There are two types of gophers: prairie dogs and Department of Education couriers. One carries disease and the other carries a scam. The scam consists of what is being carried as well as who is carrying it.
The “what” are loads of tests that tell nothing about the quality of teaching and learning but which the Department of Education nonetheless and with exquisite anal retentiveness manufactures and manipulates as propaganda tools to be used for its own aggrandizement by way of defaming teachers. (Actually the DOE is too busy to be preoccupied with anything except the dirty work. A private publishing corporation got a DOE contract for many tens of millions of dollars to design and score these pseudo-yardsticks.)
The “who” are the private messengers who pick up and drop off bundles of these dreary tests at a cost to taxpayers of $5 million annually. FedEx is secure enough for NASA, I’d bet, but not for the Office of Assessment and Accountability.
I hear that when the DOE sends out its career death warrants to senior teachers, whistleblowers, and independent educators who Teachers College considers apostates, they use the post office, but they probably do that as part of a bulk rate deal.
The DOE’s dog and pony show is of biblical proportions.
While the errand runners make their appointed rounds, more than a third of the city’s public school kids (and half of high schoolers) are shoehorned into overcrowded classrooms. The city’s target of 63,000 new seats is 104,000 fewer than its original goals, according to a report prepared by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s task force, Class Size Matters, the Center for Arts Education and the union.
Would you believe that despite the CFE settlement, there have been fewer new seats in the six years since the mayor took control of the schools than there were during the same time frame of the Giuliani administration? Of course you would believe it, because you’re an old pro at clearing away the smoke and wiping the mirrors of this mayor’s educational “reforms.”
Revelations of the DOE’s fiscal botches, warped priorities, and defensiveness follow trench-bound educators like the flocks of feather in Hitchcock’s The Birds. Several enlightening exposes by Kolodner in the Daily News and Gootman in the New York Times have been published in recent days.
On October 30 Gootman reported, “The number of children entering NYC public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last year under a new policy intended to equalize access…The policy…also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes.”
Gootman notes that in 2005, Mayor Bloomberg “promised to maintain all of the city’s existing gifted programs while creating more in historically underserved districts.’”
In an October 24 piece, the New York Times reporter spotlighted the latest problems with the DOE’s $80 million data system called ARIS. Here are two of several sobering conclusions that can be drawn from this snafu so deviously sugar-coated by the DOE:
- Each and every single one of the principals that were interviewed for the ARIS article insisted on “anonymity for fear of retribution.” Now why do you suppose that might be?
- Patrick J. Sullivan, the Manhattan borough president’s representative on the “Panel for Educational Priorities, noted that ARIS is supposed to make data accessible to parents who “need to understand what their children are learning and how they are progressing.” He described the ARIS fiasco as “further proof of the disdain the DOE holds for us.”
The DOE has indeed laid out a great spread of reforms. The banquet table is full of rations and titillations to diet. But call it a smorgasbord, a cornucopia or what you will, it’s still food poisoning.
1 Comment:
1 Redcatcher
· Nov 4, 2008 at 11:57 am
No more secret ballot–Under the Employee Free Choice Act, unions would only need to persuade a majority of employees to sign a union card, and the employees would have to sign the card publicly. Principals would like to extend this to Chapter Leader elections. This way, principals can run their own flunkies for chapter leader and the principal would see how each staff member voted. What a country!