[Editor’s note: Peter Goodman blogs at Ed in the Apple, where this post originally appeared.]
I hear a nostalgia for the “good old days” of the Board of Education … paeans to Rudy Guiliani and Ed Koch?
Rudy and Ed ran the Board of Ed, have no doubts, they hired and fired chancellors, claimed credit for everything that was “good” and blamed chancellors for everything that wasn’t …
And yes, those negotiated collective bargaining agreements … I don’t remember any monumental gains … and I do remember that Guiliani five year contract beginning two years of “0″,”0.”
As time passes that fish gets bigger and bigger, sports exploits more spectacular and former boy/girl friends more gorgeous …
The Klein initiatives have swung from tightly controlled top-down to school-by-school decentralization with absolutely no supervision or accountability, except for those School Progress Report grades …
In spite of Tweed fabrications test scores are stagnant, the gains of the late nineties/early 2000’s have disappeared … and support for and belief in Joel has eroded.
The State legislature appears anxious to take a close look at mayoral control. The law itself, that sunsets on June 30, 2009, is surprisingly simple. Much of what we have seen is the work of the chancellor, not the law.
Over the next month or two the Teacher’s Union, the City Council, the Public Advocate and a host of others will be issuing reports/suggestions/recommendations. The education public marketplace will be engaging in a public debate … a healthy exercise.
Ultimately it is the up to the legislature and our new Governor either to change the law, or, wait till next year.
Changing the leadership at the Tweed, the Department, the Board, or, whatever we choose to call it is not nirvana. Our schools are in serious jeopardy.
NAEP scores, the “gold standard,” are mediocre … and both the right and the left are questioning public education, as we know it.
Supporters of vouchers, non-union charter schools, schemes to create union-free charter districts, education management organizations, both not-for-profit and for profit, are afoot. This is no longer a “right” versus “left” fight … There is a broad spectrum that seriously questions the current unionized public school system.
Fending off the attacks is not a strategy … public school teachers, and their unions, must play an active role in creating schools that work for the most vulnerable kids.
Schools will be evaluated: either by the NCLB rubric and/or School Progress Reports, or by a method devised by teacher unions … and, unless we begin to see progress, measured by agreed upon methodologies, the opponents of public education will be emboldened.
School as learning organizations, cultures that encourage collaboration, where introspection, both inpidual and group, are core values.
The demise of the Klein leadership will be a win in a small skirmish in a much larger battle.
3 Comments:
1 NYC Educator
· Apr 9, 2008 at 3:33 pm
I regret, Mr. Goodman, that you remember no gains. When I started teaching, we got a building assignment once every third semester. Now they are perpetual.
Gains included reduction of lunch patrol to once every six years, and then never. They included the elimination of demeaning jobs helping secretaries with filing. In fact, at one point, hall patrols were eliminated. Now they are perpetual.
Another gain was the addition of more professional C6 assignments, including one to allow extra time for those of us with three or more preps. Now they are gone.
Another gain was the UFT transfer plan, which allowed teachers, regardless of salary, to transfer schools. It allowed me to escape an abusive AP, who threatened me with a schedule that precluded my second job if I would not agree to teach five classes out of license in order to replace a teacher who could not control classes.
Now schools are closed and senior teachers are dumped into the absent teacher reserves, where through no fault of their own, they may very well molder until they retire.
I certainly regret the decision to toss away every professional gain we’d made since I began 24 years ago. And I certainly recall the zeros we took to pay for them, as well as the fraud on the part of DC37’s leadership that enable Saint Rudy to dispense zeros during what turned out to be an economic boom time for the city.
As for mayoral control, I distinctly recall the UFT being unhappy with Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, and even Mayor Bloomberg. That spans my entire career. It’s folly, I think, for us to support mayoral control and hope the next one is better.
I find it remarkable that the UFT will not take a principled stand against mayoral control. Certainly, both kids and teachers need an independent chancellor, and certainly, there ought to be checks and balances against the power of the next or indeed any mayor.
2 Mayoral control debate. « PREA Prez
· Apr 9, 2008 at 6:21 pm
[...] an interesting debate over at EdWize. Peter Goodman answers the traditional question, “Are we better off now than years [...]
3 nycityteacher
· Apr 10, 2008 at 11:01 pm
I find it very difficult to outright dismiss mayoral control. Despite Klein’s restructuring, I’ve found that the past six years have been the most professional of my career. If nothing else, the new accountability measures (including quality reviews and learning environment surveys) are causing “office principals” to take more active leadership roles, convey visions for their schools, and build community among their staffs. Certainly, mayoral control is problematic — the silencing of parental dissent is particularly troubling — but I am not eager to return to a fragmented system where nepotism and other forms of corruption often thrived. Also, I wonder if we’re blaming mayoral control for the “trickle down” effects of accountability measures at the federal level. Change is always uncomfortable, but I must laud Bloomberg for having the courage to take on education as an issue while his predecessors turned a blind eye to the inequities in our city.
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