Klein and Co. have been in the news a lot recently, holding a big bouquet of flowers out to the public but I've always wondered what's in that hand he keeps behind his back. So, I took a stab at writing another op-ed for the NY Times last week. They passed on it, so I'm "publishing" it here. Reading it today, I have to say that I'm not terribly surprised they passed. Which is not to say that I have second thoughts about anything I wrote here. I think the tone might be a bit too harsh, not tempered with enough humor or irony. The original version was three times as long as much meaner and bitterer, I'll keep that version to myself.
* * *
In September the Regional Superintendents’ offices will be closed and I can say, without reservation, that I won’t miss them. I can’t imagine that I will even notice that they are gone. I have taught in the city’s public schools since 1999, and cannot recall ever receiving help, aid, assistance, mentorship or advice from anyone from the regional office. The Queens office that gave me my first full-time job couldn’t even tell me which subway went to Far Rockaway.
A few years ago I was working in a small school in the Bronx that had recently been created out of the ashes of a SURR school, a school which didn’t adequately improve its students scores on standardized math and reading tests, and was therefore “closed” and “re-organized,” meaning the staff were re-interviewed, re-hired, and sent back to work in a school with a new name. Among other interventions, the region hired a consultant to try to bring our test scores up, in order to keep us from returning to the SURR list. One morning I overheard her speaking to someone in the teacher’s lounge.
“Tell me how the new Impact Math program is working out,” she said.
“Well, the truth is that the word problems in the Impact program are way outside of my student’s reading ability, so now I’ve been working on some basic math skills in order to work back up to the Impact program.”
“Okay, but the region had mandated the Impact Program, so I’ll ask you again, ‘How is the Impact math program working out?’”
You wouldn’t want to hear your doctors talking this way, or your mechanics, but this was typical of the relationship between teachers and the region. On the rare occasions that they spoke, they spoke different languages. The common wisdom was that as long as every kid was sitting at a desk, with a book open, you were okay.
Maybe because I has figured out the seated kids with books trick, the suits in the regional office never affected what or how I taught. So it’s hard for me to see their disappearance as an improvement. It’s like giving me the cure to a disease that I would never catch- hoof and mouth disease or something. According to Klein’s reorganization plan, next year schools will be cut free from meddlesome overseers, free to either work as they please or form partnerships with not-for-profit learning organizations. IBM has been contracted to provide a 80 million dollar new “Accountability and Innovation System” to track individual student achievement on standardized tests, and share information on teaching methodologies that positively impact tests scores.
How they mean to record and transmit a teachers' lessons remains unclear, but what is certain is that this will open the door to both school empowerment and school privatization. The current administration has made no secret of their enthusiasm for for-profit charter schools. Bloomberg has threatened to target any legislator who doesn’t support more charter schools. Klein declared, “I am an unalloyed supporter of charter schools.” The former president of Edison Schools is now a deputy chancellor in the Department of Education.
Ultimately, a school, whether public, private, charter, partnered with not-for-profit or for-profit organizations, in order to remain in business, has to help its students pass their state-mandated standardized tests. Last month, despite the intervention of numerous organizations including Columbia University, Teach for America, and Klein’s own Leadership Academy my old school was put back on the SURR school list. I don’t see any guarantee that empowerment, partnership, or anything else on the menu will turn around a failing school since none of these innovations address the complaints that teachers have long made regarding the difficulties of teaching in high-poverty, high-need schools: high turnover and disruptive student behavior. In 2004, when the city council passed the “Dignity for All Students Act,” an attempt to identify and track the students who contribute to the hostile environment that cripples so many of the city’s classrooms, it was vetoed by the Mayor.
Demolishing the Regional Offices is like blowing the dust off an old pick-up. If the common sense and wisdom of all the teachers in New York continues to be ignored, I don’t care who looks under the hood- the old thing will never run again.
Recent Comments