Witch Hunts for Teachers

graphic by DB

Thursday's NY Times article on the DOE's attempt to start a with hunt to remove ""poor" - read - "tenured, higher salaried" - teachers sent another chill down the spines of NYC teachers. Are they hiring lawyers to remove bad cops or lawyers or doctors? How about that doctor that risked 600 patients with hep C and is not sent to the doctor RR. How about police who are of "lower quality?" These people can actually kill people.

Why the focus on "bad" teachers and how hard it is to get rid of them? Getting rid of a doctor is almost impossible. There are doctors practicing who are not board certified. Do we see bad lawyers being disbarred ( to the RR of the legal profession)?

The witch hunt is part of the concerted attack on teacher unionism as a supposed obstruction to education, part of the general plan of assault on the public schools.

It is very dangerous rhetoric (from Weingarten to Bill Clinton to Joel Klein) to bring up the issue that the most important thing in education is a quality teacher because then witch hunts ensue. In fact what is a quality teacher? We have the same bell curve of quality (a very thin term to use) teachers as in any other job - superb to average to below average to awful.

But the people judging have a different agenda. I saw in my own school my principal support one of the most incompetent and abusive (to children) teachers because he was loyal -- he knew how to play the game.

I know of a 20 year teacher under attack at a middle school. The other day I spoke to a colleague of hers and she told me the admin in her school targets one teacher a year for u rating as a demo of power and to keep people in line.

So the Jack Welch philosophy leads to quotas. - get rid of your negative people and the "bottom" 20%. (And if you haven't read it yet read Mary Hoffman's wonderful piece "Jack Welch is My Daddy" at the ICE web site http://ice-uft.org/daddy.htm which details the impact of the Welch/Leadership Academy principal at her school (also my former school.)

Welch, Tweed, Farina, and Creative Destruction

A great discussion (started by Woodlass) broke out on the NYC Public School Parent listserve that led to the ideology of "creative destruction" behind much of what Tweed is doing today. A lot of it is laid to former GE chairman, Neutron Jack Welch, who was instrumental in setting the ideoligcal framework of the Principal Academy.

Carmen Farina's name came up because she was quoted in a Business Week article from June 2003. Farina replaced Diana Lam as chief ed mucky muck at Tweed and gave Klein educational cover for creative destruction of the system, but was declared obsolute after her usefullness was over, supposedly being told she didn't have the skill set for the job – which means she spent some time in the classroom. Note how she spoke out [below] about 10 minutes after hearing her name was being bandied about.

Farina's original BW quote from June, 2003:
"Jack Welch said one thing that really struck me…You can't allow an organization to grow complacent. When you find those kinds of organizations, you have to tear them apart and create chaos. That chaos creates a sense of urgency, and that sense of urgency will ultimately bring [about] improvement."

Farina's comment posted on the listserve Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007:
"Complacency is not the same as complicity in how to evaluate schools. The problem with the report cards is that they leave out the human touch from evaluation and evaluating the caliber of teaching. I am not for any report that focuses only on grades since most of us know a complete education for our children includes critical thinking, problem solving, humane education and writing skills. None of these are possible with this evaluation. Hopefully parents can see beyond the reports and evaluate for themselves how their own schools are serving their children. The people who are giving greatest credence to these reports are those who do not have children in our schools. My favorite choice for Charlie [grandchild] right now is not an A school but one that strikes the balance of all important issues and respect the development stage of his growth. It is also does not stress test prep. Don't know who is quoting me out of context but feel free to put this quote on blog."

Now she tells us. Farina was part of the enabling structure that gave Klein cover.
In the words of Ricky Ricardo, Farina has a lot of splaining to do.

Leonie Haimson followed up with this:
There’s been a lot of discussion about the Carmen Farina’s quotation and its source. This came originally from an article in Business Week – about the first phase of the DOE’s so-called “Children’s First” reforms, when they eliminated the districts, formed the regions, selected a uniform curriculum, etc.etc. following the expert advice of that renowned educator, Jack Welch of GM, along with a bunch of McKinsey consulants.

I quoted it in testimony during hearings in the fall of 2004 held by Virginia Fields when she was the Manhattan Borough President. (Her full testimony is here.)
This quotation was included in testimony I delivered in the fall of 2004, during hearings held by then-Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields on the first phase of the Children’s First reforms. I was describing the free-wheeling attitude of the administration and the theory of “creative destruction” that was supposed to revolutionize education in this city, popularized by Jack Welch, former president of GE and the McKinsey consultants who were brought to DOE by Klein to bring change. They decided to dissolve the districts, and create the regions that would take their place, an decision which in turn, led to thousands of special education students being deprived of services and referrals for more than a year.

The regions are now gone, replaced by an even more inchoate management and organizational structure. Carmen Farina was subsequently promoted to Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning after Diana Lam left in disgrace; she lasted two years, until retiring in April 2006, to be replaced by Andres Alonso, who has since departed for Baltimore.

Klein may have endured longer than most modern Chancellors in the city’s history; but the top educator post in the Department has been a revolving door, reflecting the rapidly changing fads and fashions in the methods and theories of reform attempted by this administration.


It all seems so sadly familiar, even though the main actors have changed somewhat . Instead of Jack Welch and Mckinsey consultants ripping things apart and sowing chaos, we’re now dealing w/ new confusion and problems created by a former Columbia Law Professor and others, including a former executive at Edison schools.

Yet sadly, the attitude and underlying incompetence is the same, the extreme arrogance and a lack of any knowledge about what makes good schools work, and how to improve those that aren’t.


After reading Leonie's piece, I urged people to read teacher Mary Hoffman’s piece, Jack Welch is My Daddy, at the ICE web site and this led to Leonie’s response:

The article Norm cites is very interesting at http://ice-uft.org/daddy.htm. It takes a look at the PBS series about the Leadership Academy, and examined the training given to principal recruits in relation to what was happening at the author’s own school and systemwide.

Here are two excerpts from the piece about the Jack Welch philosophy, the first showing its overriding emphasis on test scores, the second on ridding the schools of teachers who are contrary, ineffective, or who don’t buy into this philosophy:

· “Jack Welch had invited the [Leadership] Academy’s students to GE’s upstate conference center for a weekend retreat. At one point they were all seated around him in a circle. The topic under discussion was the value of teacher incentives. I was heartened when one of the aspiring principals took issue with the idea that incentives should be tied solely to test performance. “Children are not products,” she said, heatedly, and went on to present her case: schools must try to consider each child’s individual needs and talents...

Mr. Welch squashed her outburst. “Oh, yes they are,” he said, with the absolute assurance of a man whose retirement package was so generous that it even raised eyebrows on Wall Street, and her protest petered out.”

· “…This fall, the opening episode of the documentary about the Leadership Academy featured scenes from the ceremony for the first class of graduates. Chancellor Joel Klein addressed the gathering, as did Mayor Bloomberg. Again, Jack Welch played a role in the proceedings. When I saw him at the podium I wondered: would he wish the graduates luck? Tell them they could continue to call on him for advice and support? Thank them in advance for the years of public service they were about to embark upon?

“Get rid of your negative people,” he said.

Not an unexpected sentiment, coming from Jack Welch, if somewhat inappropriately – well, negative – for the occasion. He earned the title “Neutron Jack” for his slash-and-burn style of doing employee relations. His lack of concern for how his policies impacted on his employees is legendary.”

The Jack Welch philosophy, in a nutshell, is the ideological approach that now dominates Tweed. Make principals and staff focus solely on test scores, create as many incentives as possible to pump those test scores up, and get rid of any educators who don’t raise test scores sufficiently or don’t buy into this philosophy.

At the outset, this theory conflicted with what I call the District 2 ideology, that also another strand in the first wave of reforms and that the leadership of Carmen Farina exemplified – an overwhelming emphasis on professional development and sometimes heavy handed oversight of teaching methods, which it was believed would produce its own results—no matter what other problematic conditions might exist in schools, whether that be students of different backgrounds or needs, overcrowding, large classes, or anything else that might hamper these goals.

The D2 model led to the emphasis on the workshop model, constructivist curriculums, literacy and math coaches in all schools, etc. etc. I think this model of reform has its own weaknesses, but at least it exemplified a more holistic view of education – as well as an acceptance that leadership at the top has some responsibility for helping schools improve.

Now everyone in top leadership positions, including district superintendents, are supposed to take a hands –off attitude towards schools, and in the case of superintendents only “evaluate” the schools in their district rather than help them succeed. Just as kids are seen primarily as test scores, the evaluation of principals by superintendents and soon, the performance of teachers themselves, is supposed to be based on hard “data” alone – read test scores, attendance, grad rates etc.

This ideology has so infected Tweed that the management structure now is unlike any corporate model than even Jack Welch might have espoused, in that principals are supposed to rely on organizations outside the management structure (ie the SSOs) -- totally separate from their ostensible superiors (ie the superintendents), ostensibly so that principals can’t blame their superintendents if they haven’t received adequate support.

This peculiar management structure is completely unprecedented as far as I know, not only in any educational system in the country, but also in any corporation, where your supervisor is also supposed to act as your support officer – and if you don’t succeed, he or she is tasked with helping you do given the underlying conditions and environment that you are working in.

This is why supers are now Senior Achievement Facilitators – drafted into the cause of coaching schools in the use of the ARIS and all the data it spews – but only for schools outside their district. That way no personal relationship can infect their evaluations of principals in their district. Of course, this peculiar management structure also leads to an ignorance about the specific situations and needs of various schools – which in DOE’s eyes, are irrelevant unless they are already captured in ARIS. Thus, problems such as class size, overcrowding, and most specific characteristics of neighborhoods and/or students, are completely ignored -- besides a few demographic characteristics in elementary grades, and entering test scores in middle and high schools.

Bloomberg and Klein Get Desperate

graphic by DB

All it takes are a few messages from some rappers on a cell phone to motivate kids turned off by school. Jeez! Why didn't think of that when I was teaching? Oh, I forgot. In those days we used waxed string and milk containers to communicate. (Is there a way to send text messages that way?)

That DOE consultant Roland Fryer jumps from the fryer pan into the fire.

I was taken by these quotes in today's NY Times article:

“How do you get people to think about achievement in communities where, for historical or other reasons, there isn’t necessarily demand for that,” Mr. Klein said yesterday in an interview. “We want to create an environment where kids know education is something you should want. Some people come to school with an enormous appetite for learning and others do not — that’s the reality.”

"Mr. Klein said the effort was spurred in part by the results from focus groups performed by market research firms for the Education Department. That research found that black and Latino students from some of the city’s most hard-pressed neighborhoods had a difficult time understanding that doing well in school can provide tangible long-term benefits."

Duhhhhh!
They needed a focus group to tell them something teachers find out in their first 10 minutes of teaching?

You see, we have been telling Klein this all along and his response is that we are making excuses. Many of us actually know how to fix this problem. Engaging, exciting curricula, not test prep. And smaller class sizes so kids who do not come with an appetite for learning have more of an opportunity to be engaged. Hell, I do not remember my friends and I having that enormous appetite for learning - we were more afraid of our mothers' daily nag.

Now let's review, kiddies:

You have non-motivated students who are often struggling with academics. I have an idea. turn on the screws by threatening them with being held over on the basis of high stakes tests and then tell them they will get a cell phone and a text message from JB Cool if they can withstand the pressure. Pure Genius!

Leonie Haimson took care of the rest of what I wanted to say on her listserve:

See today’s Times – the latest experiment dreamed up by Roland Fryer, and “focus groups performed by market research firms for the Education Department.” Cell phones, mentors, messages, free tickets to Knick games and more – all to “convince” students that staying in school is worthwhile.

Excerpt: Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said the project was the city’s first attempt to bring about change in the culture and behavior of low-performing students after years of efforts focusing on school structure and teaching.

“How do you get people to think about achievement in communities where, for historical or other reasons, there isn’t necessarily demand for that,” Mr. Klein said yesterday in an interview. “We want to create an environment where kids know education is something you should want. Some people come to school with an enormous appetite for learning and others do not — that’s the reality.”…. Dr. Fryer said he viewed the project in economic terms, arguing that while the administration’s previous efforts have focused on changing the “supply” at schools, this one is proposing to change the “demand” for education by making students want to seek learning.

“You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody wants it, it doesn’t matter,” Dr. Fryer said. What school systems have done so far, he added, “isn’t working well enough.”…. Details about how much will be spent and where the money will come from are still to be worked out, Education Department officials said.

If Fryer thinks that NYC schools are the “best product in the world,” he must be blind. Klein says there have been “years of efforts focusing on school structure and teaching”!!! How out of touch can they possibly be? This is an administration that is clearly clueless, and appears to be drowning in loose change.

It’s kind of startling, the amount of effort, time and money going into this “rebranding” PR campaign – but I guess when you’ve given up actually trying to improve schools, as they seem to have done at Tweed, what’s left?

If you run Tweed via PR, you think that’s PR is all that exists; it’s like the Bush administration and Karl Rove, who said: ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.”

So what students at which schools are going to get the “thousands” of new mentors, the tickets, the cell phones and the rest? Those attending KIPP charter schools, and those run by New Visions. I thought those schools were already so expert at motivating students…but I guess not. If nothing else, this will probably lead to a surge of applicants to those schools, so they can even more effectively skim off the top.

And I guess we’ll let all those hundreds of thousands of students, left attending the large, overcrowded high schools with classes of 30 or more, to continue to drop out, be discharged or pushed out, or in other ways actively encouraged to disengage.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/education/13schools.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1194931294-Rw4bHvFh4o/V/jTqo4F0Cw&pagewanted=print

DOE Data as Doodoo

Many of us believe in tests, but tests that help teachers learn what the problems are so they can fix them.
Earth to Tweed:
Teachers know stuff about their students without having to study reams of data.
DOE Data as doodoo is the usefulness quotient of the "Data is King" program at Tweed.
But let Round Deux say it.
Rant away - PLEASE!

Posted by Leonie Haimson on the NYCEducationnews listserve.
by 3^rd year middle school math teacher – not an unusual reaction I would imagine.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Data'ed Out

http://rounddeux.blogspot.com/

WARNING: This is a rant. You have been warned.

I'm all data'ed out. Our PD's are all about data: looking at data, using data, finding data, inputting data, implementing data in our classrooms, not going on field trips to improve data, worrying about data from the tests, feeling good about ourselves because our report card data was decent. I'm sick of it.

We've had a few discussions before in our math department meetings about relevant projects and exciting lessons, unfortunately we're bogged down and dominated by data. Today, one of few PD days we have left during the year, we spent most of our time looking at math data, or how to access data. I asked our coach/lead teacher if we could do something that would improve my teaching ability. It only makes common sense, right?

The data is supposed to help us assess, teach, group by seating, and place students in specific classes (tracking is still around people), but I still don't get how this is supposed to make me a better teacher. Sure its good to know what a student has a problem on, but spending day after day of data training is overkill.

I want to be a good teacher; but not the good teacher that politicians want, a good teacher that motivates, inspires, and helps students to develop a love for learning, not a fear of it.

Board of Education, Chancellor, and Mayor Bloomberg, enough data already. Let me teach.

PS: Kudos to schools going against merit pay!

Ed Note:
Round Deux is a former Teaching Fellow - to all the critics who felt they were indoctrinated BloomKleinies, there is hope. Round Deux says in another post:

"Whichever one of Bloomberg's teachers taught him that infusing capitalism into educational policy making was a "good thing" should be sent to a rubber room. My solution? Move to another country or take back and rebuild our union."

Pretty good insights for someone fairly new to the system. We look forward to the Round Deuxs of this world to start taking back and rebuilding the union.

Your description of the hostile takeover...

....of PS 97 by Bard with Burt Sachs as the agent misses a point (see post on Bard and PS 97). As staff, we were completely dedicated to our kids and their parents. We offered the kids what no one else in their short lives had given them - security, stability and nurturing. Sachs should have known that when he walked in with his clip board and "measured for drapes". Our service to them was obvious to anyone who walked in - even the State Ed. Dept. It is hard to know whether or not we raised reading scores, the students weren't in our school long enough. Even after he left after that visit, we were not told that the school was closing! We did not know until the end of the school year that we were closing - and were not even sure where we were going. A complete disregard for the staff and the children we worked for every day. The irony of it is that he was hired by the UFT and we now our dues pay the man who screwed us a hefty salary.

I guess I should remain anonymous, because if I ever get sent to the TRC on bogus charges, I may be giving this man the opportunity to screw me twice.

---

UFT PR on Merit Pay

It is worth repeating this comment from proof of life as a prime example of how the UFT operates to obfuscate the issues and confuse the membership. Sign a deal that rewards teachers for teaching to the test and further encapsulates high stakes testing, but then make it look like they are against the overemphasis on testing. Sort of like having a high stakes testing task force spend a year issuing a report that says much of what PoL below talks about but then doing the very opposite. Check out Lisa North's comments on the ICE blog where she says:

The UFT High Stakes Testing Committee spent a year studying the issue and concluded, "those who advocate for the misuse of student test scores to evaluate individuals, schools, and entire school systems are ignorant of or choose to ignore the fact that the makers of these tests never intended them to be used for those purposes."

Bah, humbug, hypocrites.

Comment from Proof of life:
The UFT is circulating a Petition Against DOE School Report Cards. Some highlights of the petition include.. "By awarding a school a grade from A to F , the progress report trivializes the complexity of teaching and learning. It is a punitive system that ultimately hurts, not helps, schools." Then it goes on to list major concerns "* overemphasizes testing *will potentially drive schools into doing even more test prep at the expense of learning. * is based on a curve so that there will always be losers" It goes on and on, but I personally love the last bullet * demoralizes whole school communities that have worked hard for the success of their schools.. Sounds to me like a petition against MERIT PAY!! What a contradiction. Can't have your cake and eat it too!

Worth Noting

Pseudo-Intellectualism takes a look at "A" rated school PS 188M that Joel Klein so raved about when the grades came out. On the school survey, 100% of the teachers said there was little order or discipline maintained at the school and 79% of the teachers said they get little help from the admin in addressing student behavior and discipline problems. But why should these teachers' opinions count for the school grade when we all know that schools in disorder have little real learning going on. My guess is the principal has naked pictures of James Liebman.

Jim Horn at Schools Matter on the Bloomberg-Klein plan to charterize the entire city school system.

NYC Educator looks under every rock and finds the UFT and Green Dot. (And congrats on reaching almost 900 visitors the other day.)

and Gary Babad of GBN News reports on an interview with ARIS officials on the NYC public school parent blog.

Bard's Botstein says "Let 'em eat cake (or meat)"

Bard College President Leon Botstein is being hailed a hero in some quarters for appealing the "C" rating his school (today's NY Times article posted at Norms Notes). There's lots of meat in his comments, though he says his school (the elite) are vegetables and the rest of the vermin are meat. Or something like that.

Some choice nuggets from the NY Times article:

School officials agreed to meet with Bard officials next week. “I appealed to the chancellor in an effort to tell him to remove this year’s assessment so that a better mode of assessment could be put together,” Mr. Botstein said.

Elisaa Gootman writes: educators and parents at.. nontraditional and high-performing... say that while the new rating system, which is driven by standardized test scores, may be a good way to measure whether schools are imparting basic knowledge, it is less useful and even harmful on the higher end of the performance spectrum.
Mr. Botstein said he respected the chancellor’s need to turn around a failing school system, but urged that he not do it at the expense of innovation and excellence.

“You have a system that is broken and that is failing, and they are desperately trying to improve it. But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water,” he said. “There are a couple of places, and we’re one of them, that really do something different and well.
“Not all plants are weeds,” he said, “so why are you spraying insecticide on the whole thing?”

He said of the Regents, “They’re to a lower standard, and we won’t teach to the test.“They’re in a tough bind, and I have a lot of respect for them,” he said.

“Let’s say we’re a vegetarian restaurant and you’re telling me our meat is not good. I’m telling you we don’t serve meat. We’re not in the meat business.”

In Botstein's world, and he knows full well this rating system is a farce for everyone, it is ok to force such a system down everyone else's throat but he wants special treatment. Or he says he has respect for them for political reasons, knowing full well if he criticizes the entire concept of the grading system, Tweed will pull out their dossier on him as they did with Diane Ravitch and send a Wylde attack dog after him. Or suddenly find building problems with the school he wants to open in Queens.

Before we go on with Botstein and Bard, let me reference Eduwonkette who uses her stat stick to give us five reasons the report cards might kindly be called statistical malpractice.

"I've concluded that the people in need of a wake-up call work not at F schools, but at the NYC Department of Education. Undoubtedly, data can and should be used for organizational learning and school improvement. But if we're going to rank and sort schools - an action that has serious consequences for the kids, educators, and parents affected - the Department of Ed's methods should be in line with the standards to which statisticians and quantitative social scientists hold themselves. Needless to say, NYC's report cards are not.

I urge Botstein to go and read the entire wonkette piece and then look us in the eye and tell us how much he respects BloomKlein.

I have a particular interest in Bard's progress. I know and like one of the teachers there so if she ever reads this I am never saying that great education doesn't take place at Bard (but they do have special kids that make great education easy) and of course the fact that Botstein says they don't teach to the test is an important statement.

I just wish he wouldn't say it is ok for everyone else, especially kids who are struggling and do not need a culture of teaching to the test that will only serve to turn them off to school even more. They need the culture Botstein is trying to instill as much if not more than anyone. If Botstein wants a challenge, let him open a school that does not attempt to pick the low-hanging fruit but goes after the most at risk students. Take the most struggling school in the city and turn it around without replacing the kids. Then he would be a hero.

But Botstein's history vis a vis struggling schools is not a good one.

I witnessed Botstein's rape and pillage of IS 126 (taking the entire 4th floor) in Williamsburg (I was the district tech liaison there) where Bard was first located, followed by the hostile takeover of PS 97 on the lower east side, where kids from homeless shelters had the only school that nurtured them ripped out from under them by Bard after they abandoned 126 because they refused to give in to their lebensraum (Bard wanted the 3rd floor too, being perfectly willing to squeeze the middle school students and teachers into closets).

No blame to BloomKlein here, as those deals were Klein predecessor Harold Levy's deal. Maybe that's what's going on.with the "C" rating. The revenge of Tweed on Harold's baby?

Read on for the ugly details
I was in JHS 126 on the day (I think it may have been spring 2000) the Bard deal was announced to much fanfare and press and DOE officials, with Harold Levy leading the charge, inundated the school's auditorium. Word was that a million dollars would be poured into renovating the 4th floor. Teachers were very pissed at the long-time principal, Sheldon Toback, for agreeing to this but he felt this would protect him against his growing critics (he may be the dean of Principals having run the school since the last 60's, but they just got an "F" and that may be the end.) Toback had gone from one of the leading lights as a principal in the 70's to leading a quickly declining school.

The renovation that summer included dividing almost every classroom in two since Bard kids were going to have small class sizes, beautiful new doors for each class, a new computer lab (while the old ones at 126 were falling apart – I know as it was part of my job to help keep them running) and all kinds of other goodies. When probably less than a 100 9th graders arrived in the fall, the disproportion between Bard and the IS 126 grades 7-9 kids (many Polish kids from Greenpoint, including many non-English speakers) now squeezed into 3 floors was clear. There was little mixing between the staffs, with the Bard administrators showing extreme arrogance towards the people at 126.

Naturally, the staff at 126 had tremendous resentment towards Bard, who they (rightly) saw as trying to steel their school out from under them. So relations in the teacher cafeteria were not exactly cordial.

I should point out that JHS 126 was once the flagship of District 14 when Supt. (Wild) Bill Rogers, who "taught" there, gave them mucho resources and the ability to steal the best kids from all over the district. When the coup d'etat by which UFT District Rep Mario DeStefano became Superintendent in the late 80's or early 90's and Rogers was deposed, resources shifted to IS 318 where Mario's guy Alan Fierstein (see my recent post in what makes IS 318 a good school here) was ensconced and JHS 126 began a long slow decline as the best kids went to 318 and more and more special ed and problem kids were dumped into the 126. In recent years, PS 132, a local feeder school, went K-8, thus taking away more kids. But some of the remnants from the teaching staff from the good old days still carried the "we're the elite" attitude.

Though the decline in 126 (and don't get me wrong, it was my favorite school to go to, with a wonderful teaching staff which Toback still actively recruited very rigorously) was due in part to the political manipulations by the old school district machine, it had become a self full-filling prophesy and teacher turnover began to rise. People were hoping Toback would retire and new leadership would help restore the luster. Under the first reorganization, the LIS in charge of the school was considered quite good and supportive and there were people actually hoping she would lead the school. But Toback has survived I believe because he can still count on some level of old-style seniority CSA protections and is still clinging on. The "F" grade may doom him and the school.

Back to Bard
As expected, Botstein and Bard began to demand the 3rd floor and finally Toback said "NO" which apparently he had the right to do. Bard then focused its attention on a new location. Besides, Greenpoint is not all that accessible. What of all the renovations on the 4th floor that left almost every single classroom unusable by the full-sized classes at 126? Not Bard's problem.

PS 97 the next target
PS 97 on the lower east side became the new takeover target. My source over there is a former teacher who was working with the school as an employee of Central. A top notch educator who spent most of her career in the classroom, her evaluation of the school can be trusted. She told me in an interview yesterday that it was a school that had an enormous number of kids from local shelters and did an amazing job of nurturing these kids. An example she gave was that since shelters have a rule that people can stay for only 6 months and then be moved to another shelter, often in the Bronx, many parents still brought their kids down to PS 97. She praised the principal and staff as being excellent, given the conditions. As an example of turnover rates, out of 326 children, 197 were new one year.

My friend was in the building when one day she saw a man from central going around with a tape measure. That was the first anyone in the school new they were in danger of being closed Who was that masked man, by the way? No less than Burt Sachs, notorious pre-BloomKlein central board power monger who had a reputation for enormous arrogance, one of the first to go under the BloomKlein takeover - some people early on considered Klein a hero for dumping the likes of Sachs and others - who would a thunk that one day we would wish for the likes of Burt Sachs to be back as Tweedle arrogance make Sachs look like a saint.

UFT to the rescue
But never you worry about Burt. Soon after leaving the DOE, guess who hired him for a full-time position? Randi Weingarten. He's still there doing something that no one knows exactly what it is. But he is valued for his knowledge in gaming the DOE. Maybe he helped work out the brilliant deal on merit pay with the Kleinites.

And Bard? They now occupy the entire old PS 97.

Give Botstein an "A" in hostile takeovers.

The Stealth Contract

special to Education Notes, author wishes to remain anonymous

We need to challenge the union leadership’s maneuvering to prevent discussions of items that they say are already in the contract that the membership voted on. The inclusion of clauses in the contract that are seemingly innocuous and buried in neutral sounding verbiage must be criticized. Any time the union says that it is opening discussions on items, or exploring the possibility, etc., we know that something terrible is down the pike. It is a stealth maneuver that allows them to give up more behind our backs.

What’s happening now is that the Union Leadership is portraying the merit pay proposal as a victory for us. A victory over what? Over the fact that the ambiguous contract language meant that the outcome could have been worse? The worse possibility was certainly hidden from the membership during the contract vote. And, just because the worst case scenario (individual merit pay) hasn’t yet occurred, it doesn’t mean it won’t. As many people have pointed out, school merit pay opens the door to individual merit pay, especially since they are leaving the method of distributing bonuses up to a principal-dominated school committee.

But even if the bonuses were distributed evenly to all UFT members within a school, we must recognize that merit pay is a significant setback for union solidarity and a huge step in the continuous attack on teacher professionalism. In the newly defined verbiage of the federal government and the DOE, “professionalism” has been equated with adherence to their “research based” educational mandates, and their criteria of success, always tied to test scores, and always used to further their political and corporate careers. But from the point of view of teachers, professionalism includes the commitment to do what’s best for the children, the right to make decisions, and to expect the kind of support necessary to succeed. Like other professionals they should be able to make use of their own education, training, talent and experience. The DOE’s carrot (bonuses) and stick (closing of schools) strategies are not only insulting but are bad for public education.

That our Union Leadership has joined the DOE and mayor in furthering an agenda of high stakes testing and its punitive consequences for students and teachers alike is shameful. When they say that this is what the members voted for, they are just proving that their role is to fool us rather than represent our interests.

Survey on School Safety

*Teachers Unite and NESRI invite you to take the survey on school safety!*

You will find the link to the survey at: http://www.teachersunite.net

Documenting the views of NYC public middle and high school teachers will support advocates in their efforts to:

1) learn about the impact of current school safety and discipline policies on education, and

2) explore alternative approaches to discipline that teachers believe are effective.

Please take the survey and forward the link to your colleagues today!

If you can distribute and collect the paper version of the survey to teachers in your school building, please contact me as soon as possible (contact info below).

--
Sally Lee
Executive Director
Teachers Unite
sally@teachersunite.net

Places to go

...and away we go

(updated Thurs. Nov. 8, 8am)

You're not alone. George Schmidt tells us all about the Chicago experience on merit pay and all the other stuff we are seeing here in New York on the ICE blog. Also check out Lisa North's "Drawing a Line in the Sand: Stop making concessions on Vital Education Issues" running right below George's piece.

James Eterno's fabulous analysis of the winners and losers on 55/25 is being rerun at the ICE website.

Eduwonkette with the stats, ma'am, just the stats on school report cards. It is beyond me how her brain doesn't explode. I know plenty of standard deviants.

Leonie Haimson with a marvelous post on the NYC Public School Parent blog "How School Grading is a Fiasco. Plus some other good stuff.
Under Assault posts a Q&A on the UFT's Q&A on merit pay and comes up with a lot more Q than A. Also with other posts worth checking out.

Old buddy NYC Educator also writes about progress reports and points to the fact that charter schools remain ungraded and today with a follow-up on the love-fest between Green Dot charters and the UFT:

Steve Barr and Randi Weingarten: perfect together.

(photoshopped by DB)


DA Sorrows
Just back from UFT Delegate Assembly and from hanging out in a new bar for the first time for us on Washington St. and Rector. (We'll go back.) We look up and there's Randi on NY 1. We had just heard her talk endlessly at the meeting and here she was again. We couldn't hear the TV but knew what she as saying. She moved the agenda around again today so she got to do her president report and then a motion on the progress reports which was supposed to come after the Question and New Motion period but she had that moved up. When it came to questions the first one was from Unity's Exec Bd member Greg Lundahl, with what looked like a planted question so Randi could extend her pres report without looking so. More of the Q's were Unity/union employees. Randi has taken whatever Shanker/Feldman did in terms of meeting manipulation to new heights. Don't ever say she's not an innovator.

Good PD on Election Day at Aviation HS
Finally, I wanted to mention the great PD I attended at Aviation HS. It was run by robotics coach Mike Koumoulos. Mike is also handling running the FIRST Queens qualifier on Dec. 15.
Teachers from around the city attended to get some training on preparing their teams for the upcoming FIRST LEGO League tournament season. (You can follow events on my Norms Robotics blog.)

Mike did a wonderful job and had everyone relaxed and laughing in addition to providing lots of yummy pastries and teachers were totally involved and sharing info with each other.

The principal, Ms. Taylor came up for a visit and was very gracious and thanked everyone for coming and even offered to reimburse Mike for the pastries (but he got the money from a grant.) One of the very impressive young teachers attending who works at a parochial school will be looking for a job for next fall and I asked Ms. Taylor if she needed a math teacher and she practically hired her on the spot. But she has a contract. Maybe next fall Mike will be getting a co-robotics teacher in the school. Sometimes PD is very fruitful.

Ms. Taylor said the school got an A on the progress report. If I thought they meant anything I would think Aviation would be one school that deserves it. One of my neighbors is looking for a vocational type setting for his kid for next year and I highly recommend he take a look at the school. If only it was not such a big trip from Rockaway but I know Mike and others I know there would take good care of him.

A bunch of teachers from Aviation (I'm told more than 30% of the staff of Aviation are grads) have volunteered to be judges and they were getting some basic training to prepare them. Mike graduated from the school about 10 years ago, so he was training some of his former teachers. His younger brother Greg, an engineer at Con Ed, also graduated from Aviation and Mike recruited him (by threatening not to invite him Thanksgiving) to be the chief judge. (I'm assisting.) So Greg was also training his former teachers. I got a great kick out of Mike & Greg, both in their 20's doing PD for experienced teachers (and having them lap it up.)

Good PD often comes when teachers teach other teachers relevant stuff. Pretty simple eh!

I was hanging with one of the Aviation teachers, who was clearly impressed with the comprehensive thought behind FIRST robotics programs that explore what I would call "cooperative competition." I was excited to be participating and learned a lot from the dialogue we had with each other. I urged coaches to have patience and let the kids fail and get a little frustrated and use that frustration to discover new insights. We're just grazing FIRST concepts here and many schools don't always get the whole point. But enough do to have an impact. There are over 8000 teams world wide involved this year.

School Report Cards - Way to go 318

DB comes through again

IS 318 in Brooklyn didn't get an F but a B. Note the item below from Elizabeth Green's NY Sun article on school report card grades:

John Galvin, the assistant principal at a popular Brooklyn middle, I.S. 318, said his school's leadership met to discuss their new grade, a B, but decided not to make any changes. Moving to an A, he said, would require spending many hours on small improvements, moving students who are already passing tests to get just one or two more questions right on a standardized test.

He said test prep would leave students bored, not stronger learners. "We're not going to give up doing art, music, chess, robotics — all the great programs we have during the day that gifted kids are interested in — just to make sure they get a better or equal score than they got the year before," he said. "We do care about the test, but not enough to sacrifice.

Full article posted at Norms Notes.

Pat D. Teacher and Parent comments on ICE-mail:
Way to go 318! It's a great school with so much to offer their children. Kids and parents knock the doors down to get in. My daughter had the best three years of her school life at this school. She learned to enjoy learning along with the opportunities she was offered in the arts, sports and cultural aspects of life. The staff is very dedicated, receptive to parents and proud of their students. You couldn't ask for a better school environment. These marks don't mean anything but an increase in scores. My school got an A. But so many of the kids are struggling and have a long way to go.

I've had a long-time relationship (I tried to get a job there in 1968) with people at the school and they have always had these great extra programs that attract kids from all over Williamsburg and Greenpoint. People don't fight to get in because of the test scores. The school could get an "F" and it wouldn't make a difference to people in the community. Except that the Tweedle bureaucrats might pressure them to drop things like chess and robotics to get an uptick in scores. They were the first school I got involved in robotics back in 2001 and that coach is now an AP there.

The smart admins, led by Fred Rubino who has spent his entire career there as a teacher and AP, know what people really want as an education for their children. They know that making the school attractive to a wide variety of students by offering great programs ends up raising test scores because they attract kids that do not need as much test prep.

The machine is ALIVE

The long-time now retired principal Alan Fierstein was a product of the local political machine in District 14. The destruction of such machines was one of the major goals of the BloomKlein assault on the schools. I once fought the machine with the original activist group "Another View in District 14" in the early 70's, which evolved into the CSW Caucus which eventually led to ICE. But that's a story for another time.

The machine went under cover under BloomKlein and I don't care much for the current boss, but it still controls many of the schools. I know all the players - the good, the bad and the ugly.

I've been writing lately that things were better pre-BloomKlein (and was shocked to actually read Diane Ravitch say something along those lines.) In my last few years in the system I worked at the district level in instructional tech support and saw almost all the schools close up. You know what? There was a hell of a lot more good than ugly.

Alan Fierstein is a prime example of someone who I originally viewed as a hack - the gym teacher/coach becoming a school leader type, but grew to respect him. He never said he knew about teaching reading or math but trusted people who did know how to do these things. Fierstein called me every year to ask if I had any kids for him (we weren't a feeder) and I would get as many kids as I could into 318 to keep them out of the local middle school catastrophe we fed into.

One time, one of the smartest kids we every had (one of the 3 Asian kids in our school) and a member of my robotics club, was accepted at the top middle school in District 32/Bushwick due to the intervention of someone who got her a waiver. When Al heard he put on a full-court press and come September the kid was at 318 and had a great 2 years there, going on to Stuyvesant.

When we were distributing lit during the 2005 contract vote in the Bronx, we went to eat on Arthur Ave. As we walked into the restaurant, from the back came the distinctive voice of, "Oh, oh, the restaurant just got painted red." Al was never subtle. He invited us to join him and his wife and we had a blast, though my buddies felt they were sitting with the enemy – Al is not shy about talking about the union, which, ironically, made him principal. Al waxed, as poetic as Al could get, about some of the current ed policies. If you run into him don't get him started. Al passed the school into Fred's hands, so they've has consistent leadership for over 30 years.

There are other schools in District 14 that currently have good leadership that came out of that machine. Many of the principals were chapter leaders because the UFT District rep who became the district superintendent, the legendary Mario DeStefano (who died of cancer in the mid 90's) was the boss. One of my battles with the machine was how a union-run machine could be so willing to violate teachers' rights. Over time, Mario and I worked things out (he was not very happy when I became a chapter leader,) but that's another story for another time. There are too many another stories.

That these machine principals still exist in Tweedledom, with pretty high marks from my teacher buddies, is a sign that they are mostly not running their schools into the ground and also that the shadow machine still is in operation, just waiting for BloomKlein to exit. (One school that I won't finger, has the perfect principal and AP, both former teachers there. Someone in the Tweed bureaucracy got something right.) Though I can point to some machine-created horror stories (the first school I taught at has a machine-made decimator as principal and the chapter leader has started working with ICE because the union is so inept,) generally my contacts say they prefer a machine principal to someone out of the Leadership Academy, or one of the other Tweed attack dogs.

The two schools I was based at for over 30 years have gone over to the enemy and the long-time staffs have been, or are in the process, of being decimated. The true impact of BloomKlein in so many schools - massive instability at the ground level.

Tweedles often believe that in the corporate world one shouldn't supervise the people you once worked with (we heard this about Joe Girardi's becoming Yankee manager) and they have often applied this to the NYC school system, to disastrous effects in many places where a popular and competent former teacher is passed over for some hack.

IS 318 is a prime example of a school community where complex relationships forged over many years between parents, teachers and their former colleagues who they have come to trust as their administrators, can make a school work. It is a lesson that hopefully the successors of BloomKlein, who are simply not interested in lessons that will really improve schools, will learn.

With mayoral control authorization coming up again, people should not throw out the idea of an improved local community control that existed pre-BloomKlein. Sure, there will be political machines and patronage (does anyone think there's no patronage through mayoral control?) But with oversight, a system could be put in place that could work.

Of course, with the UFT having always backed centralized systems, as epitomized by mayoral control, the very idea is impossible.

Read the fabulous review of IS 318 in Inside Schools.

Kudos to Teachers at PS 196X Who Reject Merit Pay

Kudos to the gang at PS 196x and to the Lucy and Yoav from the Post for reporting the story. And for going to ICE'ers James Eterno and Lisa North for comments. Kudos to them too for speaking publicly. (Check out more from Lisa and James on the ICE blog.) Make sure to read ICE'er Michael Fiorillo's (yeah, kudos to him) amazing post on this blog from a few days ago on merit pay. (just scroll down.) Oh, and with these 3 founding members of ICE doing their thing it reminds me that ICE turned 4 years old on Halloween. Kudos and Happy Birthday to all the gang at ICE who keep plugging no matter what. And kudos to Jan, parent from Dist 2 for her great comment of support her teachers and the principal at her child's school as it relates to the school progress report. The outrage of some of these grades ties in with the crazy way merit pay will be distributed.

And kudos to eduwonkette for writing this today: "Five years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article called "The Talent Myth" questioning the management zeitgeist that the NYC Department of Education has swallowed wholesale...."
One thing leads to another and guess which company is the model? It starts with an E and ends with bankruptcy and dissolution on desolation road, or on the road to desolation.

Teachers at PS 196X Reject Merit Pay
From NY Post:
By LUCY CARNE and YOAV GONEN

November 5, 2007 -- Teachers at a Bronx elementary school gave a surprising response to a bonus plan that would pay them roughly $3,000 each for schoolwide student gains: Thanks, but no thanks.

Even without knowing if their school will be selected for the controversial program, more than 30 teachers at PS 196 voted preliminarily to reject it - largely because of its emphasis on
student test scores.

"I'm trying to move away from test scores being the be-all, end-all," said a PS 196 teacher. "I'd rather impress upon them the importance of a well-rounded education."

Mayor Bloomberg and United Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten announced the bonus plan with much fanfare Oct. 17 in conjunction with a pension agreement relished by the teachers union. Many saw the bonus plan as a trade-off, and as a step toward an individual merit-pay plan sought by Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

The bonus plan calls for teachers at 200 of the lowest-performing schools to divvy up $20 million in private funds for improving student performance. Individual teacher payment will be determined by a four-person committee at each school.

But the union was given an escape hatch that some members seem to be savoring: 55 percent of teachers at each school must vote to participate in the plan.

"The whole concept is an insult that you're not working hard unless we throw 3,000 bucks at you," said James Eterno, a longtime social-studies teacher at Jamaica HS in Queens.

Eterno added that he wouldn't be surprised to see at least some schools reject an invitation to the program, which is expected to double to 400 schools next year.

Department of Education spokeswoman Debra Wexler said the list of eligible schools is still being worked on but officials "are completely confident that educators will want to be part of a program that rewards excellence."

Even Weingarten acknowledged that the program, despite relying too heavily on test scores, was better received than she had expected.

"For now, what we did was include enough checks and balances that this is something where the school staff has equal power with the principal to decide to go into this process and decide how the money gets distributed," she said.

Whether schools ultimately accept or refuse offers for the bonus pay, wary teachers maintain that aligning teacher rewards with student scores sets a bad precedent.

"I think it lowers the standard of what good education is," said Lisa North, a literacy coach at PS 3 in Brooklyn.

Grading Public Schools by Jan, parent in Dist. 2

It is outrageous to me that our city's hard-working educators are being subjected to this narrow grading system. How humiliating! How reductive! Chancellor Klein has no idea how to work with or respect professional educators. My son's middle school received a C, and according to the DOE website, a school that receives a “C” 3 years in a row is subject to “consequences.”

This grade does not match my experience of the school in any respect. The school’s principal is stellar -- gifted and visionary. The teachers as well are smart, concerned, and committed; they bring a vibrancy and enthusiasm to a curriculum increasingly threatened to be overcome by test prep. The team of teachers from each grade meets regularly to discuss curriculum and individual students; if a student is falling behind, they are alerted immediately and work together to bring that student back. I am so angry that the chancellor is subjecting these hard-working educators to a meaningless and demoralizing grade.

The DOE’s miserly focus on assessment, their non-stop testing and grading, is deadening to our children – and now the DOE has found a way to demoralize our principals and teachers in the bargain. All the children in our city deserve the opportunity to experience a love of learning, the chance to be engaged in vibrant learning communities, and our educators deserve support.

My grade for the DOE? A resounding F. Unfortunately, I fear that their actions will now resound throughout the system, and it is our schools and children who will feel the “consequences” of this grade.

-- Jan, School District 2 Manhattan

TAGNYC has been gathering feedback

UPDATED: Materials have been circulating calling for an action at Tweed on Nov. 26 the evening of the monthly PEP meeting. Right now we have sketchy information. We'll post more when we know more.

The following is a note from TAGNYC with comments on the meeting Randi held with RR denizens on Oct. 30. We wrote a previous report on that meeting here - ed notes

Teachers:

TAGNYC has been gathering feedback on the October 30^th meeting between UFT staff and persons currently in the Reassignment Centers. Very few of the responses have been positive. A couple of people who spoke to us expressed the sentiment that Randi was now trying to address the conditions of the Reassignment Centers and that her Ten Points is evidence of this new commitment. Here is a direct quote from a person who drew encouragement from the meeting:

“As negligent as she has been in the past, I think she is showing a greater level of concern now.”

TAGNYC can not agree. Our position: The UFT leadership is analogous to the farmer who shuts the barn door after the horses escape or to the fire department that arrives to hose down a building’s burning embers. No amount of theatrics on the part of Randi Weingarten could quell the constant muttering of the crowd: “Where have they been all this time?” Where was the UFT and Randi’s concern when the damage was being done? That is the question that should have been addressed. Where were most of the district reps and most of the chapter leaders when Bloomberg-Klein’s unethical principals and assistant principals were harassing teachers and using u-ratings to intimidate and force out senior/experienced teachers? TAGNYC holds that the consensus ‘on the street’ is that Randi is no longer silent because her lambs are no longer silent. “Fired up--won’t take no more”- a rallying union cry that has caught up with the UFT leadership.

What follows are comments made by individuals who attended the meeting with some TAG commentary.

• Why was not a copy of the Ten Points handed out? People tried to copy them down from the PowerPoint but there was not enough time. (Possibly not to have a paper record?)
• Most of the Ten Points came from the brainstorming of people in the Reassignment Centers. How is Randi planning to make "her" Ten Points happen?
• Randi got the message loud and clear that her people were not doing their work (of representing the members).
• A member of the audience called out “If you can’t do anything, why are we here?’ Randi heard this comment.
• A reply of Randi’s: “That’s why I’m here. I need to hear.” (Brings up the main question- Why weren’t you hearing for the past many years? Isn’t that the role of a union leader?)
• There were no surprises. However experiencing it was really depressing. I’m glad I did not go alone.
• The UFT staff looked visibly upset when Randi told us “...we would be here until all questions are answered.” They kept talking among themselves and looking at their watches. A member of the audience had to keep asking "Can you please be quiet."
• She’s not going far enough. She has to do something before people are removed from the school. (That’s when the chapter leaders and district reps could earn their stipends and salaries.)
• Why is enforcing due process such a big deal when Article 21 of the contract repeats the state law? Why doesn’t the union just enforce the contract? Some of the Ten Points are contractual.

The next meeting will be on November 15th to address the issue of the ATRs. Affected TAG members please ask: Where was the union and how did you let this happen without a fight?

TAGNYC

http://teacheradvocacygrpnyc.blogspot.com/

Suggestion from Michael Fiorillo on ICE-mail:

In regard to David Pakter's plan to demonstrate at Tweed, I think it might be helpful if the Rubber Room teachers did a borough by borough survey to see if the detainees have been put there disproportionately by Leadership Academy principals. If this were to pan out, it would make for a much more effective attack against Klein and the regime, since it would be hard for them to counteract the logical inference that this a policy developed by Tweed and implemented by its minions.

Commentary from a variety of people on ICE mail:

"Do We Live In A Police State?" asks teacher A:

Teacher B: Most decidedly YES!

It strikes me as strange that we, as teachers, sat back for so long and allowed ( yes, allowed) all of these things to happen to us. Piece by piece, little by little, we have turned our destinies over to those (Bloomburger, FrankenKlein and Swinegarten) that are seeking greater political careers for themselves and even greater personal power. Do we not see the Bear directly coming at us?

Sure, I've heard all kinds of reasoning for why we have allowed ourselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter ( time in, pensions, age, etc). True enough, but WHEN will those blinders come off, and teachers take control of their own destiny? We have let ourselves be treated as less than professional, and now we see the results.

Rallies, etc., are great for publicity, but, after the dust settles, what will have been accomplished? It's time for teachers to rally together, and form our own professional association, and PAC's.

Teacher C:

Definitely. And it's time to write letters to members of the City Council and other public officials. It is time to learn how to be effective activists, and not rush blindly and emotionally into anything.

The opposition is extremely clear headed and relaxed. If this were a game of chess, we are fast approaching check. We're not there yet though. There's still some time, but not much.

The message that must get out of the Rubber Room is "If it can happen to us, it can happen to you." Every in-service member needs to be aware of that possibility.