"The ‘bad teacher’
narrative as a way of explaining what’s wrong with our school system
gets really old,” says Ms. Cavanagh. “Our union has taken a stance that
we will collaborate and compromise and that is shortsighted when the
other side seems bent on destroying you." -- Julie Cavanagh in NY Times
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/23/scorn-for-unions-threatens-mayors-educational-legacy/
Anything Michael Powell writes is worth reading, though one must pity his passion for the Mets (I didn't tell him Julie is a Phillies fan) and I think the Jets. Now I don't know if he knew Julie is running against Mulgrew and I also know that Julie tends to downplay putting herself front and center but what an interesting sidelight to this article that Julie as President along the Karen Lewis mode would be Bloomberg's and the ed deformers' worst nightmare.
Teachers
Julie Cavanagh and Adam Stevens listen to the mayor pour boiling oil on
their union, to his talk of imposing more tests and using the scores to
draw a stringent measure of each teacher, and they wonder what world he
inhabits.
Michael Powell on government and politics.
Ms. Cavanagh, 34, teaches at the highly rated Public School 15, in the
working-class Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook. She already loses 16
days each school year to our mania for federal, state, and city tests.
(I write “our mania” but this noun rarely applies to the $40,000 per
year private schools attended by the children of the mayor and many
education reformers, where the emphasis is on essay writing and the
“whole child,” and a distrust of standardized testing prevails.)
“Our
school has never been about churning out day after day of test prep; we
try hard not to be that narrow,” Ms. Cavanagh says. “Slowly but surely,
though, the definition of success becomes based on a test score.”
As
for Mr. Stevens, 38, he teaches history with much-admired passion at
one of the city’s nationally ranked public high schools. “I love
teaching history,” he says, “but I don’t want to find myself pushed to
the curb in ten years because some of my kids didn’t do well on a test
imposed on us by administrators who have set us both up to fail.”
Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg styles himself an education revolutionary. He can
claim accomplishments, and many rebuilt schools. Like many of that
self-assured breed, however, he can sound deaf to the observations of
his best front-line troops. Twelve years in, he risks making purism his
trademark.
Last week he went to war on two fronts, and neither was very successful.
He
took on the school bus owners and union drivers and attendants, who
each day take more than 150,000 children to school. The mayor insisted
that only competitive bidding for bus contracts – which could eviscerate
union contracts – would yield the dollar savings he desires. His
adherence to the religion of competitive bidding is wobbly; his
administration came to the precipice of disaster in 2007, when
consultants holding a no-bid, multimillion dollar contract recommended
new bus routes that made very little sense.
Former Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani, a true negotiating carnivore, was threatened with a school bus
strike years ago, but backed off after the companies and unions gave
back tens of millions of dollars in savings.
(Comptroller John C.
Liu also noted last week that the mayor’s education department planned
to hand a no-bid, $10 million contract to track test scores to a company
run by the former New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein).
But
it was the mayor’s failure last week to reach an agreement with the
United Federation of Teachers on a new evaluation system that poses a
real threat to his educational legacy.
The teachers union, aware
that teachers chafe at being tied tight to the wheel of test scores,
reluctantly agreed to a two-year trial run for a new evaluation system.
Mr. Bloomberg would hear nothing of it; he insisted that an agreement
must extend for perpetuity. The mayor took the same line with the union
representing principals and administrators.
Each negotiation foundered as a result, in the final hours.
The
mayor mounted his horse of indignation afterward, suggesting that the
teachers union wanted only to kill the evaluations. The teachers union
is no team of angels; it can be a stubborn, frustrating negotiating
partner.
But the mayor’s account trips over inhospitable facts.
State
education officials said that the Bloomberg administration had
indicated early on that it was open to a two- year deal. More than 90
percent of school districts statewide agreed to deals with their unions
that lasted either one or two years.
The Bloomberg
administration’s hard line carries a price tag: It now risks losing
hundreds of millions of dollars in federal and state aid.
The mayor has claimed that the teachers union’s leadership is out of touch with its members. He is perhaps half right.
Rank
and file anger swells, some of it directed at the union itself. But
trust in Mr. Bloomberg is an hourglass that has run out. Many teachers
say the mayor has humiliated them, offering no raises since 2009 and
last year releasing a database ranking 18,000 teachers based on student
test scores. Mr. Bloomberg enjoys talking of bringing business practices
to the public sector, but it’s hard to imagine top law and financial
firms handing out evaluations of its partners to potential customers.
Ms.
Cavanagh adores her Red Hook school and her children, 90 percent of
whom come from families poor enough to qualify for free lunches. But she
feels the walls of the system closing in.
“The ‘bad teacher’
narrative as a way of explaining what’s wrong with our school system
gets really old,” says Ms. Cavanagh. “Our union has taken a stance that
we will collaborate and compromise and that is shortsighted when the
other side seems bent on destroying you.”
Her words speak to a revolution in peril.
1 comment:
The fact that Julie is running should never be downplayed. That would have been the perfect opportunity for people to know she is running.
Schoolgal
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