authorizers appointed by Cuomo to create dozens or hundreds (no cap!) of new charters (paid for out of the pubic school budget), Garcia won’t be able to do as much harm as she would if she got her way. She definitely will be more catered to by the media, although the NYPost is already accusing her of some very bad practices as Sanitation Commissioner — the NY Post suddenly is very, very concerned about the treatment of women and minorities.
I think one of the women has quite a good chance of winning. If Garcia’s education policy (if she gets her wish) was not so damaging to public schools, I would not mind if it was her, as she’d probably have an easier time than Wiley (who I definitely prefer).
“ NYC public school parent on June 18, 2021 at 8:18 pm
The best choice – Maya Wiley – was endorsed by progressives AOC, Jamaal Bowman, and surprisingly, by Hakeem Jeffries, who represents the leadership of the DNC that you often think works against progressives. Not this time.
Actually, if Maya Wiley becomes Mayor, there is no way she can possibly be perfect enough to fend off attacks from the mainstream media that amplify all her failures and ignore any good things she does, much as de Blasio was. It doesn’t bode well. I suppose the best bet is for someone who the mainstream media won’t attack — like Kathryn Garcia — to win and not be as much in the pocket of the pro-charter folks as she appears. Perhaps if Albany doesn’t obey her pleas to allow charter authorizers appointed by Cuomo to create dozens or hundreds (no cap!) of new charters (paid for out of the pubic school budget), Garcia won’t be able to do as much harm as she would if she got her way. She definitely will be more catered to by the media, although the NYPost is already accusing her of some very bad practices as Sanitation Commissioner — the NY Post suddenly is very, very concerned about the treatment of women and minorities.
I think one of the women has quite a good chance of winning. If Garcia’s education policy (if she gets her wish) was not so damaging to public schools, I would not mind if it was her, as she’d probably have an easier time than Wiley (who I definitely prefer).”
Dead on point, NYC. On all points.
That is to say I couldn’t possibly have said it better.
Thank you, gitapik. Looking forward to voting on Tuesday!
“In short, the report is consistent with prior research that suggests black and Hispanic students learn more in charter schools, and that competition from charter schools has a positive, or at worst neutral, effect on traditional public schools.
In other words, a rising tide of charters really does lift all boats.”
It’s really amazing, the absolute blinders these people have. It affects everything they do.
Any gain in any public school is not attributable to the public school, it is instead credited to charter schools.
This is why we can’t have this echo chamber directing public education in the US. They start with the ideological premise and then create studies to validate it.
My state government in Ohio has vastly expanded vouchers this year while accomplishing/contributing absolutely nothing for public schools. I have a voucher school in my town. If my public school improves FOR ANY REASON, ed reformers will conclude that the voucher school “improved” the public school.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/rising-tide-charter-market-share
If the “rising tide of charters” actually lifts all boats, why not just close all the public schools immediately?
I mean, we’ve clearly found the superior schools – all charters “lift” all public schools (but never the other way around).
They have to privatize the whole system. They’ve already announced the conclusion of this experiment.
Why bother to pretend to “support” or “improve” public schools at all? These decisions have clearly already been made and they’re lockstep uniform across the echo chamber.
Public school parents really should read within the ed reform echo chamber because I don’t think it’s understood just how grim and negative the agenda is for public school students:
https://www.hoover.org/press-releases/hoover-institution-education-experts-provide-solutions
Read it. Public schools get testing and stern warnings on “accountability”, “choice” schools get gushing praise and promises of more and more government support and funding.
This “movement” offers nothing to students and families who attend public schools. It is GRIM for our kids.
Public schools are going to have to come up with their own approach. These folks have nothing for us. It might be freeing. Why would want to march along lockstep with this agenda anyway?
A young man commented online that after Biden’s announcement, we’ll now have a holiday (Juneteenth) that we can’t talk about in school.
Thanks, Repugnican Thought Police.
Oops. Sorry. That was a woman named Mirella whose twitter handle is Mire.East@teachmirella
LOL!
There is a reason Republican billionaires fund the campaign to elect him. The online student warehouse idea is not just dangerously dumb; it’s reactionary libertarianism. It’s visionary if you make sure to keep your eyes closed. I always remember a picture I saw, years ago, of a young student in one of those online warehouses with triple digit class size, Rocketship charter here in Los Angeles. The child was draped over the back of the chair, glazed, staring into space, drooling. And we have all seen, during the pandemic, the awesome power of online learning. Just awesome, huh. No one wanted to reopen schools because of the power of competency based education apps. Right. (Sarcasm, that was.) But politicians who take from billionaires did not see before or during the pandemic. They do not see.
Adams could benefit from a high school English refresher course:
“Let’s look at our best mastered teachers and have them have programs where they’re no longer being just within a school building.”
I just read a fascinating article about a “Police pull-back program” — an extremely successful experiment done in Brownsville, Brooklyn in which the NYPD pulled back from an area, and instead there were city agencies and non-profits (including those who specialize in violence prevention) set up with booths. Crime – especially serious crime – went down significantly after two week long experiments months apart. Now the plan is to try this in other neighborhoods.
Of course this didn’t get much coverage in the mainstream press which has presented NYC’s upsurge in crime as if it was historically high. In fact, the current crime rate is similar to the rate during the Bloomberg administration – it is just high compared to the historically low rates that happened after de Blasio’s ending of stop and frisk went into effect.
These are the kind of policies that Maya Wiley wants, too. They work.
Turns out that Kathryn Garcia is now partnering with Andrew Yang — with the NYPD now asking their members to rank those 2 and no other candidates.
As much as I don’t like Eric Adams, I see from Kathryn Garcia’s partnering with Yang that she is going all-in for what the billionaire/pro-police folks want. Not sure she has the integrity or fortitude to do anything but what those with power and/or money want her to do. Eric Adams does not seem particularly knowledgeable about education and has some bad ideas, but if he is elected, he is a politician who will be answerable to those who elected him. Unfortunately, it seems like Yang and Garcia’s main constituency are the affluent and the NYPD.
By the way, it turns out that Wiley’s (defund the police) wealthy partner (husband?) pays for private security to patrol the block they live on.
Tali Weinstein is reported to have paid zero, or very minimal, taxes in the last four out of six years. Gotta love the hypocrisy!
What is with your obsession with candidates who have Jewish spouses?
I don’t think you understand the meaning of the word “hypocrisy”. “Hypocrisy” would be if Wiley and her husband used their connections to demand the NYPD use public money to assign extra police to patrol their block 24/7. “Hypocrisy” would be if Wiley demanded that rich people pay significantly less taxes to “defund the police”, knowing that she would use the tax savings to hire her own security guards.
In fact, that private security is something that the neighborhood has been paying for decades — not something that Wiley and her husband arranged.
Wanting good public policy has nothing to do with being Jewish or not. It has nothing to do with being rich or not. Some very rich people — like Bernie Sanders – want good public policy. That’s why AOC endorsed Wiley.
The NYPD resisted ending stop and frisk and said crime would go sky high. It did not.
Maybe if you stopped being so angry at Jews and started thinking about why the kind of “police pull-back programs” might work, you could see beyond your hatred of Maya Wiley.
If charter schools were honest, I might support them, because their lies and their billionaire funded public relations efforts that get the entire education media to report their false narratives as truth would not be incredibly harmful to public school.
Maya Wiley has a good idea that needs to be tried. “Defunding the police” is what happens in affluent white communities, as AOC so aptly explained. Money is spent on the things that lower crime — addressing the ill effects of poverty — instead of the belief that you can aggressively police an economically struggling community into being safe, with no need to provide any resources except even more heavily armed police to be even more aggressive.
Well actually crime was much lower during Bloomberg’s tenure though I don’t agree with the stop and frisk tactics. You didn’t respond to Tali Weinstein and the fact that the billionaire paid zero or barely any taxes. To be clear I am very bothered about our tax system that allows this to happen. You seem to think I hate Jewish people just because I quoted Jewish friends. That’s ridiculous. I loathe what is happening to our society, the increasing divide by the “haves and have nots”. Unless we get a handle on tax avoidance by the wealthy, the purchase of elections, the control of policies through hired lobbyists, etc., I am truly concerned about our future.
If you care to bury your head in the sand about this fact, so be it.
AOC endorsed Maya Wiley. So did Jamaal Bowman. I guess you know better than them. I guess neither of them should be trusted. Who should?
Or just maybe, the wealth of a candidate – or their spouse – has nothing to do with how corrupt or not corrupt they are.
I hope to achieve many of the policies you do, but I have no idea how you hope to achieve them when no one will ever meet your utopian standards. AOC is already suspect since she is fighting for a rich man’s wife to win, right?
Years ago it was more widely recognized that wealth leads to power and more wealth leads to more power, hence the push for publicly funded campaigns. It seems to me we are going in the wrong direction and came perilously close to the unthinkable of losing our democracy. With the ever increasing concentration of wealth and power is it unthinkable that some time the future we may come to a “man the barricades” moment?
Also, I didn’t respond to Tali Weinstein (I guess women must be identified by their husband’s name?) because I live in Brooklyn and thus have not followed that race since I will not be voting.
And, on a totally unrelated note:
A Theory of Dreaming | Bob Shepherd
The American philosopher Eric Switzgebel has made a name for himself in recent years by challenging a lot of what people think they know, and, in particular, by challenging what people think they alone know—things about their own conscious mental experience. For example, he has challenged the notion that mental images are picture-like, which a lot of people believe. People confidently state that they “had an image in their heads” of this or that and discuss the contents of it (oh, I was looking at an image in my head of Grandma’s house as it appeared back when I was a kid in ’85), but when you press them on this, their image report turns out to be extremely unreliable in a way that pictures–real pictures–aren’t. If I ask someone to visualize a candle, he or she will report having done this. He or she might say something like, “I had a picture of it in my head,” but when you press the person on this: what was the candle sitting on? What was the color of the candle? How far down had it melted? Was any of the candle still liquid or molten at its base? What was in its immediate background? Was the flame flickering? etc., people don’t know the details that they would know if they had seen an actual picture. Switzgebel tells people to “picture a house,” and they report having done this, but then they can’t tell whether the house has a chimney, which they could easily do if they were consulting something actually “picture-like.”
In a similar vein, the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus famously showed that when people remember events, they think they are simply reporting a recording in the brain of what happened when, in fact, their brains actively construct memories from a combination of the few things from that past time that actually got recorded into long-term memory and a lot of general knowledge about the world, including things that they were later falsely told about this past. Memory is not playback, though it seems like that to the person having the memory. It is reconstruction, and extremely unreliable reconstruction at that.
I think that it might be the case that something similar occurs with dreaming. This is a fairly radical proposal, and I haven’t encountered it before in work by others. We tend to think that the events in dreams play out over time, typically in real time, that they have duration. Event A occurs, then Event B, then Event C, and so on. But what if, instead, the same story construction mechanism that occurs in memory occurs when we call upon a memory of a dream? Suppose that an executive conscious portion of the brain
takes random stuff that is currently being processed by the brain and is therefore currently available;
automatically, swiftly, constructs a narrative, with duration and a protagonist and other narrative elements, from that material; and
presents the result to consciousness?
And, furthermore, suppose that throughout REM sleep, this conscious executive part of the brain is checking in, in this way, from time to time, finding slightly changed inputs each time and requesting correspondingly changed narratives that are automatically, swiftly supplied? One might call this the “Multiple Drafts Theory of Dreaming.” The idea bears similarities to Daniel Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness presented in his book Consciousness Explained.
If what I am suggesting is true, we don’t actually experience events with duration during our sleep. Instead, we construct from the random stuff our brain is processing events with the qualities that events have, including duration and other narrative elements like conflicts and antagonists, and then those presented to conscious memory and we think that we experienced them in a dream because we are remembering them, just as we think, all the time, that we experienced events in our own pasts that our brains have partially or wholly simply constructed as part of the active making, each time we remember, of the memory?
And if all this is true, what is happening in the morning when we “remember a dream,” is that the conscious part of the brain is telling the unconscious part, construct a narrative memory of a dream from the most recent brain state and present it to me as an actual memory (not as a hypothetical or construction). This shouldn’t be surprising, for this is just what happens in memory of life events. But it is a bit disconcerting because it challenges what we think we know about ourselves and our experiences.
Ofc, this ability to construct narratives, automatically, swiftly, has a readily available evolutionary explanation in that it would enable prediction of the behavior of others–a playing out into the future of a creature’s theory of other minds–an essential survival skill. It pays to have an idea what that hippo one has suddenly come upon might do.
NB: One support of the theory: the iffiness of duration in dream reports–in dreams, there are often leaps in time and compressions or extensions of it; so, it’s unreliable and more like duration in stories than in active, waking life.
Some people , including some physicists like Julian Barbour, believe that time itself is an illusion and that our brain is simply putting together a series of snapshots of the world that, when taken together, make it appear that there is a passage of something that we call time.
I have struggled through Barbour’s book. One of those physicists, ofc, was Albert Einstein, who wrote the famous letter to his friend Bezo’s wife explaining that passing time was illusory. The idea, I suppose, is that all the instants all exist at once, but we perceive them as distinct because at any moment we are in only one of them. This is the Block Time referred to in Barbour’s book, The End of Time.
Hello Bob,
Interesting ideas here. Since I resonate more with Jung’s view of dreams and dreaming, I have some different ideas. I wouldn’t say that dream are “picture-like.” They are images, yes, but more like a movie than a picture and fleeting an sometimes difficult to remember. Your idea that in remembering a dream our conscious mind is actually constructing it like a memory is interesting. In trying to recall a dream and put it into words, our conscious mind, I believe, does also add things and interpret. However, that can be an interesting aspect of dream recall as well. We also have feelings in and about dreams that are important. Why would the “conscious part” of the brain want to tell the “unconscious part” to construct a narrative? Why would the “executive part of the brain” want to “check in” and “request changed narratives?” You say that it’s to predict behavior but I’m not sure how the conscious part telling the unconscious part what to do is going to inform the conscious part to predict behavior. Sounds like the ego trying to exert its influence over the unconscious to produce what it wants. Oh la la!!!
One of the phenomena that supports my suggestion about dreams is their malleability by the conscious mind. I have been trying experiments with this one waking. Interesting.
It’s more like a semiconscious “hmm?” a questioning. Akin to, “What’s happening here?” That we run scenarios in our heads to predict the immediate future is clear enough.
the ego trying to exert its influence over the unconscious to produce what it wants
interesting
Hi again Bob,
It also made me think of Henri Bergson’s idea that the brain and senses are basically like filters. Our “real” consciousness is much like those reported by NDEs, out of body experiences or psychedelics and mystical experiences of a oneness of consciousness. We tend to think, in our reductionist worldview, that the brain generates consciousness when really it’s that the brain is more like a radio receiver filtering out different frequencies. Our senses and brains do act as filters. For example, there are wavelength ranges that we cannot see and hear but still exist. So, I think that, underlying your ideas about time, memory and dreams, there is a wide field of consciousness studies out there that needs to be explored. 🙂
You’d better watch out
You’d better not cry
Better not pout
I’m telling you why
He’s making a list
And checking it twice
Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice
He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you are awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
Rooty-toot-toot
And rump-a-tum-tum
The diviners give us the sum…