Bloomberg for Perpetuity

After 12 years of his machinations, which is four more years than the millions of New Yorkers who twice voted for term limits demanded, it is doubtful that anyone in NYC above the age of, say, five, has any doubts of the completely ruthless and anti- democratic spirit of Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Still, even those who have tasted Bloomberg’s contempt for the democratic process and ethos may be taken aback by the spiteful little man’s latest stunt: the hiring of the consulting firm The Parthenon Group to craft a plan that will preserve Bloomberg’s dreadful Children First Network, a key component in Bloomberg’s destruction of the New York Public School System, created ostensibly to assist principals and teachers in their ever more complex work loads. They are perhaps the only structure in Bloomberg’s DOE that is loathed in equal measure by administrators, teachers and parent groups. The reason for the mass loathing is simple: the Networks are both crazily expensive and largely incompetent. For an extra bonus they are created not out of geographic communities but rather on abstract demographics, the better to insure relationships are as strained and a-human and as corporate as possible.

Nobody seems to know how one is hired and by what criteria. I’ve been advised by “experts” in my field who never taught a day in their life. The same principals who hire Networks somehow also take orders from them and also live in fear of them. For the past year or so, it seems every time I’ve heard the Networks mentioned it was always in the context of how, come January 2014, they would face the same good riddance as their creator Bloomberg. But their creator, it turns out, has other ideas and would like to extend the Networks well into the mayoralty of whoever it is who comes after him regardless if he or she wants it. To be sure, Mike Bloomberg would like to extend all his ideas into perpetuity if he could,just as he would use his billions to purchase an army of shills to defend them, which is just one of the reasons that New Yorkers will rue the day they allowed a sociopath like Bloomberg anywhere near power for a very long time.

See Gotham Schools article below.

JUNE 10, 2013
DOE secretly enlisted Parthenon to devise plan to save networks
by Geoff Decker, at 8:27 pm
Intent on preserving the Bloomberg administration’s education legacy, the Department of Education has hired a favored consulting firm to craft a plan that would safeguard a signature policy.

The city has hired the Parthenon Group to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the system through which principals choose support organizations to provide professional development, curriculum, and budgeting help.

The consulting firm, which has previously studied school closures and small schools for the department, is charged with crafting a strategic vision to ensure that Children First Networks are preserved when another mayor takes over next year.

“While there is no set of actions that can perfectly ensure ‘sustainability’ of the network model, the goal of the project will be to identify a series of steps that can bolster the odds of sustaining those elements the DOE views as most essential,” the firm wrote in its bid for the project. The confidential bid was submitted in April and obtained by GothamSchools.

Demoralization and Dejection On Chancellor’s Conference Day

Today as part of Chancellor’s Conference Day, my fellow teachers and I were obliged to sit through a talk on “Teacher Effectiveness” which seems to be the code word for the brand new teacher evaluation plan released by NYSED Commissioner King on Saturday and to be implemented beginning this September. It was for many of the teachers present the first real exposure to the speeding locomotive racing straight at their hearts and heads.

The presentation was as strange as the subject matter was overwhelming. We sat, the bunch of us, staring at a projector screen filled with graphs and charts while a disembodied voice of a DOE official called “Dave” bumbled his way through the graphics.
Halfway through, disembodied “Dave” was replaced by disembodied Shael Polakow- Sharansky, chief academic officer of the NYC Public Schools. Introduced by “Dave” as “Shael” as if he were an old pal of ours, Sharansky droned on and on and on about a system built upon junk science that seems to be designed to exhaust teachers for the sake of exhausting them, keep administrators and teachers at each others throats, and above all create a climate of perpetual fear. All of this, of course, is to put children first and insure that they would be collage and career ready. Sharansky informed one and all of how we were one and all to be judged, and if need be, fired if we proved to be “ineffective” as teachers.
The torrent of information seemed not merely horrible but interminable. Even though I was familiar with much of what “Dave” and “Shael” were going on about, in time the sheer volume, vulgarity and ruthlessness of the stuff shut down my brain. At the same time I knew most if not all of my colleagues were hearing this for the first time.

Every by and by, I looked around the room and studied the faces and eyes of these decent, hardworking talented teachers I’ve come to know and respect and care about over the years. In time, as the disembodied voices droned on, their eyes grew blank or fearful, their faces masks of dejection. Once in a while I’d catch a colleague’s eye from across the room and they would inevitably shake their head as if to say, “This is insane.”
At last the weird presentation on “Teacher Effectiveness” drew to a close and our principal, a decent and caring person if there ever was one, did her best to address and disperse the palpable distress in the room but to no avail. The truth, moreover, is that she too is in the crosshairs. The mood remained funereal and appropriately so. These were not people who were against “accountability, ” a word that along with “compliance” has taken on an almost sacred status in the Church of Corporate Education Reform. These were people who, like all people, wished simply to be treated fairly and with the dignity of their chosen and noble profession.
Gone.
Slowly, as if recovering from shock, people drifted out of the big room. I watched them as they walked and knew what they were thinking because we were all thinking of variations on the same theme: “How did my union agree to this?” and “Who could sustain such a work load?” and “How long will it be before I’m fired?” and “How will I feed my kids ?”
I imagine the disembodied presentation was held in hundreds of schools across the city today to very much the same effect, which is to say, complete demoralization of the teaching staff.

It is impossible to conceive of any thing good coming out of any plan this joyless, this convoluted, this degrading, this a-human. But something will come, that is for certain.

Ours is a very vicious and violent hour.

The Common Core: A Bizarre but Revealing Picture Tells a Thousand Words

A couple of days ago a bizarre if not surreal poster appeared on the entranceway wall of the school in which I work. Issued by the New York City Department of Education, touting both the challenges and wonders of the highly dubious educational cure all Common Core State Standards, the poster is aimed at New York City parents. In large print are the words: “ This Spring We’re Aiming Higher.” It makes a point of warning parents, among lots of fluff, that on account of the rising standards of the Common Core, their childrens’ all revealing test scores will go down this year.

But not to worry, parents, the poster goes on to say, in the end, because of the Common Core, your kids will be prepared “for college and a career.”

Nothing new here. This kind of drivel about the wholly untested Common Core has been repeated with cast iron certainty ad nauseum from coast to coast.
But the words are accompanied by a photograph and it is here that things get interesting. The picture of what appears to be a 10 year old boy shooting a basketball at a basket that is not merely distant but ludicrously distant. The child appears to be almost beneath the opposite basket on the other side of the court. To tell this child making this shot is “a challenge” is to not understand the meaning of the word. Or, worse it is to understand the word. In either case the child has not a prayer of making the shot. It is an act of cruelty to propose that he can. Indeed, neither would many grown men make the shot — and if they did, it would be more luck than skill. But then again, most grown men would know what the little boy in the picture would not: there is only one scenario where one would even consider taking such a shot — a moment of absolute desperation when your team is behind at the buzzer and you fling the ball and hope you get lucky. And they would know something else: they would know that only an absolute fool or an absolute sadist would have you practice such a shot.

It is, to say the least, a curiously cruel choice of a metaphor, particularly considering the audience it is aimed at. If some gym teacher had my kid taking such shots I’d question not merely his or her competence, but his or her sanity. Indeed, only someone with no knowledge whatsoever of basketball or the fragility of a child’s psyche would ever request such a moronic task. It virtually insures failure. Yet, for all its absurdity it is completely consistent with the towering arrogance and self-righteous certainty of the promoters ( and owners and profiteers ) of the Common Core and indeed, all of the “education reformers.” After all, this is the same crew that under the No Child Left Behind Act insanely demand that every child in America be proficient in English and Math or they shut down their schools and fire their teachers.

That’ll show ‘em.

All of this, of course, could be dismissed as making too much of a silly poster but for the fact that while musing over the image I could not help but recall Diane Ravitch’s prescient comments on a purloined copy of this years Common Core aligned fifth grade English Language Arts test: “ I read the passages and the questions based on them. My reaction was that the difficulty level of the passages and the questions was not age-appropriate. Based on test questions I had reviewed for seven years when I was a member of the NAEP ( National Assessment of Educational Progress ) board, it seemed to me that the test was pitched at an eighth grade level. The passages were very long, about twice as long as a typical passage on NAEP for eighth grade. The questions involved interpretation, inference, and required re-reading of the passage for each question.”

Ravitch’s conclusions on the actual (still secret, still hidden) test – that fifth graders were tested with eighth grade level work — could easily be seen as the intellectual equivalent of demanding that little kids shoot a basket from the opposite side of the court: could easily be seen, that is, as exposing either an imbecile’s idea of raising standards or as an integral part an extraordinarily cynical long term plot to set American children up to fail by the millions to create a rationale for privatizing public education.

I see the latter.

A photographic addendum:

The author taking up the Common Core challenge, readying himself for college or a career.

Bloomberg Puts Kids First in Schools Buildings Riddled with Violations

Unsafe for children first

Herein is a disturbing report concerning those masters of accountability and putting kids first, Mike Bloomberg and Dennis Walcott, fresh on the back of the new teacher evaluation plan built especially “to hold teachers feet to the fire. ”

Question: by their own criteria, why do either of their apostles of “accountability” have legs ?

Awaiting the Word of the Corporate King

I have known the facts for weeks now but nonetheless there remains in my brain some voice that keeps telling me, this can’t really be true, my union, the once mighty United Federation of Teachers did not really sign off on an agreement allowing the cynically selected corporate crusader, New York State Education Commissioner John King, final say over the new teacher evaluation plan for all of New York City. Surely my union would never entrust this precious fan of Educators 4 Excellence (and other billionaire funded union busting lowlife organizations,) who taught a total of three years (one in a public school) and was just last week seen pathetically cheering on the corporate CEO’s he lined up to shill for Bill Gate’s Common Core. (‘cause, really, who knows more about education than CEO’s? ) to have the final say on the most radical change in teacher’s professional lives in decades.
Surely, this was some kind of bad dream or evil hallucination or elaborate cosmic joke that I’d, in time, awaken from, snap out of or catch on to.

John King who taught for three entire years.

But no. Like their signing on to Race to the Top, easily the most corrosive and insidious attack on American public education in its history ( of which Bill Gate’s Common Core and Commissioner King’s evaluation plan are part and parcel) the UFT, indeed, did sign on to this slow motion train wreck. Worse, my union wants me and my union brothers and sisters to believe that this is a moment for celebration, a victory of some kind.
Reading UFT President Michael Mulgrew’s letter on the matter made me cringe. (See below.) Several times. Then it did something worse. It lit in me the sensation I have known in certain dark hours in my life when I comforted myself with the thought, “it cannot get worse than this” until, a short time later, it was worse than that.

I suspect many teachers from coast to coast have felt something akin to that sickly sensation over the last decade of ceaseless attacks. I am tired of it. And more than tired of it. The corporate disease has over taken all including the only forces capable of withstanding it, namely unions and political parties. The choices of working people, never rosy, are now starker than they have been in a century and there seems there is nothing but darkness in the tunnel. We either find some way, as yet unimagined, to rebel against our own immiseration and degradation or we wind up with lives that are scarcely worthy of the word.

Herein Mulgrew’s letter.

Dear colleagues,
Late on Saturday, June 1, State Education Commissioner John King is expected to release an evaluation plan for K-12 teachers in New York City. It will be done through a binding arbitration process and take effect in September.
The mayor and the DOE will no doubt try to spin Commissioner King’s decision to their advantage. The UFT staff will be working through Sunday to get accurate information about the new system out to you by Monday morning in a form that is both clear and concise.
The process to create a new evaluation system has been long and contentious. The final decision came to rest with the commissioner because the city Department of Education proved incapable of negotiating in good faith with us.
The UFT and the DOE each submitted lengthy proposals to the State Education Department on May 8. Arbitration hearings are taking place in Albany today and tomorrow. Commissioner King will consider the proposals and decide on the final evaluation system on June 1.
We have the opportunity to use our collective-bargaining rights to modify aspects of the evaluation plan during future contract negotiations. Practically speaking, since we are in fact-finding now, if any changes were negotiated, they would not take effect until the 2014-15 school year.
Because the commissioner’s plan must be in accordance with the 2010 state law on teacher evaluation that this union supported and helped shape, we expect it to be fair, professional and focused on teacher development to the benefit of our students. The new evaluation system as set out in state law is designed first and foremost to help teachers improve their skills throughout their careers. Teachers who are struggling will get support tailored to their individual needs.
We have our work cut out for us in September, given this DOE’s terrible track record of translating policy to practice compounded with the fact that they will probably be gone come Jan. 1. We have started working on a professional development plan and we will use our rights to make sure that the new system is implemented fairly. It is a big help that we already have an appeals process for New York City teachers nailed down that will give our members stronger due process rights than they have ever had.
I hope this email clarifies where we are and what we can expect. Working together, we will make this transition. You can count on your union to continue to fight to get you the support you deserve. Thank you for all that you do for our city’s schoolchildren.
Sincerely,

Michael Mulgrew