Marc Epstein taught at Jamaica High School in NYC for many years. He has a Ph.D. In Japanese history.
Since his school started closing, he has taught in many of the city’s schools.
He writes:
What Ever Happened To In Loco Parentis?
Well, another June another student field trip drowning. But this time around the schools chancellor has assured us that there were a sufficient number of chaperones and signed consent slips from the parents. Case closed.
That the chaperones failed to carry out their duties, that field trips of this sort during the last days of school especially when children are so much harder to supervise and control should not be permitted, seemed not to cross Chancellor Walcott’s mind.
When Nicole Suriel drowned during her class outing in June of 2010, there was only one teacher on that ill-fated excursion. The students lacked parental consent, and the required number of adults to supervise the trip was never checked. But in the era of mayoral school control supposedly based on business model accountability introduced by our entrepreneurial mayor, not a single supervisory official lost their job. The hapless first year probationary teacher took the fall instead.
When I attended New York’s public schools a similar incident never would have occurred because these kinds of trips were forbidden in June. At least that was way it used to be when the putatively dysfunctional pre-Bloomberg Board of Education ran the show.
So I queried my friends, and they had no memories of such an occurrence during our public school years. Neither do we recall the teacher-student sexual abuse scandals that explode on the front pages of the tabloids with regularity.
But times change, people change. There was a time when the responsibility of the school to act in place of the parent, “In loco parentis,” was taken with the utmost seriousness. But that no longer seems to be the case.
This breakdown in decorum, competence, morality, common sense, and accountability is no accident. And it’s not the fault of an amoral hidebound teacher’s union defending the indefensible either.
If you look at the articles that detail these incidents you’ll discover that most of the accused employees were hired during Mayor Bloomberg’s watch!
Don’t go looking for editorials demanding that the mayor enforce a more rigorous hiring standard for teachers and their supervisors. You won’t find any.
Don’t go looking for any investigative reporting on who hired the people who’ve been charged with sexual misconduct. You won’t find anything about that either.
Instead of real reporting you get manufactured stories coordinated with the publisher of the Daily News, Mort Zuckerman, and former CNN and NBC reporter Campbell Brown.
Zuckerman was raised and educated in Canada, and Brown was raised and educated in elite schools in Louisiana. I can assure you that they have greater familiarity with the menu at Per Se than they do with hiring and management practices of the New York City school system.
That hasn’t deterred Brown, who now flacks for Students First, a front organization funded by the mayor himself, from joining the fray as a well compensated “concerned parent.”
The result is Big Lie journalism, a form of journalism that was heretofore associated with totalitarian regimes that believed that the truth was what they said it was.
Another characteristic of our Orwellian city is the mayor’s claim that we now have a government that demands and gets accountability.
In fact, gentle reader, it’s really quite the opposite. It’s all counter-intuitive you see. If you work within the school system you find that there is no accountability above the level of the classroom teacher.
And it’s not exclusively about the non-existent hiring standards that have allowed these awful sexual predators a perch in the classroom.
Just spend some time in the schoolhouse and you notice the molded ergonomic chairs that are cracked and missing arms before they’ve seen their fifth birthday.
I’ve been to about 30 schools over the past two years and can attest that I’ve yet to see a school where these chairs are still in l one piece. When I first started working in the schools almost two decades ago our furniture dated back to the 1920s but it was still in tact.
This past term I taught in a state of the art, drop-dead gorgeous building that opened four years ago. It provided all a teacher could ask for, but when you looked at the pneumatic door closers on the classroom doors you noticed that they were all leaking. Those plastic chairs were broken too.
I like to talk to the workers in the school cafeteria and custodial staff. You get to know a great deal more about the schools’ operation that way. They complained about the lids for re-heating the food that were supposed to be aluminum but were really aluminum colored plastic. The result was they melted all over the food. That never happened in the bad old days.
Another food service worker told me about the commercial rolls of foil that ran out too quickly because they were three pounds lighter than they were supposed to be. That never happened in the bad old days either.
I asked someone in the food vending business to estimate the costs, and he told me that it comes to about $4.50 per roll of missing foil. That doesn’t mean a heck of a lot, to borrow a phrase from The Pajama Game, but 3,000 rolls a week used citywide over thirty-five weeks a year? You do the math.
Last week I made a point of attending my old school’s penultimate graduation ceremony. Jamaica High School, which survived for 121 years, won’t survive the mayor’s ordered closing of the school next year, unless a new mayor grants a reprieve. In the name of accountability this school must die.
You wouldn’t know it from listening to the speeches of our students, many of whom are new arrivals to this country. They were proud to be Jamaica High School graduates, and none of the phony numbers about a failed school could convince them otherwise.
Nancy Giles of the CBS Sunday Morning was the keynote speaker. She wanted to know what the four small schools that are taking Jamaica’s place in the building are accomplishing that couldn’t be accomplished by Jamaica High School? Giles graduated in 77’.
The answer is nothing. If anything, student life, schools sports, the arts and music have suffered with the atomization of the comprehensive high schools.
As I walked into the building through the rear parking lot I noticed that the heavy fire doors that were installed less than two years ago were painted gold metallic. When I spied the bottom of the doors I noticed that the metal had already rusted out and the paint job was an attempt to camouflage the rot.
The brand new rusted doors are the metaphor for mayoral control. I’d like to see Mort Zuckerman deploy his very competent education reporters to investigate these items; just who got the contracts and pocketed the profits, but don’t hold your breath.
That’s because the movers and shakers know that what used to be a “public” that had to be answered to in New York City no longer exists.
This is a city of immigrants – a new peasant class that can be easily ignored. When a school child of Dominican immigrants drowns in Long Beach, or a child of Haitians drowns in Bear Mountain Park, the establishment has little to fear from middle class articulate parents demanding answers and true accountability.
All you need do is gin-up the attacks on the teaching profession and claim that you can turn education around by giving their kids school choice and ridding the city of public schools, and never lose a night’s sleep.
