A few years after I started teaching I met Eddie Gottlieb, he lived in my building. He was a member of the War Resisters League, had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War and an elementary school principal on the Upper West Side. When you walked into his school building kids were all over the place, painting on the walls, sitting in groups in the hallways, at first it looked chaotic, and then you realized they were all engaged in projects, actively engaged in learning. In an era when kids were expected to sit quietly in their seats Eddie was decades ahead of the curve. The precursors of Tweed, the denizens of Livingston Street left him alone, the parents and their elected officials loved him and protected him.
International High School was another gem within the huge Board of Education bureaucracy. A small high school hidden away in Long Island City that did it “their own way.” Eric Nadelstern, the principal, and his staff created the School Based Option Staffing plan and brought it to the union. It eventually became imbedded in our contract. “Personnel Procedures for Staff Selection, Support and Evaluation” is an International High School publication that outlines a system whereby teachers hire teachers and teachers evaluate teachers. International High Schools have empowered staffs.
About forty high schools formed a consortium, headed by Eric, they received a waiver from the State Ed Department. Students were evaluated and granted diplomas through a portfolio and roundtable system rather than Regents Competency Exams. As the State began to phase out waivers Eric lead a battle, without any help from the Board of Education, to retain the system.
I always figured that one day some Chancellor would handcuff Eric and bury him in the dungeons of Livingston Street.
How did Eric get Klein to move from a Stalinist authoritarianism beating the muzhiks into submission to a Kibbutz system of self managing collectives?
I was thinking, maybe hypnosis, but Joel Klein’s droning speeches put everyone to sleep without a swinging pocket watch.
Empowerment Schools: two hundred schools divided into networks of twenty schools each, that manage themselves and all the higher ups serve the needs of schools and are evaluated by the schools – a bottom up evaluation system.
By contrast, the Jack Welch driven Leadership Academy proffers a stick and carrot approach, a Machiavellian philosophy, you must fear me before you can love me.
Can Jack and Eric hug and survive? Will Joel snap out of his hypnotic trance?
We live in interesting times.
4 Comments:
1 Chaz
· May 14, 2006 at 6:40 pm
Peter;
Is this same man who is the driving force in breaking up our large comprehensive traditional high schools into the “flavor of the day” small schools?
By the way as a high school teacher, the State Regents is the great equalizer in determining the ability of a student to graduate. The use of an alternate assessment such as a portfolio is subject to abuse. I was once in a school with a portfolio requirement and the teachers spoon fed these students to develop an acceptable portfolio. I mean the teacher did most of the work!
I think I’m understanding why our Union has lost touch with the classroom teacher when it embraces the likes of Eric Nadelstern, the destroyer of high schools and an opponent of Regents testing, a tried and true method to determine a students academic ability.
2 jd2718
· May 14, 2006 at 11:21 pm
Chaz,
I agree with you completely about portfolio assessment: in a high-stakes testing environment, there is not a possiblity that it will be abused, there is a near certainty that it will.
While some individuals may be friendly with Nadelstern, I do not believe that the UFT as a whole has ‘embraced’ him. At least I hope we have not.
Jonathan
3 amajorov
· May 15, 2006 at 9:34 am
That would be “kibbutz” and why groups of twenty schools? Why not thirty? Or ten?
4 Kombiz
· May 15, 2006 at 9:43 am
This is a post Peter wrote and sent to me last week, and I posted it online without going through a back and forth. It’s certainly not an official UFT position, agree or disagree with the post or Peter’s post.