Welcoming Gotham’s new teachers

The Javits Convention Center looks sort of like Darth Vader’s place, and today, at 59 degrees and raining outside, it was exceptionally cold and cavernous. The only warmth was some 3,000 new NYC teachers, who gathered there for a day-long orientation. Young and tough and curious–or so they seemed, though they were never really invited to speak.

Their day started in rows–and rows and rows–of chairs, looking out a wall of windows onto a grey Hudson. Silhouetted before these windows was Joel Klein, who waxed poetic, as most of the other speakers did, on his alleged salvation by city school teachers, about the great and noble undertaking they were embarking upon, etc. etc. Very nice.

Then Marcia Lyles addressed them. I loved this line of hers: “I know exactly what’s going through your minds right now.” She said it a couple of times. Why does she know exactly how they feel? Because, quote “I have only been on this job six weeks.”

How inspiring is that?

Lyles is actually the fourth deputy chancellor for instruction under Klein. While he has been celebrated lately for his five-year longevity, the people who work for him tend to come and go rather quickly. My second favorite line of hers was, “There are days when I just want to say, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’.” Working around the DOE, I know exactly how she feels.

“We must have high expectations.” “We are here for you,” and “We must transform our schools, ourselves into diamonds!” were among the platitudes that filled her speech, as the teachers watched helicopters come and go from the west side helipad and gulls fly by the big windows. Then of course there was the part about her favorite teacher, without whom she would never have become all that she became. Finally, her concluding line: “Welcome to the club.” It is not a clubby place, the Javits Center, and for all her kind words the whole thing felt a little stiff. They gave out $5 food vouchers but they weren’t good at Starbucks, which was the only coffee in the place.

A little later Chris Cerf, Deputy Chancellor for Human Capital, External Stragegy and something else (I’m not making that title up) was warm, as he can be, but more of these lines: “Thanks from the bottom of my heart.” “You are truly American heroes.”

If I were a new teacher in that room I would have started to wonder what they weren’t telling me. Why was everyone extolling their nobility and talking as if they were going off to war?

Actually, as luck would have it the teacher I was sitting next to told me proudly that she was about to become a 6th or 7th grade ELA teacher at MS 298 in the Bronx, the Academy for Public Relations. I got to tell her that it was one of the 16 schools that the SED added to the list of “persistently dangerous schools” yesterday. Welcome to the NYC school system, teach. But she was into it. She’s a Texas lawyer who chucked it all to come to NYC and teach with the Fellows and I imagine she’ll be terrific if she can last. Sounds like some rip-off real estate broker took a couple of thousand dollars off her to get her a tiny studio in Manhattan. I thought our teachers were supposed to get help with housing, or is that another program that was announced and forgotten?

Randi was the only speaker who gave these teachers any concrete help. She had them actually make a chant out of it: What are you going to do about pay checks, safety, class size etc.? “Call your union rep.” They liked that and chanted the response to her every time she named an issue. They also especially liked hearing their salaries will go up in October and again in May, and they also liked hearing Randi say she’ll make sure DOE abides by the state requirement to lower class size. That got a big round of applause, even before they learn just how huge their classes will be.

“Everyone else who talked to you today–they’re your bosses,” Randi told them. “I’m the only one–you’re my boss.” These young teachers are going to need the union, even though many of them were likely educated to believe unions stand in the way of education reform. But no one else is going to let them speak out, for themselves. The platitudes are nice and well meant but this job takes muscle and gut, which unions tend to support.

I hope these teachers turn out to be as strong as they seemed. Good luck to them.

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