EduShyster has developed a list of 10 signs of a real, true Transphormer. You know, the ones who are so motivated to arrange the lives of other people’s children that they can’t wait to get their parents’ okay. The ones who are so gripped by a sense of urgency that they feel called to close schools in poor communities and fire the staff without a moment’s delay, even though the students and parents beg them not to do it.
Archives for category: Administrators, superintendents
For more than a week in September, the nation was astonished to see thousands of Chicago teachers on strike.
The media treated it as an old fashioned dispute over wages and hours, which it was not.
Many of us who follow education issues knew that the teachers were striking against nearly 20 years of nonstop ill-considered “reforms” imposed on teachers by politicians and uninformed policymakers.
The bottom line: Enough is enough.
This excellent article explains the teachers’ strike and puts it into a larger context.
Marc Epstein is an experienced history teacher in NYC who holds a Ph.D. In Japanese history. When the Department of Education closed his historic high school (Jamaica High School), Marc joined the ranks of teachers who are assigned to different schools weekly. He has written many articles for Huffington Post and New York City dailies.
He writes:
The Myth Of The Empowered Principal
The “empowered” principal was supposed to be the agent of radical change for the New York public school system. With every passing day it appears that the empowerment model has resulted in the death of institutional memory, atomization, and the end of accountability for anyone above the level of principal.
You need look no further than the scheduling and staffing fiasco that enveloped the new multi-million dollar high school located in one of New York’s most stable middle-class neighborhoods. The school is only three years old and is already being administered by its second principal.
The trouble first began when the administration proved incapable of programming students into their required courses when it opened.
New York 1 (the local TV news station) reported that students complained that they had no science teacher, and were taught by rotating substitutes; “…they were handed new schedules, with different teachers and courses, almost once a week.”
http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/151185/doe-officials-try-to-address-queens-high-school-s-massive-scheduling-headaches
The deputy chancellor for instruction claimed that the problem was rare, but at the same time was kept busy fending off parent protests over the same problems at Long Island City High School just a few miles away. For those of you who are unfamiliar with New York, the schools are located in Queens, the borough considered to have the most functional schools in the massive school system in years past. But all that has changed.
There’s more to the Metropolitan High School story. Fixing a programming glitch is easy enough. All you need do is bring an experienced programmer on board.
The news stories about the scheduling snafu made no mention of the former principal’s pedagogical decision to enroll the freshman class in Physics, before taking Living Environment (biology), or Chemistry. Physics is considered the most difficult of the Regents science courses and is usually reserved for the most capable students in their junior or senior year.
What’s more, we have no idea if this foolhardy decision was reviewed and approved before its implementation. I’m told that she actually presented this radical reorganization of curriculum as a selling point when she applied to the job!
If you want to make sense of this administrative breakdown you need look no further than the resume of Metropolitan High School’s former principal.
Her entire teaching experience consisted of seven years of teaching, with only three of them in a public school setting. Prior to that she worked variously as a marine biologist, and educational consultant observing teachers in various settings for her father who was a retired principal.
http://www.timesnewsweekly.com/news/2010-03-18/Local_News/NEW_HS_LEADER______VISITS_FH_CIVIC.html
After that, it was on to the vaunted Jack Welch Leadership Academy established by Joel Klein, where graduates are molded to incorporate the ways of the business world into the management of schools. Think of it as a Wharton School for principals with a dollop of West Point discipline thrown in to keep teachers productive and in line.
This business model stresses teacher accountability based on a bottom line calculated by student test results. The institute purposely recruits candidates with minimal classroom experience, believing that experience outside of public education is preferential. So in this regard the Metropolitan High School principal fit the 21st century principal profile Mike Bloomberg wants running his schools.
But the evidence indicates that the principal wasn’t versed in the nuts and bolts aspect of the job that it takes to put a school together and run it. After watching events at the school unfold, I’m reminded of Donald Sutherland’s line to Robert Ryan after inspecting a line of soldiers arrayed in their spit and polish dress uniforms in the Dirty Dozen; “very pretty, colonel, but can they fight?”
That’s because the pre-Bloomberg route to the principalship of a new high school would involve years of seasoning in the classroom before a series of administrative jobs in the program office, the dean’s office, and as an assistant principal, before being given command of a school.
A school like the new Metropolitan High School would be handed to someone with twenty to twenty-five years experience in the system who had a proven record of successful supervision.
That principal would bring an experienced staff on board in order to ensure a successful shakedown cruise and hand off a functioning institution to the next principal some years down the line. Instead what we are witnessing is a new managerial class running schools aground on a regular basis.
Perhaps the most dramatic proof that principal “empowerment” is little more than managerial “newspeak,” is evident in the staffing crisis throughout the school system. That’s because the new business model actually constrains the principal’s ability to hire the best possible staff.
The so-called Bloomberg-Klein business model demands that teacher salaries come directly out of the school-operating budget. Under the old system a school was charged the same amount for a teacher line regardless of the teacher’s salary or seniority. This was a rational approach to staffing in a system of eighty thousand teachers and constant turnover.
But budget cuts to a system that has more than doubled its operating costs to over $22 billion dollars over the past ten years, have forced principals throughout the city to skimp on hiring qualified teachers while administrative costs have ballooned. The result has been the hiring of the cheapest day-to-day substitutes, many of whom aren’t certified to teach the courses they are covering, in lieu of using experienced teachers who are held in a reserve pool because their schools are either being closed or their student populations have dropped.
None of this makes any business or pedagogical sense to anyone but a willful mayor who seems only capable of demolishing what was once a functional system. Education has taken a back seat as the new school leaders ply the only trade they know by following Abraham Maslow’s maxim; “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
A question from a reader:
“Des Moines Iowa needs some advice.
“Des Moines superintendent candidates narrowed to 3″
” Carey Wright, chief academic officer of the District of Columbia Public Schools.”
Just minutes ago, I posted a strong letter from Superintendent Jeff Ramey, calling on parents and educators to support their schools and protest the budget cuts and tax caps that undermine them.
Carol Burris, an outstanding high school principal in Long Island, New York, responds here:
Superintendent Rabey,
I assure you, there are outraged New Yorkers all over our state.
Over 12,000 New Yorkers have signed the petition against high stakes testing http://roundtheinkwell.com/2012/12/29/petition-to-the-nys-board-of-regents-against-high-stakes-testing/ in two months. The Alliance for Quality Education has an Albany rally this month regarding funding. Over one third of all New York Principals signed a letter in opposition to APPR for the reasons that you mention. http://www.newyorkprincipals.org . The Niagara Regional PTA is proposing a resolution at the State PTA conference against high stakes testing. Schools Boards in Bedford and in New Paltz have passed their own resolutions.
The problem is that there is no state-wide coordinated effort and frankly a lack of courage to go beyond grumbling and resolutions into passive resistance and even active resistance. If you take your three key points–lack of funding, over testing, and state controlled teacher evaluations with test scores–and link them together, you have a powerful combination that many would support. Think about how much more funding there would be if all of the dollars going to testing and test prep and APPR went into classrooms in the schools that can no longer adequately serve their students?
I will hop on that bus anytime and I will bring others with me. In fact, you will have overwhelming support from principals and from rank and file teachers, though not necessarily from NYSUT, at least not on APPR.
Will you, however, get your colleagues to stop whispering their disgust at the Albany agenda and be willing to stand up against it?
Several years ago, death by lethal injection was brought to a halt in California, because anesthesiologists refused to participate. Courage, not compliance, is what is needed now.
Carol Burris
The San Diego school board has selected a highly respected, successful elementary school principal as its new superintendent.
Cindy Marten runs a terrific school that is child-centered and community-centered.
It is an exemplar of the San Diego concept of community-based school reform.
When I was in San Diego last year, the superintendent Bill Kowba made sure that I visited Cindy’s school to see what a great school in a diverse neighborhood looked like.
Cindy is an inspirational principal and she is a great choice for superintendent.
She knows what schools need and how to support schools and encourage collaboration among students, parents, communities, and educators.
What a breath of fresh air!
An experienced educator as superintendent.
In these times, that is truly innovative!
John Kuhn is a superintendent of a small district in Texas. He is also one of the most eloquent champions of students, teachers, and public education. With him on our side, we can’t lose.
Why doesn’t the media give him equal time with Michelle Rhee? He actually educates children. He changes lives. He is an educator.
This was his speech at the Save Texas Schools rally on 2/23/13:
http://www.texasisd.com/article_135671.shtml
John Kuhn’s Rally Speech
By John Kuhn – Supt
Feb 27, 2013, 08:39
Are there any teachers in this crowd?
I want to say something to teachers that our lawmakers should have said long ago: Thank You! Thank you for keeping our children safe. Thank you for drying their tears when they scrape their knees, for cheering on our junior high basketball players, for going up to your room on Sundays to get ready to teach my kids on Monday. Gracias por cuidarlos! As a dad, I thank you.
Coaches, thank you for fixing little girls’ softball swings and for showing our boys how to tie their ties. Thank you for getting our children safely home on the yellow dog after late ballgames, marching contests, and one-act plays.
Thank you for buying all those raffle tickets, hams, pies, discount cards, Girl Scout cookies, insulated mugs and pumpkin rolls, for buying more playoff shirts than any one person could possibly need and on top of all that spending your own money on pencils and prizes and supplies for your classroom.
There are those poor deluded souls who say you take more than you give, and I disagree with them with everything I am. Don’t let them get you down. They wouldn’t last a day in your classroom. You are NOT a drain on this economy; you are a bubbling spring of tomorrow’s prosperity. You’re a fountain of opportunity for other people’s children. As educational attainment goes up, crime, teen pregnancy, unemployment, and prison rates all go down. Squalor and ignorance retreat. Social wounds begin to heal. Our state progresses; our tomorrow brightens. What you do, teacher, is priceless. You don’t create jobs. You create job creators.
Some people don’t understand why you do what you do. They think merit pay will make you work harder, as if you’re holding back. They don’t understand what motivates you. They think the threat of being labeled “unacceptable” will inspire you to care about the quality of your instruction, as if the knowledge that you hold the future in your hands on a daily basis is not incentive enough.
Maybe these sticks and carrots work for bad teachers, but they only demoralize the great ones, and there are thousands and thousands and thousands of great teachers in our public school classrooms today.
Some people have forgotten that good teachers actually exist. They spend so much time and effort weeding out the bad ones that they’ve forgotten to take care of the good ones. This bitter accountability pesticide is over-spraying the weeds and wilting the entire garden.
You stand on the front lines of poverty and plenty, on the front lines of our social stratification. You are the people who shove their fingers into gushing wounds of inequality that our leaders won’t even talk about, and you aren’t afraid. You’re the last of the Good Samaritans, and you aren’t afraid, even as they condemn you for trying but failing to save every last kid in your classroom. You aren’t afraid, and you keep trying, and you haven’t faltered. You deserve to be saluted, not despised. You deserve to be acclaimed. You deserve so much more than the ugly scapegoating that privatizers peddle in the media and our halls of government.
Teacher, bus driver, coach, lunch lady, custodian, maintenance man, business manager, aide, secretary, principal, and, yes, even you superintendents out there trying to hold it all together—you serve your state with skill and honor and dignity, and I’m sorry that no one in power has the guts to say that these days. History will recognize that the epithets they applied to your schools said more about leaders who refused to confront child poverty than the teachers who tried valiantly to overcome it. History will recognize that teachers in these bleak years stood in desperate need of public policy help that never came. Advocacy for hurting children was ripped from our lips with a shush of “no excuses.” These hateful labels should be hung around the necks of those who have allowed inequitable school funding to persist for decades, those who refuse to tend to the basic needs of our poorest children so that they may come to school ready to learn.
They say 100,000 kids are on a waiting list for charter schools. Let me tell you about another waiting list. There are 5 million kids waiting for this Legislature to keep our forefathers’ promises. There are 5 million children, and three of them live with me, and they’re all waiting for somebody in Austin, Texas, to stand up for them and uphold the constitution. There’s a waiting list of 5 million kids and this government says they can just keep waiting. How long must they wait?
If you support public schools I want to tell you about a new website. Go to texaskidswaiting.com and add your child’s name to the public school waiting list, the list of kids waiting for this government to provide adequate school funding. That’s Texaskidswaiting.com.
Our forefathers’ promises must be kept. We want fair and adequate resources in our kids’ schools. We want leaders who don’t have to be dragged to court to do right by our children.
It’s not okay to default on constitutional promises. It’s not okay to neglect schools until they break, to deliberately undermine our public school. These traditional institutions have honorably served their communities for generations. It’s not okay to privatize a public school system that strong and generous people built and left to us; it’s not okay for Austin to confiscate buildings built by local taxpayers and give them away to cronies and speculators.
These buildings aren’t just schools, they’re touchstones. They’re testaments to our local values. The Friday night lights that have illuminated our skies for decades, the school gyms that have echoed with play since the Greatest Generation was young—these aren’t monuments to sports. They’re monuments to community. They’re beacons of our local control, of the togetherness we cherish in our hometowns and city neighborhoods. We don’t want education fads imposed on us by Austin or, even worse, out-of-state billionaires.
What we want is simple, tried, and true. We want what this state promised in 1876. And to those who want to take away that promise, I know some moms and trustees and local businesspeople who will say what brave Texans have said before: “Come and take it.”
Two years ago I asked state leaders to come to our aid; they responded by cutting school funding by billions. But help did come: it came from you. The people of Texas are the cavalry that will save Texas schools. Two years ago may have been the Alamo; but this year may well be our San Jacinto.
I will end by saying this to the advocates who are bravely defending public education: thank you. And one more thing: do not go gently into that good night. Stand and fight, and save our schools.
Thank you.
Jere Hochman, superintendent of the Bedford, New York, public schools wrote the following for his colleagues among NewYork superintendents:
“If you want to see Superman solve the problem of the day with the fix of the day, go to
the movies or buy a comic book. If you want to see a student motivated intrinsically with
drill-skill learning and a standardized test, go the DMV. If you want to make money off the
backs of kids, open a small business that sells video games, not tests.
If you want to see authentic learning, go to a public school where you will find a proud
principal who will gladly engage you in dialogue with professional teachers and introduce
you to remarkably dedicated staff members.
And then proceed to the entire school district where you will find a humble superintendent observing in schools, meeting with our citizens committee or civic partners, and planning with an elected board or district leaders; a superintendent who revels in the connections, the learning, and the organizational capacity to sustain success.”
Jere Hochman, superintendent of the Bedford Central School District in New York, has some excellent ideas for President Obama. Ten of them, to be exact.
He believes in putting first things first, in thinking clearly about what the federal role is and doing that role well. He believes in career professionals. He believes that the corporate types who think they know how to run the schools need a reminder that the factory model of the 1950s doesn’t work for them and doesn’t work for schools either.
Read and enjoy some good sense and good advice for the President.
An administrator in Louisiana writes about how the Jindal administration tries to strike fear in the hearts of all educators while boasting of their great success.
Dear Bridget, here is my advice: “Illegitimi non carborundum.”
Be there when their pathetic regime is toppled by the good and great citizens of Louisiana.
Bridget writes:
It definitely is getting more and more difficult for teachers to stay. As an administrator, I see the panic on their faces as the date of the state test looms closer each day. Here in Louisiana, our jobs are tied directly to their VAM score, which over-rides any evaluation score given to them by our team. As administrators, we do our best to help to empower them with information and resources, but it will never be enough. Our governor has set us up for failure. I often think about returning to my special education classroom to finish out my last five years before retiring. Then I realize there may not be a retirement system left in five years. The joke is on me. After dedicating my life to teaching, I will probably not have anything to show for it except memories and/ or nightmares. My starting salary years ago was around $13,000 a year. I definitely didn’t get into this career for the money. Thanks to this blog I stick it out. I now have a place to stay abreast of what is happening across our nation. Don’t know how long I can last… one day at a time. I agree with Jesse that it is unfair to leave in the middle of the school year.
