In its inaugural issue of the new decade, the Daily News memorialized Chancellor Klein’s New Year’s resolution along with those of Kim Kardashian and Justin Timberlake. Too bad the aftermath of his already consummated resolutions are not yet fading memories and there is no immediate hope of inaugurating an enlightened post-reformist period with the vaporization of the malicious mischief of recent years.
Klein is quoted as saying “My resolution is… I want to stay focused on the children… I’m going to spend more time in the schools, reminding myself of what this is all about. If you hang out with the adults, you can get confused — you can get too much into who’s up and who’s down.”
No right-minded person could argue against the face value of the chancellor’s words. But is there a veil between the face value and the hidden scheme and is advocacy for children being used as a mask for an agenda that is hurtful to the practice of education and therefore to the welfare of children?
Is the exploitation of children interchangeable with being focused upon them? Is lip service a legitimate service? Are they morally equivalent?
Is the retreat from curriculum an embrace of intellectual development? Are corrupt practices of assessment a purifying means of achieving high standards and accountability?
What do we call adults who capitalize on public trust and the innocence of children by using devotion to children’s futures as a smokescreen for anti-public school, union-busting agendas?
The chancellor will spend more time in schools, he says. That would be great. But only if it involved unannounced visits with no administrative escorts or briefings or staged presentations. And only if he met with classroom educators spontaneously and at their request, without cameras, microphones or recriminations. Educators should feel secure that their confidence will not be betrayed and that there will be open-minded dialogue in which ideas are tendered in good-faith and taken in the correct spirit.
Otherwise, his spending time in schools will produce nothing more than the pre-ordained self-fulfilling prophecies in which all his programs and directives will be validated by pseudo-evidence concocted from his staged, scripted and rehearsed tour of phony showcases.
Chancellor Klein admits that he needs to be reminded “what this is all about.” He says you can get “confused” if you “hang out with the adults.” He doesn’t identify the sub-set of adults he has in mind but he seems to think that relating to kids and identifying with the instructors who inspire them are mutually exclusive designs. And admitting to being confused is an empty exercise in introspection unless he at least speculates where and when he has gone astray and volunteers to adjust his compass.
But his resolution sounds like a humble, populist confession made more plausible, perhaps, by sincere-sounding colloquial buzz. Are these hints of the “common man” sufficient for us to let down our guard?
If Klein’s vows mean anything less than an attitude-detoxification immersion, it’s just another typical new year’s resolution to be uttered and forgotten in the same breath.
I cannot criticize the last sentence of Chancellor Klein’s New Year’s resolution because I can’t fathom what he’s trying to proclaim. Perhaps it is supposed to make sense by virtue of its sounding definitive and authoritative.
“Who’s up”? “Who’s down”? And “Where’s Waldo?”
The calendar is clean but penciled in with “same old same olds.”
