The summer beach season is about to open, and the anti-teacher, anti-union “Jaws” of New York City, Eva Moskowitz, is prowling the shores again.
Eva hasn’t quite figured out that her lack of knowledge on how to run a school, her lack of administrative imagination, does not necessarily translate into fatal flaws for teacher unions and collective bargaining in education.
So she is putting it all on display, telling us about the wisdom that has come with running the Harlem Success Charter School [which has yet to open]. You can read a selection of it here, as it appears in the conservative educational journal Education Next.
According to Eva, the collective bargaining agreement excludes the possibility of running an extended day for students who need the extra time, all because of the contractual limits on the length of the mandatory teacher work day. To demonstrate just how little she knows, she manages to get the actual time of the current teacher work day wrong, but that is only a bonus.
The main difficulty with Eva’s attempt to take another bite out of the hide of NYC teachers is that if what she says were actually true, then the UFT Secondary Charter School could only run from 8 AM in the morning to 2:40 PM in the afternoon. [We are working within the terms of the existing contract, to demonstrate that it is no impediment to creating quality schools serving high need students.] But, in fact, we will run from 8 AM in the morning until 5 PM in the afternoon, giving students an extended day, tutorial sessions for those who need them and quality extra-curricular programs. The entire academic program will be taught by our experienced, accomplished high quality staff [we have had literally hundreds of applications for our twelve opening year positions], and teachers will be paid per session for extra-curricular work. [None of Eva’s skinflint outsourcing to operations who are cheaper than teachers at our school.]
And it’s all as simple as putting the teachers of the school on two different, overlapping time schedules. We know that teachers spend a lot more time than their contractual minimum working in schools, but we do not want to overload our teachers and burn them out. We want them at their best when they are teaching our students.
We could go on, but now that the beaches are cleared, we have better things to do than spear fishes in a barrel.
4 Comments:
1 curious3
· May 26, 2006 at 10:48 am
Hey Leo,
I hope that the UFT charter school is a giant success. If so, I hope the UFT opens more. If Eva is successful, I hope she opens more too. I hope no one tries to threaten the existence of excellent schools. I am concerned that the charter cap will prevent the creation of more schools that can experiment with new ideas and provide parents with more choices.
By the way, does the new UFT charter school accept visitors? I would love to check it out…
Ken
2 Kombiz
· May 26, 2006 at 11:21 am
Ken, This isn’t the right forum for that question, besides the fact that I don’t know who you are, safety, no one is going to make a determination from EdWize without any input from school based staff, disturbing instruction, basic policies in place, etc.. The school that I’ve visited came via a specific request from school based staff and there are guidelines, for good reasons, in place. Certainly there can’t be a recommendation made from the comment section of EdWize (and without input from the teachers in the school), as EdWize would rightly have zero power over those questions.
3 NYC Educator
· May 26, 2006 at 3:15 pm
The Sewers of Rangoon should back up in her breakfast.
4 R. Skibins
· May 26, 2006 at 10:21 pm
I believe that 8:00 start times are discriminatory against teachers who must commute from the suburbs. For three decades, the city has been trying to inact a residency law. Thanks to the ever-increasing school day and now the ever-increasing schools with 8:00 start times, the residency law has, in a manner of speaking, become a reality.