To DA or Not to DA

Gosh, I don't know what's going on with me. I'm coming up with all kinds of crazy ideas this year. First it's subversive activity like explicitly teaching correct grammar. Now, I'm thinking about becoming a union delegate. I've never been deeply involved with the union before, and I'm not sure what has changed, but I'm interested, at least.

My new school's old delegate doesn't want the job anymore because she's about to have a baby, so the position is open. Our CL is looking for volunteers, and maybe it's just me feeling like I need to get out of the house more or see the UFT in action up close (whatever that may look like), but I kind of want to do it.

Sure, it's not the UN. Then again, it's not like the UN appears to be accomplishing much these days anyway. I'm not under the illusion that I'm going to go all Norma Rae all over the DA or anything; I just see it as a learning and serving and networking opportunity. That seems not so bad.

The readership's opinions on this would be most welcome. Any delegates out there willing to share their experiences, good or bad? Any pitfalls of which I should be aware? My CL told me it's just going to the DA once a month; is that really all there is to it?

Take Heart

Everyone is talking to me about the nonsense spewing forth from Oprah, from the propaganda film, from the mayor.  Yesterday morning, driving to work, I heard Bloomberg saying teachers need to be paid like professionals.  This from the man who just unilaterally announced that teachers, unlike all other city workers, were not going to get any raise whatsoever this bargaining cycle.  Of course the mayor was talking about merit pay, which was pretty handily discredited in a very recent Tennessee study.

Then there's NBC's preposterously named Education Nation, which presents the status quo from those with money, and then offers the status quo from those with power, so as to present both sides.  Diane Ravitch?  Never heard of her.  Let's have Michael Bloomberg give another speech about how awful the teachers are.  When his test scores appeared to have risen, it was attributable to the sheer brilliance of his "reforms."  When the state put a sharp pin in his bubble, it was time once again to talk about the teachers.

What can you say about a nation that ignores the foibles of the Wall Street crowd that tossed the entire economy in the toilet, and then relies on those same incompetents to bolster its education program?  What can you say about a nation that not only allows them to do that, but also permits them to do so by vilifying its hard-working teachers, the ones that have spent decades working for substandard pay in good times to teach their children?  Well, not the children of the Wall Streeters, but rather your children and mine.

You can only know that what you do is very important.  You can know that your job is the most important one there is as far as children are concerned, with the possible exception of doctors.  You can know that for every kid with negligent parents, you are that kid's next best chance.

Know that people who mindlessly direct their venom at teachers are no better than bigots, spewing idiotic stereotypes, and that this applies no matter how much money those people have.   Know that the man who brought the world Windows 95 doesn't know beans about education, hasn't the remotest notion it entails anything more than test scores, and know that his sorely limited vision failed to persuade voters in either NYC or DC.

You can't fool all of the people all of the time.  Demagogues fall.  Take heart.

But don't go gently into that good night.  Make yourself heard.  Write a letter to the paper.  Find out who the troglodyte was who wrote that editorial and give him a call.  Submit an op-ed to one of the papers.  Even if they don't print it, they'll read it.  And for goodness sake, feel free to comment here any old time.

Your pal,

NYC Educator

Creative Subversion; Or, How to Teach Writing Mechanics Without Really Trying

I engaged in a little creative subversion at my new school recently. I decided to do something that's JUST. NOT. DONE anymore. I decided to do something so unpopular, so controversial, indeed so dangerous, that it might have cost me my rating.

Yes, that's right. I taught a lesson on writing mechanics.

I photocopied handouts with rules. I circled mistakes on students' papers. I made them write down proper usages of punctuation marks. I did all that and so much more.

And it felt GOOD.

In fact, I bookmarked some EXERCISES in a WORKBOOK that I might photocopy and make my students do.

How about THAT?

I know. I'm a terrible teacher. I'm supposed to assume that my students will magically figure out the rules of the conventions of the English language simply by being wide-eyed ingenues before the great literature of the world and writing about their lives, this despite the fact that relatively few of them have learned any great life lessons at their tender ages. This is what I'm supposed to do.

But some things have changed. I'm at a new school in which, against all reason, the administration seems to trust me to teach students things that they ought to know. That helps, but more so than that, I have realized that teaching usage conventions the stupid way has produced, for me, fifteen-year-olds who can't use commas properly and aren't even sure what they are. So I'm going to teach them. Because that's what I do. Ignorance is not bliss.

Jeez, what will I do next? Make everyone in the class read the same story? Force kids not to copy research reports from Wikipedia? STOP ME BEFORE I TEACH AGAIN!

Chancellor Klein Blogs Waiting for Superman

I'm shocked that the petty, stupid, lazy teachers in my employ see this brilliant new film as an attack on teachers.  It's nothing of the sort.  It's a work of art in which teachers are highly revered.  Of course, I'm not talking about the teachers in the schools I run.  They are a bunch of whining fussbudgets.

With them, it's always, "Oh, I have to follow the contract, and you can't put more than 50 kids in that music class, and how come I don't get a raise just because every other city employee got one?"  I mean, have you ever heard anything so juvenile?  Just because PERB insisted they take the city pattern when it was crap is no reason we have to offer it when it's attractive.   And then they have the audacity to whine this filmmaker doesn't like teachers.

30 years after President Reagan introduced A Nation at Risk, we're spending a whole lot more money and accomplishing nothing whatsoever.  For example, all the test scores that we've been boasting about since we got into office turned out to be total crap, but does that suggest we shouldn't plod blindly ahead with our bold agenda?  Of course not!  And thank goodness we have visionary filmmakers like Davis Guggenheim who neither follow local news nor amend their brilliant works of art to reflect our miserable test scores or the overwhelming rejection our ideas by both NY and DC voters.


Of course this wonderful film is not anti-teacher.   And it certainly shows that there are both good charters schools and bad charters schools.  There are all sorts of charters schools.  I love charters schools.  Charters schools are all about giving parents choices  Every parent should have the choice to enter a lottery and try to get admission to a charters school. As the movie points out, one in five charters schools are really good.  So if they win the lottery, they get a one in five shot at getting into a good charters school.  Those are pretty good odds for poor people.   It's one in five multiplied by whatever the chance of winning the lottery is.  What more could a bunch of poor people want? 

Let me tell you something, I've had it up to here with those whining teachers, with their contracts and their lunch periods and their health benefits whining to me that all schools ought to be good.  Sometimes I think those English teachers read Candide and don't even know it's parody.  This is not the best of all possible worlds, folks.  It's New York friggin City, fer cryin' out loud!  Jeez, I close schools all over the place, and when the new ones don't work I close them too.  It's not my fault if kids still fail tests after I move them into new schools!  That's why teachers need more accountability.

Anyway, just like in the charters schools,  I want to empower public school teachers.  Let them take the initiative, put on hardhats, let them spend weekends, summers and nights building the new schools if they really want to do something more than complain.  After all, I give them 110 dollars a year for teacher's choice and they can do whatever they want with that money! Why are they always coming to me, with oh, my building is overcrowded, falling down, and oh, I want a classroom instead of a closet, the place is filthy, and oh, there are bedbugs on the carpet the kids sit on when I read to them from my rocking chair?  Do they thank me for buying them the rocking chair?  Of course not! Why can't they pick up a vacuum, or buy a can of Raid, or do whatever it takes?  Geoffrey Canada does whatever it takes.  If he has to dismiss an entire grade to get the grade, he does it!   If it weren't for those darn contracts, public schools could do that too.

But the public school teachers just blather on, expecting me to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars I got to reduce class size on reducing class sizes.  So what if I raised them instead?    Anyway, we just created 3,000 seats in Queens alone.  If we do that every year for ten years, and the population doesn't go up, we'll be caught up in just a few brief decades.  If you think about how long ago dinosaurs roamed the earth, what's thirty lousy years?  Jeez, can't those teachers just sit in their cramped rooms and shut up, for the love of Mike?  Don't they know we're building a hundred million dollar charters school for Geoffrey Canada, who does whatever it takes?  

Let me tell you something, the guy who made the Superman film and I have the greatest respect for those who teach children.  He doesn't hate those fat, lazy, overpaid miserable public school teachers, neither do I, and if they think we do, they're a bunch of malodorous paranoid lunatics.  I call on the unions to abandon their contracts and let me pay them whatever I feel like.  I'm a nice guy.  They can trust me.  They think I don't care but it isn't true.  I care a lot and that's why I want them to work whenever I say, for whatever I pay.  Because it's all about the kids and that's the only fair way to do it.   When the kids grow up they can work for me too, maybe even in a charters school that does whatever it takes.  Look, let's face it, all the schools I run are pretty awful and if I can't fire the teachers every time people complain, sooner or later people are gonna start blaming me.  Maybe during our fifth or sixth term people will start pointing fingers at us, no matter what the editorials at the New York Post say.

That's just unacceptable.  After all, kids can't afford to pay union dues and their parents can't afford to send them to elite private schools like the ones my kids and the mayor's went to.  What?  You don't think we're gonna send our kids to crappy public schools or dehumanizing charters schools, do you?

Finally, to help kids all over the city, I'm cutting school budgets 2.7%, on top of the cuts I already made.  This tough love will teach them to do whatever it takes.  Also, next year I'm probably gonna lay off teachers even though they haven't gotten a raise or a contract.  Fortunately, in the charters schools, contracts are not an issue since we can fire people whenever we feel like it.  That's just one  reason we need more charters schools.

My Favorite Quote...

...from Chancellor Joel Klein's review of Waiting for Superman...

It also recognizes that there are good charters schools and bad charters schools.

Sorta adds a whole new dimension to the "charters schools" discussion.  More tomorrow.

De Duva

Wacky parody of an art film.  I think it's Madeline Kahn's film debut.  Very funny and worth a look:

Not Insane!

That was a tagline for a politician in a strange Firesign Theatre political ad.  But it might be Andrew Cuomo's strongest selling point.   Now I don't much like Andrew Cuomo, and if you want to know why you can read my buddy Reality Based Educator, who will give you chapter and verse.  Basically, though, I've decided that any politician who doesn't support teachers won't be getting my vote.  For starters, I've crossed Obama and Cuomo off my list.

On the other hand, billionaire GOP pick Paladino runs around saying, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore."  Thus, he models himself after Howard Beale of the film Network.  Here's the thing, though--Howard Beale was clearly in the throes of losing his mind.   He announces he plans to commit suicide on the air, and that's not precisely what I look to in a leader.  That doesn't apply, I suppose, to people who are literally ready to drink the Kool Aid.

Are New Yorkers ready?  Well, if they actively support Paladino, I'd say yes.  In fact, you only have to look to Darkest New Jersey, where they saw fit to elect Christie, to see the sort of thing teachers can expect from our pal Paladino.  And that would give me pause if I weren't convinced that Andrew Cuomo would be just as bad.   Cuomo is creepy and opportunistic.  But to me, he doesn't appear insane.

Still, if I were to vote for him, I'd be granting credence to the Firesign Theater well beyond what their parody envisioned.  I'm afraid I can't vote for Andy simply because he's not insane.  If he wants my vote, he's gonna have to start acting the way Democrats acted before they all morphed into Hopey-Changey empty suits.

"Missing a Day of School Is Like Missing a Day's Pay": Moms, Repeat This

So says some brochures in my school's guidance office to encourage good attendance. It's true, even beyond its metaphorical truth: attendance is an excellent predictor of Regents and SAT scores, on-time graduation, and advancement to higher education. Sure, it seems like a no-brainer to us adults, but some kids are still genuinely shocked when this revelation comes to them.

I decided to take this line one step further and use it on a recalcitrant student of mine that I'll call Ross. Ross seems to be a good sort at heart, not a bad kid at all, but a kid much more inclined to spend his in-school hours dozing and his out-of-school hours talking to girls, playing video games, and, um, also dozing. I believe him when he claims to be popular with the ladies: he's nice-looking and well-dressed, and his sleepy charm might be cute to a 15-year-old girl. But all of these stellar qualities that Ross possesses nevertheless do not serve him well in the classroom, so I had to give him a pep talk.

"You know, Ross, it's great that you're here every day," I told him. "Good attendance is really important. But now that you're here, you have to do work. I mean, you wouldn't just show up at a job and sit down and do nothing, and expect to get paid, would you?"

Ross looked at me with sleepy eyes, not defiantly, just quizzically.

I soldiered forth. "So you sitting here and doing nothing is like going to work and doing nothing. So you don't get paid, and there's no payoff academically."

"But I don't get paid here," he pointed out, this seeming to him to irrefutably seal the argument. "Where's my paycheck?"

"It comes later," I explained. "When you're able to get into college because you did well in high school, and when you're able to get a much better job because you went to college, you'll make more money."

"You only have to graduate from high school to become a garbage man," commented Hector, who sits behind Ross. "That's what I'm going to do."

"That might be true," I said, "but right now the city might have to lay off lots of workers." ("Have to" is relative, I know, but for the purposes of this discussion, play along.) "And that means, in the future, they might not hire as many trash collectors. So then where will you be?"

"I'll just live with my mom," Hector said.

"Me too," Ross added.

Moms of New York City, this is what your children are thinking. I need YOUR help to get this thinking out of their heads. After all, they won't be living with me until they're 47.

Oopzie!

Talk about your embarrassing errors.   Joel Klein and his merry band of Tweedies have ordered a bunch of high school kids to go back to junior high.  It wasn't their fault, of course.  Nothing ever is.

I've got a new high-schooler right downstairs, and I do not wish to ponder the sort of anguish such a recall would call her.  She's involved in after-school activities, is making new friends, and making decisions about her classes.  She has deemed her math classmates "a bunch of idiots."  Imagine how she'd feel if all those idiots got to see her very public demotion.

That's a hard pill to swallow.  Who, at Tweed, is accountable for putting these kids through this ordeal?  Judging from the story, that would be precisely no one.  They defend the decision, calling it "fair."  Of course, Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg send their kids to private schools with small class sizes precisely so they won't have to suffer through such nonsense.   Heads would roll, checkbooks would close, administrators would be repeatedly and gruelingly taken to task.

Unfortunately for these ex-ninth graders, in the public schools this is just another day in Mayor Bloomberg's New York. 

Some Schools Are More Equal than Others

You know, I'm happy for the kids at Renaissance Charter School. Why shouldn't I be? Though their school is new and untested (in all senses of the word), they certainly seem to have a lot going for them. I'm sure that their teachers are bright and dedicated, their parents hopeful, and their administration tough-minded but ambitious. Really. I'm not being sarcastic. I wish them all the best.

My opposition to charter schools isn't really opposition. I'm not opposed to their existence. Charter schools, as they were originally imagined, were meant to be lab schools that took on difficult challenges in education and aimed to serve historically underserved children and families in new ways. Charter school work was always going to be hard, and for the people who felt they could do it, all the best. The more I hear about charters, though, like that which I heard from an acquaintance of mine who quit her brand-new job at a charter school when she was told she'd have to paint her own classroom, the more I'm convinced that it's not for me, as I tend to draw the line on my working week at 50 or 60 hours. But anyway, no, I've never believed that charters, in and of themselves, are the problem.

The problem, as Michael Fiorillo and others point out, is that where we seem to be going with charters is a two-tier, separate and unequal school system. Kids in charter schools get three and four teachers to a class, as they do at Renaissance, or upscale snacks and lunches as they do at the Harlem Success schools. And God bless those children, they deserve it, every bit of it. But my question is simple: Don't all children deserve that, not just the lucky few in charter schools?

Teach for America's mission, lest we forget, is (was, perhaps) a simple one: One day, all children will receive an excellent education. You know what? That's a decent mission. What's not a decent mission is chronically expanding the mission of public schools while simultaneously shrinking their resources. What's not a decent mission is blaming public school teachers for not saving the world in their under-60-hour-work-week because we hope to be able to do this for many more years, not burn out in a few like most charter school teachers (sad to say, but true). What's not a decent mission is expecting us to be everything from social workers to parents to dieticians to nurses while still hoping we can somehow squeeze some teaching in there.

What's not decent is perpetuating, purposefully, in system in which only the lucky kids get the perks. Public education is supposed to change that, not let it go on. Some schools should not, in fact, be more equal than others.

Ship of Fools

There's something symbolic about an organization like Education Nation, sponsored by NBC News, and anchored by BrianWilliams (who thinks it's his duty to listen to Rush Limbaugh).

Education Nation managed to put together a panel, publicly boast about it, and fail to show the remotest awareness it hadn't included a single teacher.  Over on Facebook they're facing a barrage of comments from people who've noticed what they've overlooked.  Here's their panel, though the last time I looked they seem to have honed it down, perhaps in response to the dozens of commenters who noted how one-sided it was:

Participants in the Education Nation Summit will include:


•Michael Bloomberg: Mayor, City of New York
•Geoffrey Canada: CEO & President of Harlem Children's Zone Project
•Arne Duncan: US Secretary of Education
•Byron Garrett: CEO of the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA)
•Allan Golston, President, US Program, The Gates Foundation
•Reed Hastings: Founder & CEO of Netflix
•Walter Isaacson: President & CEO of the Aspen Institute
•Joel Klein: Chancellor of New York City Schools
•Wendy Kopp: CEO and Founder of Teach for America
•John Legend: Musician; Founder of the Show Me Campaign
•Gregory McGinity: Managing Director of Policy, The Broad Education Foundation
•Bill Pepicello, Ph.D.: President of University of Phoenix
•Sally Ride: First Female Astronaut; Vice-chair of Change the Equation
•Michelle Rhee: Chancellor, District of Columbia Public School System of Washington, D.C.
•Margaret Spellings: Former US Secretary of Education
•Antonio Villaraigosa: Mayor, City of Los Angeles, California
•Randi Weingarten: President of American Federation of Teachers (AFT-CLO)

The last entry, perhaps, was a reluctant concession to the fact that teachers actually exist.  Of course, Ms. Weingarten also saw fit to invite Bill Gates to be the keynote speaker at the AFT convention, so perhaps she merited Bill's stamp of approval.  However, the AFT was also a prime contributor in unseating Michelle Rhee's boss.  With Rhee on the way out, and a slew of "reform" candidates just having lost at the polls last Tuesday, you'd think NBC would crawl on hands and knees to recruit Diane Ravitch, Leonie Haimson, Patrick Sullivan, or some other sane, knowledgeable person representing what actually happens in public schools.

No such luck.  After all, MSNBC is half Microsoft, and why should they speak up about anything of which Bill Gates does not approve?   If they aren't kowtowing to Gates, the Education Nation staff is uniquely unqualified to discuss education, let alone compose a panel.  The CEO of Netflix?  John Legend?  Why not Lady Gaga and the Spice Girls?  Why not Otto from Otto's Deli? What about the Archies?  Sure, they're cartoons, but they know as much about education as John Legend.

This is a one-sided hatchet job.  It's disgraceful and un-American that they'd set up a panel to whore the corporate agenda favored by Gates, Broad, and the Wal-Mart family.  It's chilling to imagine that a journalism organization could be so woefully uninformed that no one working there knows there is a reality-based side to this equation.

At times like these I recall being in East Berlin in 1984, where they sold Pravda on every street corner.  No one bought it, of course.  Sadly, with the advent of Fox News, the so-called "Education Nation," and the other nonsense taking place these days, we're not only buying it, but accepting it.

It's time to educate Americans, and it's time we realize the crisis is not in the classroom, but in the woefully inept media, typified by the clueless "Education Nation."

I've Never Trusted in the Kindness of Strangers

Despite the dearth of Christmas cards I get from 52 Broadway, I always want the UFT to be right.   Sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren't.  I have grave doubts about the new teacher evaluation system being piloted in "transformation" schools, and likely coming to yours and mine next school year.

If I understand it correctly, 20% of your rating will depend on some sort of standardized test.   Perhaps the "Race to the Top" funds, the ones that can't be used to hire teachers, lower class sizes, or raise teacher salaries, will be used to design such tests.  And, as experience shows, it's entirely likely the tests will be total crap, measuring nothing whatsoever.  Another 20% of your rating would be dependent on some sort of school-based assessment, perhaps a test you write.  I'm fairly confident many, many students will show enormous gains on such tests, unless you happen to work for a principal keen to have his school closed down and lose his job.

The other 60%, of course, would come from observations, portfolios, or who knows what else, so you'll get the same fair shake from administration you've come to know and rely upon.   Or at least, you'll get an equally fair shake.   The big question, of course, is whether or not this system is better than the one that preceded it.  Of course you could have been screwed by your principal under the old system.  Will this one help?

It's a tough call.  A determined principal could certainly give someone out of favor the worst kids in the school, pretty much condemning said teacher to poor standardized scores.    And this same principal could base the other 60% on this 20.  After this happens two years in a row, that teacher would be toast.

Am I saying all principals are like that?  Of course not.  But however many there are, if you happen to work for one, it's a serious issue.  Could such things have happened under the current system?  Yes, but the principal did not necessarily have the standardized test data to back it up.

Naturally I hope for reasonable, fair principals.  But with Joel Klein running Tweed and churning out principals from his Leadership Academy, I'm not nearly as sanguine as I'd be if, say, a reasonable, realistic and experienced person, perhaps one with a background in education, were Chancellor.

Making it Work (Without ARIS)

Teachers are an ingenious lot, that's for sure. We're experts on "making it work," as Tim Gunn would say. Some of us manage to survive weeks at a time without, say, photocopies, paper, or chalk--that or we get them on our own dime. So it came as no surprise to me that enterprising teachers have tried to beat ARIS, the $80 million boondoggle of a computer systems that many teachers still find intimidating and/or unhelpful to the point of being useless, by creating their own data tracking systems that do exactly what they want. Even I, allegedly a tech-savvy relative youngster, find ARIS to be unnecessarily cumbersome and complex. Nor am I surprised that teachers have been able to create systems that are so elegant and helpful that other schools are willing to buy them from their creators, or that (because teachers tend to be generous folks) they are practically giving them away.

No, what surprises me (though I suppose it hardly should) that this system seems to have been built without asking teachers what information and systems would actually be useful to them. I don't know that for sure, I admit, because, if I'm not mistaken, ARIS was being assembled either before I came to the DOE or while I was a petrified brand-newbie. But you would think, for $80 million, you could get a system that actually works well plus a whole bunch of cheap tablet computers so that teachers could use it during instruction. Or, for $80 million, you could get some smaller class sizes to re-place and retrain, if necessary, the ATR teachers. Or a bunch of schools in growing neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. Or the no-show jobs at charter schools, complete with Blackberries and Starbucks budgets, for NYC's best and brightest teacher bloggers. (Kidding!) I don't know, something other than a giant computer system that no one likes and that people seem forced at gunpoint to use by administrators who don't think outside the box.

Do you use ARIS? Do you know how? Is your class information on ARIS and it is accurate? Let me know if I'm off-base. It's happened before. Lord knows that Tim Gunn would probably look at some of my outfits and declare emphatically that I am not making it work.

Who Funds Ex-Educators 4 Excellence?

After reading the WSJ piece on the union-busting young ex-teachers, I had to wonder--how the hell do they pay the rent?  They aren't teaching, but rather spreading their new gospel.  What happens when that electric bill shows up?

It's remarkable that seems not to have occurred to the reporter.

Do they live with Mom and Dad?  Do they get an allowance?  Or do they get money from Whitney Tilson and DFER?  If so, is that really any way to run a "grassroots" movement?

I lost my job on multiple occasions, excessed when it meant no more paycheck.  At that time, no hedge fund manager offered to help me out if I'd subvert my union.  Nor was it an avenue I was inclined to pursue.  Instead, I put on a suit and haunted every department of every school in New York City until some poor desperate AP offered me a job.  It only takes one yes, you know.  After that you can forget about all the rest.

Not working was not an option for me, nor is not a viable option for most teachers.  And non-working teachers do not, in fact, represent working teachers.

This particular group of non-working teachers represents Gates, Broad, and Wal-Mart, whether or not they even know it.   You'd think those folks bought themselves enough press already.

You'd be wrong, I guess.

Educators 4 Actually Being Educators

Oh, those crazy kids Evan Stone and Sydney Harris! Remember them? Well, it's a brand-new school year and they're back. Thank heavens for that. I definitely need two lesser-experienced teachers who aren't even in the classroom anymore telling me more about the evils of tenure and seniority.

What? They're not in the classroom anymore? You read that right. They're not in the classroom anymore. They've taken some time off to do some consulting and work on their "grassroots" nonprofit, Educators 4 Excellence, which is not in any way connected to any larger force despite evidence to the contrary. Since they've been on the job all of three years, they're not eligible for sabbaticals. They appear to be in robust, apple-cheeked good health. This leads me to believe that they resigned from the DOE, unless someone more versed than I in all of the vagaries of the DOE can provide alternative possibilities.

I'm not sure exactly what size reproductive organs it takes to pull a stunt like this. How on Earth can you profess to care so much about the future of your students, so much that you would voluntarily leave the classroom? I mean, I know people quit all the time, sometimes for very good reasons. But those people tend not to be the same ones pulling for less job protection for their colleagues while at the same time going on and on about the preciousness of children's futures.

Maybe I'll start my own organization. It'll be called Educators 4 Actually Being Educators. Our goals will include not quitting the job we profess to love so much to be consultants.

My tender (really) heart doesn't want to be too hard on them, for all that. Believe me, there was an earlier mental version of this post that wasn't fit for a family audience. But any grudging respect I might have had for them, as folks trying to be politically active (in their way) while managing the challenges of full-time teaching even if I disagreed with their position and methods, is pretty much gone.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news while we're all still in the honeymoon period with our new classes. And I thought about telling you all a very charming story about one of my new students who is the proud papa of a ferret and can't stop talking about it. So maybe we'll have that story later this week or over at my place. But I had to get that off my chest. I was shocked, and maybe even a little saddened, and maybe even a little disappointed.

But I guess, ultimately, I'm not really surprised.

A Majority of Americans Favor Witch Burning

That's probably not true, but when people favor such things it's invariably due to mass ignorance.  Bearing that in mind, Time Magazine says a majority favor rating teachers with test scores.  Here's the question they asked:

Should teachers' evaluations be based in part on their students' progress on standardized tests?
Yes: 64%
No: 31%
No answer/don't know: 4% 

Admittedly, that's not the same as burning witches.   But how many of those questioned have seen why it isn't a valid measure?  How many have read this study?   I'll go out on a limb and say fewer than 1%.  That may explain this question as well:

Do you think that public schools in this country are in a 'crisis,' or not?
In a crisis: 67%
Not in a crisis: 29%
No answer/don't know: 3% 

Anyone reading the tabloids knows there's a crisis in education.  It's in the news pretty much every day.  And we're treating it with all sorts of methods that haven't worked, don't work, and won't work.  But it's better than thinking about the massive economic crisis, the one All the President's Men have failed to put a dent in.  And then there's this:

Do you support or oppose tenure for teachers, the practice of guaranteeing teachers lifetime job security after they have worked for a certain amount of time?
Support tenure: 28%
Oppose tenure: 66%
No answer/don't know: 6% 

Ask the hundreds of teachers fired by Michelle Rhee how secure they feel.   Ask the teachers at the Rhode Island school, whose jobs were saved by agreeing to draconian changes--after Barack Obama applauded their mass firing.  Don't want to travel?  Ask the hundreds of New York teachers in the non-rubber room, wherever that might be.  Ask the ATRs how secure they feel.  Ask the teachers in schools facing closure how sanguine they are about getting new jobs after being ATRed.

Few Americans follow education news, and even fewer know that status quo is utter crap.   Billionaires dictate a large portion of what hits major media, and buy candidates like you or I might buy an ice cream cone.    Yes, Americans think teachers are the problem.

And yes, it's our job to teach.  But it isn't us failing to keep the public informed.  That job belongs to the people who produce the articles we read in Time and elsewhere.

Moonlighting

Yesterday I played in Pennsylvania, and in a few minutes I have to go to Darkest New Jersey.  It's not my main job but for some reason I just can't stop.  Being a musician can be rough if you work for the wrong people, but sometimes those people pay well.  I never made more money as a musician than I did when I played in a wedding band.  I did that for a few years when I was a new teacher making 13K a year.  I don't do it anymore, though.  Watch the video below and you'll get an idea why.

It reminds me very much of how Joel Klein runs NYC schools.  I hope, for your sake, your immediate supervisors are not like the one below.  But I've seen a lot of school supervisors just like this, and I'm sure you have too.

In the Arena

It's a big job to rationalize the massive corporate undermining of education marching across these United States.  The schools are terrible because the kids are failing, say the "reformers."  The only cure, they say, is to close the schools and fire the teachers.  Charter schools, with non-union employees, are what we need, they say.  Never mind that charters, despite enormous advantages, for the most part don't manage to out-perform public schools.  Forget about poverty, parents working 200 hours a week, or any of the underlying causes of student failure.

Here in NYC, it's reform 24/7.   "Keep It Going, NY," declared a campaign funded directly from Bill Gates' huge pockets.  For years, they declared victory based on test scores Diane Ravitch and others labeled suspect.   They dismissed the critics as lunatics.  When the critics were proven correct, they said it didn't matter.  The spineless, incurious editorial writers of New York went right along with them.

You wonder how they sleep at night, carrying on a massive fraud, undermining the middle class, and training kids for nothing but high-stakes tests.  Then you come upon an article like this one and everything becomes clear.  Uber-"reformer" Joel Klein sees himself as a gladiator:

In an eighth-grade social studies class at Queens Gateway, he praised a student for choosing Theodore Roosevelt as the subject of a presentation she had prepared over the summer. Then he pulled out his wallet and unfolded a slip of paper he said he always carried with him. 

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better,” he recited, quoting Roosevelt from a 1910 speech at the Sorbonne in Paris. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” 

That's a great quote.  I love it.   But let's get real for a moment.  Joel Klein works for the richest man in New York City, carrying out his corporate-friendly vision.  He works in a sparkling new air-conditioned office in an immaculately reconditioned building.  He sits on boards, goes to gala luncheons, and hobnobs with the press.  In the eyes of NYC editorial boards, he walks on water, can do no wrong.

There are indeed people in the arena, shouted down by the public, ridiculed by the media, pelted with rotten fruit on a regular basis, and doing battle with billionaire lions.  For those who haven't cracked a newspaper since well before Klein took office, these people are called "teachers."  And one of their primary critics happens to be Joel Klein himself, who repeatedly lectures them on what he thinks they could do better, who regularly vilifies them, and who indulges in the most spectacular forms of rationalization to justify his "reform" program, which has served no one in the real arena (let alone their students).

Speak Out!

It's your patriotic duty to go to the EdNext poll and vote for Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, as best education book of the decade! 

There are a few people who are not insane speaking up about education, and it's our duty to support them on these rare opportunities.  Media is dominated by hand-picked stooges of Bill Gates, like Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama.

If we don't avail ourselves of those rare opportunities to make ourselves heard, we have no one to blame but ourselves.  Everyone usually blames us anyway, so let's give someone else a chance to be a scapegoat for a change.

In Which My Daughter Critiques Her First Day of High School

"There were a lot of tall people there.  I felt very short."