So, what do you think of this latest iteration of “If at first you don’t succeed … (you know the rest)? It really is a joke. The mayor starts the education piece of his State of the City with the boast that “we brought stability to a school system that was in chaos” (paraphrase). And then he announces yet another reorganization! How many is that? 3? 4? How can he keep a straight face?
And why are we dismantling the regions that we spent a fortune on setting up? Again, with a straight face: “because the regions did their job.” What job was that? Teaching people how not to answer their phones? So now we can spend another fortune on refilling all those empty district offices. Anything rather than admit failure.
And how’s this for double-speak? “We’re putting the decision-making in the hands of those closest to the students.” By any sane definition, that would be the teachers. But not according to this administration; to them it’s the principal. Shows how little they know about schools. Do they really think it’s the principals who are there with the kids six-and-a-half hours a day? Most principals don’t even know their students’ names, let alone what their needs are.
All this would be funny if it weren’t so scary. We are at the mercy of people who either a) have no scruples or b) are delusional. Even worse, the kids are at their mercy too. But thankfully, this reorganization has nothing to do with kids. It’s all structure. I know this union says the chancellor should focus more on the classroom, but maybe we’re better off that he doesn’t. There’s less harm he can do this way.
Besides being unscrupulous or delusional, this proposal makes it clear that Klein is one more thing — pissed. (Can I say that here?) He is so p.o’d and humiliated that he didn’t get tenure from us in the last contract — or just about anything else he wanted — that he feels he has to save face. So he claims he’s “reforming” the tenure process. How’s he doing that? By telling principals they should start paying attention to their responsibilities in evaluating probies. (Note: These are the same folks his reorg gives even more responsibility and authority. Scary)
But just in case he decides to do something more than blow smoke — and really change the criteria for granting tenure — our esteemed chancellor had better brace himself for some heavy pushback. You don’t press hot buttons like tenure with this union and expect it to slip through. Randi was apparently ready even before the mayor spoke Wednesday, with a prepared statement making it clear that fooling with tenure is a line in the sand for us. (You can read the whole statement on the uft website.)
Poor Joel. He’s been trying to make his bones by breaking this union since he got here. Now, in trying to cover up the fact that he just lost his last chance to do that when his boss made him agree to this last contract (by the time the next one comes up, he’ll be outa here), he’s leaving himself open for even more egg on his face. This should be fun to watch.
4 Comments:
1 xkaydet65
· Jan 19, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Let’s refill those DOs. If Cathy Powis tries to return to the old CSB 24 office in Atlas Terminals she’ll find it’s become a California Pizza Kitchen.
Oh and the Queens super office will be located in the Region 3 HQ on Linden Place in Flushing. A location harder to get to than the green zone in Bahgdad.
2 Persam1197
· Jan 20, 2007 at 7:36 am
What scares me is that the damage caused Kleinberg’s latest master plan might not be repairable. I’m a conspiracy theorist. I see Chris Cerf as the icing on the cake in this corporate raid of a public trust. How can the former head of Edison be the driving force in NYC education? Now management is being privatized and parcelled out to corporate interests. Even if the next chancellor is a real educator and is a person of the hightest integrity, what will he/she have to work with?
Bloomberg and Klein have both stated that we wouldn’t recognize the system they’ll leave behind from what the B.O.E. was when they took it over. Oy!
3 xkaydet65
· Jan 20, 2007 at 5:28 pm
What we as a union must do is stand on the law that public employees can only be supervised by other public employees. What these people like Cerf and the Brits must be told is that they are not in our chain of command. They are not in our table of organization. They are not in our army!
The law about public employees is clear. Stand on its principles.
4 jd2718
· Jan 20, 2007 at 10:23 pm
We should keep a careful eye on what they mean to do to tenure. But we cannot afford to stop looking there.
While each of the organizational changes so far may have accomplished some limited objective of Bloomberg and his Chancellor, I believe their overall aim is served by frequent, rapid, unpredictable disruption.
They are generating nervousness and insecurity. They are changing for change’s sake. They are forcing people to change jobsite, or other work conditions. They have changed our schedules each year of the last (how many in a row?) They are subjecting all of us, including the most vulnerable, to the whims of untrained and erratic “principals.”
The principals have it as bad, if not worse (although my overall sympathy for them is of course tempered by how lousy some of them have treated us). I know that I don’t want to rate them, not the way Bloomberg’s Chancellor has proposed; I’m not for appealing to the might and justice of Tweed. For anything.
But the schools themselves have it the worst. Consistency in staff? (Should we talk about high turnover, or ATRs here?) Consistency in curriculum? (new high school math courses starting in Septenber, btw. That’s from Albany, and an improvement, though an improvement of an ugly mess of their own design). Schools opening? Schools closing? Extra help? Losing art and foreign language? Overcrowding? Incompetent administration?
They are disrupting the system.
At Tilden they manipulated a functioning school into a mess in order to close it down.
Why are they manipulating the New York Public School System into a mess?
Jonathan