Schools Flush With Cash, Says Donald Trump

I'm sitting in an office at 7 AM by myself writing this. I do this because there's no one here at this hour. Sometimes I do planning at this time. No one bothers me because almost no one has to be here until 8. I keep ridiculous hours and may fall down and sleep at 8 PM. As chapter leader I actually have a shared office, but it's in a pretty noisy part of the building and kids are always walking in and out to talk to my office mate.

I spent 12 years teaching in a trailer. The first time, I got dumped there. But I couldn't help but notice it was a full-size classroom. This was an improvement from the half classrooms I'd been dumped in, and also from the bowling alley shaped converted custodian work spaces. It was an improvement on my room in the music wing where the guy next door blasted Flight of the Valkyries every single day. It was tough teaching English with that going on.

My school is now at 214% capacity, the most overcrowded in the city. That's because, believe it or not, community residents like us. I'm certainly grateful for that, because were that not the case, Bloomberg would have closed us down first chance he got. I'd be a wandering ATR, visiting schools all over the borough and reflecting on what it's like to be a teacher without a class. For the record, I love teaching but hate subbing. I would be one very unhappy ATR, even though it would give me a whole lot of primo blogging material.

Our PE teachers are gladiators, teaching up to 500 students a week. Some genius in Albany wrote a new requirement that makes it very tempting for principals to offer PE half time, and we of course are doing it. I have no idea how the teachers even learn anyone's name. I have no idea how on earth, other than who shows up, they are supposed to assess these kids. I'm sure there's some idiotic rubric somewhere with instructions for them to follow. I'm also certain it's written by someone who doesn't teach ten classes of fifty students a week.

In our school, what with being at 214% capacity and all, we can't actually fit all our PE classes in the gyms. So a whole lot of them are outside. Unless of course, it rains or snows, or is too cold to hold classes. In fact I've seen classes out there on very cold days. I've seen them out there in the dark. I wonder how many times Donald Trump Jr. had to run around in the dark. I'm guessing never.

Then there are the facilities we are forced to use. I've already mentioned the trailers and the odd shaped classrooms. I forgot the converted bookrooms with no windows, the half rooms in which cheating becomes a virtual national pastime, and the ones with windows overlooking the fragrant dumpsters.

And let's not overlook the oversized classes. Let's first establish that NYC has the highest class sizes in the state already. Then come to my school, bursting at the seams, where new kids walk in each and every day and administration simply cannot figure out how the hell to come into compliance. I'm trying to help, and I am getting very good support from UFT right now.

There's probably more to say, and I'm sure I'm living in the lap of luxury compared to Detroit, but I'll leave it at that. For Donald Trump to say schools are "flush with cash," I'd say he's delusional, but it's more likely he's just telling another ridiculous lie to justify his agenda, one in which reason and common sense play no part whatsoever.

You Will Differentiate Instruction the Same Way for Everyone

That seems to be the main thrust of the new grading policy. A big thing, for me at least, is the policy on what is and is not acceptable for participation. I had been doing precisely the thing that the DOE seems to loath—granting a participation grade at the end of each marking period. I essentially gave a positive grade for students who raised their hands and were active all the time, a negative grade for those who spent most of the time sleeping, and various degrees in between for others.

Now here’s the thing—DOE gives an example that you give credit each day when a student brings a pencil and notebook. That is, of course, measurable. It’s also idiotic, as it’s a preposterously low standard. I think the reason they gave that example was because it was very easy for them to think of. And thus, we part ways. I actually think about grades a lot. To me, bringing a pencil is only a marginal step above breathing.

But they don’t need to think about it. They just need to sit in air-conditioned offices and tell us what to do. Why bother considering the real lives of lowly teachers, let alone the students they ostensibly serve? Treat everyone the same.

So if someone places a student in my class, tells me she has a 70 IQ, and the girl looks appears so fragile that if you touched her she would break, well, rules are rules. If she doesn’t participate each and every day, screw her, she gets zero. If one of my students is from a country where they have classes of 50, if she’s been taught all her life to sit down and shut up, if she’s so painfully shy that she actually trembles when you ask her a question, give her a zero. Everything is black and white in the ivory towers of the DOE.

Your opinion cannot be quantified. Let’s say you teach strings. Let’s say one of your students comes in and plays a beautiful piece, with perfect vibrato. She makes you feel as though you have reached nirvana. I come in and scratch out something that sounds like I’m strangling a cat.

But we’ve both brought in our violins and cases, and how the hell are you gonna prove she plays better than me? Is it on the rubric? And who’s to say I didn’t find my own piece to be breathtakingly beautiful? Who the hell are you to judge me without a rubric? And if you do have one, and you tell me how badly I played, maybe I’ll just report your ass under Chancellor’s Regulation A-421, verbal abuse. You made me feel bad. So screw you too.

After all, the supervisors are using rubrics. They come in with that Danielson thing and check boxes. These boxes contain the evidence.  Plus they have notes. So who cares if the notes came from the voices in their heads and nothing they say actually happened? I’ve seen supervisors outright make stuff up.

So is that the solution to this ridiculous rule? Do we lie and say that students who didn’t participate did?

I have a disagreement with my co-teacher over what volunteering means. For her, it’s, “Did you raise your hand and get up and do something?” For me, it’s you, you, and you. Thank you for volunteering. I usually do that and call on everyone. Should they get less credit because I forced them to? Or should I wait and hope for the best? Here's another manner in which I part ways with the DOE--I'm willing to negotiate or discuss it. I don't just say, "Here's how we do it. If you don't like it, screw you." Because that's not how you work productively here on Planet Earth. 

Here’s what I think—I think if you’re a teacher you should have discretion. I think it’s ridiculous that everyone must be graded the same without exception. I think what’s excellent for me may be so-so for you. What if you’re the person who plays that violin like an angel? Do you seriously believe the Department of Education won’t place you in a class with a cat strangling, off-key person who can’t spit out a tune to save his life?

Oh, and your self-contained class must be held to the same standard as the gen. ed. class. The fact that there are only 15 kids is the accommodation. That’s it. The fact that the Regents exam holds them to a lower standard doesn’t mean you can because screw you. And screw the kid too. It’s no problem for the DOE, which is impeccable in treating everyone fairly.

And that class with the push-in ESL teacher? The one where everyone is learning about the Civil War for 40 minutes a day and the ESL students are supposed to be concurrently learning English? Too bad the native kids only need to learn about the Civil War. You need to learn both, in the same time, because screw you. NY State says that’s how we have to teach it and that’s the way it is. So screw you, and screw your students too, because you have to be fair but we don’t.

That’s what the new grading policy looks like to me so far.

Abstract Portrait of a Chancellor

There's an interesting piece in Newsweek today. It's written by Alexandar Nazaryan, and ostensibly about NYC Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña. Full disclosure--I have a little experience with Mr. Nazaryan. He edited an op-ed I placed in the Daily News when he worked there, and it was a bit contentious. I can be picky about my writing, as anyone with whom I've worked will attest. Nonetheless, we treated one another respectfully. There was no personal animosity when we finished working together, at least none on my part or that I'd heard about.

That's why I was pretty surprised when, on Twitter, for no reason I could determine, Nazaryan accused me of being a UFT mouthpiece:

@TeacherArthurG @KatieOsgood_ @leoniehaimson @DianeRavitch Last I remember, Arthur, you were shilling shamelessly for UFT. That still so?

— Alexander Nazaryan (@alexnazaryan) May 3, 2014

That's ironic, because I'm wholly confident UFT President Michael Mulgrew, among many others, would spring to my defense and tell the world I have been doing no such thing. As if that weren't enough, after my response to that absurd statement, Nazraryan saw fit to attack me personally:

@TeacherArthurG People like you are the reason teaching isn't respected more.

— Alexander Nazaryan (@alexnazaryan) May 3, 2014

Now that's not simply a personal attack. It also utilizes what you call a stereotype. You see, whatever I do, or have done, or whatever Nazraryan perceives me to have done, is then attributed to all teachers. We are, therefore, in his view, disrespected. This is the same sort of thinking bigots of all stripes use to insult people of a given religion, race, nationality, or ethnicity. So yes, I absolutely believe the writer is prejudiced against us, and we therefore need to question his assumptions very carefully.

De Blasio, after all, is a self-styled progressive who promised “transcendent” change, surrounding himself with youthful advisers minted in the Barack Obama mold. Fariña, meanwhile, was coaxed out of retirement.

Now it's entirely possible that Nazaryan simply forgot, while writing that particular sentence, that Fariña had worked for Bloomberg. And it's entirely possible that Nazaryan doesn't know that a whole lot of Bloomberg people are still sitting at the DOE.  But being that he's writing a piece about the chancellor, it kind of behooves him to know that, doesn't it? I mean, here I am, a lowly UFT shill, disrespected by all for reasons known only to Nazaryan, and even I know it. Here's how Fariña is seen, according to Nazaryan:

Some see her as a defender of teachers, others as the pawn of teachers unions. 

That's not much of a choice, is it? I see her as neither, and I'd argue that this is a black and white fallacy. Lots of teachers do not feel the love for Fariña, and don't see her jumping to our defense. She let Jamaica High School wither and die, she is not shy about removing and/ or firing teachers, and is much ballyhooed for having done so in her career as principal.

Nazaryan devotes a good deal of time to speaking about himself and his brief teaching career. Perhaps he feels that gives him some cred while writing about this. Who knows? What I do know is he has no idea how working teachers think or feel. Even in the piece, Nazaryan outs himself as a supporter of right to work with no respect whatsoever for our union:

I was once a member of a teachers union and have long lamented its moribund conception of the teaching profession. (I was not a fan of the mandatory membership fees extracted from my paycheck either.)

I actually wonder how on earth Newsweek can present this as a portrait of the chancellor, or why their editors, if indeed they have any, deem Nazaryan's feelings about labor unions germane to what is, supposedly, a piece about the chancellor. Nazaryan is also clueless about the recent teacher contract:

Fariña said sensible things—that she wanted to bring joy back to the classroom and earn the teachers’ trust (a generous new contract with the United Federation of Teachers has helped). 

In fact, the contract gives us the 8% over two years that FDNY and NYPD got, but we don't actually receive it until 2020, a full decade after they got it. It then goes on to give us 10% over seven years, the lowest pattern in my living memory, and for all I know, in the history of the City of New York.

Nazaryan is also less than opaque about his own feelings on charter schools.

Her “old-school” tendencies are also responsible, I suspect, for an outsized antipathy to charter schools, which she shares with the mayor. Charters are public schools, and Fariña could have embraced them as a small but critical component of the education system, one that does an admirable job of educating poor kids of color.

For Nazaryan, there's no question that charters do an admirable job, but there's also no awareness of the fact that they shed students at an alarming rate, dumping them back into public schools, not replacing them, and thereby increasing their test scores. There's no awareness that they rarely if ever take students like I teach, or those with severe learning disabilities. As far as I can tell, there's not even awareness that the state pretty much decreed NYC would have to pay rent on charters of which it didn't approve. There are also a whole lot of us who dispute the characterization of charters as public schools.

There are rambling paragraphs about Moskowitz, Rhee, and all the reformy things they've done, and or tried to do. Then there's this, the conclusion:

This state of affairs is unfortunate but not surprising. We are not a small, monocultural nation like South Korea, or an autocracy like Russia where a history textbook might fall victim to Kremlin diktat. In America, school reform will always be a Hegelian contest between clashing visions, frequently maddening, infrequently productive. It is the only way we know.

There are always clashing visions, but reforminess has thus far reflected mostly one, and that has been pretty much whatever Bill Gates placed his many dollars behind. Small schools, charters, VAM, Common Core, and other such things proliferate. Despite Nazaryan's conversations with Diane Ravitch and Patrick Sullivan, and despite his limited experience as a teacher, he has no idea what goes on in city schools.

From what I can glean here, Nazaryan has little interest in finding out.

A Lesson for Alec Baldwin

Alec Baldwin loves that propaganda film.  He says it's "monumentally important."  And he knows that, apparently, because he sat through the whole thing.  Baldwin seems to feel no one has ever made such a statement before.  This is particularly valid if you've ignored every identical statement, beginning with "A Nation at Risk," and haven't ever heard of obscure figures like Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, or the Walmart family.

Baldwin pulls no punches, telling it like he appears to believe it is:

Whether or not teachers' unions are partly to blame is open to discussion, but Guggenheim's film casts a light on that perspective. And once you get a peek at New York City's "Rubber Room" for outcast teachers, you may never view the NEA and the AFT the same way again.

This is a monumentally important film. My father was a public school teacher for 28 years and I can think of few other areas in our society that deserve this type of urgent scrutiny right now. See Guggenheim's film, which opens in theaters this weekend.

How does Baldwin suppose we will now view the NEA and the AFT?  Is he perhaps suggesting that viewing the defunct and therefore unviewable rubber room will somehow give us a positive impression of teacher unions?  That seems highly unlikely.  But not to Baldwin, whose follow up is decisively titled, "Raising Awareness of Flaws in Education is Not Union Bashing."

That's true, of course, but it certainly seemed Baldwin expected people to take a dim view of our unions.  By the way, promoting views that are anti-union, particularly when they're based on false premises, well, that is union bashing.   But Baldwin has harsh words for those with the temerity to refer to his union bashing as "union bashing."

If you read union bashing into that, then you have a problem. An education problem. 

Apparently, if you don't share the same views as Alec Baldwin, you aren't educated.  Oddly, I never learned that in school.

So let's review.  Baldwin said you may never view the unions the same way.  It's really hard to see how anyone could take anything but a negative view, given the evidently awful rubber room that Baldwin doesn't seem to know is closed.  Or perhaps, because his dad was a public school teacher, he feels he couldn't possibly be speaking against school teachers.  This cannot be questioned because no child in the history of civilization has ever had a harsh word for any parent, ever.

Still, it's ironic to be lectured about "an education problem" by someone who has not the remotest notion of what really goes on in NYC schools, someone who not only gets all his information from a propaganda film, but also appears to demand we all do likewise.

A Total Load

In a fascinating op-ed in the Daily News, "distinguished professor" William Ouchi lauds Chancellor Klein for reducing "total student workload" for busy city teachers. Apparently, city teachers can have up to 170 students if they have five classes of 34 kids. Ouchi has clearly done his homework in determining that five times 34 is 170. After that, however, Ouchi ventures onto ground that even I, lacking his apparent mathematical saavy, would not skate upon.

Ouchi says total student load is more important than class size, preposterously implying that the amount of students teachers have in classes does not impact the quality of education they receive. He fails to take into account the amount of personal attention kids get from teachers before they hand in their papers, something I, as a parent, am very interested in.

Ouchi suggests measuring a teacher's total number of students is "an almost entirely unknown measure of school performance," as though teachers have never considered it. Clearly Ouchi's responsibilities as "distinguished professor" preclude his taking one minute to speak to a single classroom teacher (the norm for many brilliant researchers, unfortunately). He also asserts classes are orderly, and schools are safer. Were my ESL students to write such things, I'd demand support, but Ouchi does not hold himself to such exacting standards.

Perhaps most outrageous, we're supposed to accept this as gospel based "a cluster of 42 schools"  in New York City.  We have no indication of the size of those schools, nor whether they received the preferential treatment that typifies the "academies" popping up where neighborhood schools used to be. We don't know how many teachers are deans, coordinators, or programmers two or three periods a day. We certainly don't know why Ouchi opts to make his conclusions based on the cluster, when figures for the entire city, flawed and juked though they may be, are available.

While class sizes are exploding in NYC, it's blatantly preposterous to assert teachers have fewer students by any measure. Perhaps it's nice to be a tenured professor and spout such plainly absurd gobbledygook rather than teach five classes. But the overwhelming majority of real city teachers teach those five classes (and that doesn't count the sixth class, the one the UFT claims is not actually a class).

Ouchi can say whatever he wishes, of course. He can talk about "total student load" and ignore class sizes, which have risen, particularly during the last year, despite Tweed's acceptance of hundreds of millions for reduction. He can ignore the failure and delay of new schools to relieve overcrowding,

Certainly Ouchi can pat himself on the back if he really believes no one has ever before conceived of "total student load. " But I work with real teachers every day, and just about every working teacher is pointedly aware of it. Ouchi can assert averages based on his small hand-picked cluster, but it's fairly simple to deduct precisely Ouchi's research is a total load of.