Anyway,
in the course of my communications to you, I questioned your choice to
remain anonymous and you sent me a detailed explanation of your reasons
for for doing so. You also challenged some of my beliefs, and so I took
you up on your invitation to put a guest post on your blog.
I
should note that I don't want this to be an endless back and forth--I'm
going to say my piece and then I'll be gone. I also am not going to
read or respond to any comments; with the new school year starting, I
don't have time to debate with commenters--no matter how thoughtful they
may be. I know that those of you who read my remarks probably disagree
with practically all of them, but I'm not afraid to say what I think.
My method will be to respond to your missive line by line. Your remarks are in italics.
The
irony in my anonymity, if any, lies in the fact that I am a tenured
teacher whose views might end up getting him fired if his name became
known. I have told the truth about Bloomberg, Klein, Black, Walcott, and
other power brokers in the DOE. They do monitor my blog, and it would
be foolish for me to disclose my identity. Tenure is supposed to protect
me and give me the freedom of speech that an educator should have, but
it does not. I have heard of at least one blogger who was U rated after
her identity became known. She is now out of the system. You would have
it that tenured teachers can not be removed. That is nonsense. I know
outstanding teachers who have run afoul of admins and were fired for
their troubles. This includes union leaders who were fired for their
involvement with the UFT.
I have to say that I don't really buy this
defense. There are many many pro-union bloggers who are teachers and
the response that they have gotten does not resemble the harsh crackdown
that you implied.
In my own school, Gary Rubenstein is a spirited critic of
education reform and is an active updater of his blog. These views have
earned him lots of hearty handshakes and as far as I know, no horse
head has been delivered to his bed. He is not an exception. Here's another blog. Here's Peter Goodman's blog.
And there are many more. I have to say that blogging anonymously has
its uses. But if you are using your blog to attack others--especially
people who don't have any real power, it strikes me as somewhat
unethical. It's true, I wrote that piece for the Daily News so I guess I
asked for it, but I would prefer attacks on my ideas, not on my person.
If you are going to insult my character, then you owe it to yourself
to emerge into the daylight.
You
took a poke at this blog, alleging that few people read it. While "few"
is subjective, you can see that I have 72 followers, and have received
more than a half a million hits. One post of mine reached 150,000
readers. Quite a few of your own students have been here, if you care to
read the comments in the posts that feature you as their subject.
Perhaps you're just hoping that no one hears how real teachers feel
about your blatant betrayal of you colleagues and your union?
I'm sorry if I understated the response to your blog. These remarks
were based on the fact that many of your posts seemed to have no
comments, or at least very few.
You
asked me quite a few questions about my personal life, which I decline
to answer, once again for the sake of anonymity. You seem to think using
your name makes you more courageous than me, but followers of Kim
Jong-un who praise their dear leader aren't showing courage. You are
likewise showing no courage by sticking up for the billionaires who
would steal the jobs and pensions of hard working teachers.
I don't recall asking you
specific questions (they were
sort if idle inquiries), but I am curious about your own experiences.
I can say that I've taught in NYC schools for 14 years and my father
did for over 30. I currently teach at Stuyvesant HS, but started out
teaching middle school at IS 143M. I have three children, and I expect
them all to be educated in the public schools--though you might not
consider a charter school to be a legitimate public school. I'm a
lifelong NYC resident and I still live in Brooklyn today, in
Bed-Stuy. It's hard to say what your experience is. You say you are a
teacher with tenure. I have no reason to doubt this, but also there is
no reason to believe it. As an anonymous blogger, your audience has to
take it all on faith--again I urge you to come forward.
Your point about Kim Jong-un (who is actually the
Great Successor, if you must know) is obviously hyperbole, but really?
An entity that murders millions is comparable to the desire to reform
education in America? I don't think you are doing your cause much good
by using this comparison. And, as I mentioned, bashing the union while in the union is not an easy thing to do. You may disagree, but try it some time and see what response you get.
In
your letter, you claim to be anti-union. Don't you find it in the least
hypocritical that you rake in the benefits of union protection while
trying to tear it down? As a 14 year teacher, presumably with a master's
plus 30, you earn at least $80K a year. Do you think anyone would be
paying you that without your union negotiating on your behalf? When you
go to the doctor, are you thankful for the health benefits that the
contract affords you, or do you wish you could rip up the contract and
pay your medical bills yourself?
I do have a masters, but I'm not at +30. Actually, I came in
on the (now defunct) PPT license and was able to string out the process
of getting a masters for as long as possible. In the process, I cost
myself a lot of cash, but it was all an effort to avoid taking awful ed.
classes. After much drama, I ended up getting my masters at CUNY Grad
Center, which was where I wrote that anti-union piece, which was
submitted to the Daily News which started this whole discussion. But
the point is this: I don't believe that I need the union to give me my
benefits.
I'm confident in my abilities as well as that of
most of my fellow teachers. The idea that, without a union, we'd get
zero dollars doesn't make sense to me. I know of no employer who can
survive without offering their employees health care or competitive
salaries. It might be the case that I would get paid less than a
teacher who can teach BC Calculus and I might get paid more than a Phys.
Ed teacher. So be it. I was (IMHO) an excellent teacher in Washington
Heights and I believe I am an excellent teacher at Stuyvesant. If your
point is that since I receive union benefits, I can't criticize the
union... well, that doesn't sound particularly democratic to me.
Imagine that I made you the head of a business that
was struggling. Then I said, "by the way, you can't fire any employees
(or if you do, get ready to
run this gauntlet),
you can't change any of their pay, and those who have been here the
longest get paid the most. And if these employees keep their noses
clean for three years, they get essentially a lifelong sinecure." (It's
true that now tenure granting is less automatic, but now most applicants
automatically get tenure after four years or five). Is it any wonder
that such an entity would struggle?
Exactly
how much do you think Eva Moskowitz would be paying you? What job
protections would you have? Do you think you'd perform as well teaching
poor inner city children as you seem to teaching the brightest kids in
NY at Stuyvesant? If you are so anti-union, quit it and go work for Eva.
You want to talk the talk, then walk the walk. Then I'd have respect
for your position, if not agreement.
I don't think I buy your point that I can't criticize the
union unless I teach in a tough inner city school. I did teach in one
for two years and my departure was mostly the result of (what I
perceived as) a capricious administrator. Good thing the union was
there to protect me! Or not. I had no tenure yet and they were too busy
defending other teachers, like the one who slept at his desk and the
one who actually dragged a kid down the stairs by his ankles. I'd still
be there today, but the principal and I had differing educational
philosophies and I ended up at Stuy.
But let's get back to this idea that I can't
critique inner city schools unless I teach in one (leaving aside the
fact that I did). I live in a neighborhood that could be characterized
as inner city. Because the school there is so bad, I felt I had to leave
the zone and apply to a panoply of other programs. The result is an
onerous commute every day for drop-off. A related point: I think that
there should be a 2nd Avenue subway in NYC. I totally support it. But
digging that tunnel is a dirty and dangerous job. According to your
logic, I cannot criticize any elements of the project since I am not a
sandhog. By this logic, I can't criticize our military policy because I
don't serve in the army. You see why I find this argument pernicious?
Speaking
of which, it's extremely easy for you to ask for the contract to be
ripped up when you teach at a school like Stuyvesant. Those kids are
self motivated, and even if you sucked as a teacher, they would still do
quite well. Why don't you try teaching in a high poverty, gang-riddled
neighborhood as I did for 20 years and see how well you do. Perhaps that
experience might make you more aware of the issues involved in good
teaching. Perhaps then you might appreciate the job protections that
your union affords you, especially when your class in NOT a group of
Harvard bound seniors, but a bunch of kids who are lucky if they manage
to scrape through high school.
I notice you say "did" and not "do," which
presumably means you are also no longer in the game, so to speak. Are
you still teaching in that gang-riddled neighborhood?
Be that as it may, I spent my childhood going into
those schools, which is where my father taught (in the South Bronx and
East New York in the 1970s and 1980s). I also was a teacher up in
Washington Heights myself. There were great teachers in all of the
those schools, just like there are some mediocre teachers at Stuy.
Obviously evaluating teachers in different environments is an important
factor to take into account. Why not, for example, test kids
twice--once at the beginning of the year and once at the end? I do
agree that these are not easy issues to solve, but I don't believe that
they are unsolvable. Learning is a pretty complex process and yet we
stamp numerical grades on students year in and year out. I don't see
why teaching should be any different. Even to this day, you could be
Socrates himself (or maybe Plato) and the best mark you can get on your
ratings sheet is "S" for satisfactory.
You
claim that the article in the News, in which you vilify your union and
your fellow teachers, was not submitted by you. So what? You clearly
gave your consent once you found out that they wanted to publish the
piece. Was your 15 minutes of fame worth selling out your colleagues?
Totally. I take full responsibility for the piece. I just
wanted to clarify that I wasn't bombarding the Daily News with union
bashing pieces. As to "selling out your fellow teachers," that sounds
something like
omerta or the thin blue line. Part of being in a
respectable profession is being willing to call your peers to account
when they fail to live up to their obligations. My "15 minutes of fame"
was more like 15 minutes of being bashed all over the internet and being
sent lots of hate mail. And this was what I expected--I certainly did
not imagine I would get any sort of professional advancement and none
was forthcoming. As to selling out your fellow teachers; well, your
blogs weren't exactly polite to me--a fellow teacher. But no hard
feelings!
Regarding
your daughter winning the lottery for Eva's school: You claim it was
fortuitous that the reporter for the Daily News just happened to be
there when you were and just happened to ask you questions that showed
Eva in a good light. Perhaps so, but this is the same newspaper that
used you once before to strike out at your colleagues. It's entirely
reasonable for anyone to be suspicious when you suddenly appear in the
same paper, lauding a charter school while you work for the public
schools.
Fair enough. That's one of the reasons I
wrote to you initially. I also suggested that you could have reached
out to me and asked me directly, but there it is. Still, most all
papers have one guy who writes the editorials and a staff of other
people who do reporting, and the Daily News is no different. I suppose
you could suspect that this is not true, but I can't believe that you
buy into the conspiracy that this alternate telling would imply.
What
concerns me most about your efforts to sabotage the UFT is that you
have no skin in the game, and that you offer no solutions. Your skin is
safe in Stuyvesant--as I said, whether you are a good teacher or not,
your students will perform. More concerning is your lack of solutions.
You advocate throwing out the UFT contract but say nothing about what
would take its place (if anything). How many teachers might lose their
jobs unjustly if the contract disappeared tomorrow? How many excellent
teachers would be fired because they could be replaced by two newbies?
Maybe if your job was at stake, as well as your ability to provide for
your daughter, you might think twice before advocating that others be
fired without due process.
Here, I think, is the most valid of your
points. It is true that I have not specified exactly what I think
should replace the current system. I have some inchoate ideas, but they
might not work. For what it's worth, I think that lockstep pay and
first in last out is a lousy way to run a school. The way I'd like
teachers protected is this: an administrator would be under constant
pressure for results. Good teachers, who deliver those results would be
essentially guaranteeing the AP's job.
But here's the thing: if this plan doesn't work, we
should be able to try something else! Let a thousand flowers bloom! If
school A guarantees teacher jobs and pays $60,000 and school B offers
no protections but pays $100,000, let's try them both. Let's try things
that I haven't thought of. The contract prevents experimentation like
this in conventional public schools. To quote FDR: "The country needs
and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent
experimentation." Of course he was referring to the Great Depression,
but I think is point is apropos to the discussion.
You can attack this scheme and it is vulnerable to
attack. Still, good teachers produce better results. There is no
question that home life plays the biggest role, but the city can't go
home with the kids.
Here's an excellent Q&A with Stanford Professor Eric Hanushek that deals with these issues.
I mean, weren't you a student at one point? Didn't
you have amazing and inspirational teachers? Didn't you have some who
where totally forgettable? Didn't you have some that were awful? Haven't
we all?
An old joke: two men are running away from a bear.
The second guy says to the first guy "how are we gonna outrun this
bear?" The first guys says "I don't need to outrun the bear--I just
need to outrun you." The status quo is the equivalent of being eaten by
the bear. This leads into your next point:
Finally,
you claim that education is in "crisis" and that we need to do
something. I suggest you read Diane Ravitch, who knows more about this
than anyone else in America. She would tell you that American students
are actually doing better than ever in the PISA tests, and that if we
adjust for poverty of our students, we perform as well as any nation in
the world. So the "crisis" is a crisis of poverty, and you will never
solve it by attacking teachers, any more than Bush solved the problem of
terrorism attacking Iraq. You solve a problem by attacking the things
that cause it, and not by randomly attacking the easiest target.
Regarding the crisis in education, I have a couple of remarks. The
first is that I agree--poverty is a major problem in America. So, hey,
let's end it! Easier said than done. Look at the attempts by Lyndon
Johnson and his Great Society--to end poverty as we know it.
It's still here.
I would suggest to you that lack of access to quality education is the main driver of poverty in the United States. You (and maybe even St. Diane?) mixed cause and effect.
Things weren't as bad in 1960 when a high school
diploma could still get you a fairly decent gig. But globalization and
automation have ended the era of low wage manufacturing jobs. The only
reliable path out of impoverishment is education. I agree that parents
are often the main issue here--I used to walk down 182nd Street at 11pm
on a weeknight and all my sixth grade kids were hanging out. Their
parents were good people who really did value education, but only in the
abstract. Still, at school the kids who had good teachers were still
capable of achieving great things. But the ones in the class with the
teacher who called them "a bunch of disgusting animals" failed to
thrive.
I'm not saying that creating better schools is the
only way to tackle poverty, but it's a powerful tool and should not be
discarded lightly.
As to your PISA post, here is
an excerpt from Shanker Blog
(no ed reformers, they): "I want to make it very clear that U.S. PISA
results are not good enough by any stretch of the imagination, and we
can and should do a whole lot better."
The author then goes on to note that we are not
awful--merely mediocre.But here's the thing; poverty is real, and I
still submit that it is at least partially a result of bad schools. Look
at New York City. Our graduation rate is floating around 65%--and this
is
trumpeted as good news!
This alone is disgraceful. But if that weren't enough, those that do
graduate are often lacking even the most basic skills. I'm sure you are
familiar with the 2009 study that showed half of all NYC graduates
attending CUNY schools needed remediation before they could attend basic
college level classes. Here's
a piece in the NYTimes about the flood of remediation.
This also might be a good time for me to note that I carry no water for
Joel Klein, Cathy Black or Dennis Walcott. I disagree with a ton of
what comes out of Tweed--the cell phone ban is just one example of many.
Just because I criticize the union doesn't mean that I agree with all
of its other critics on everything. I don't think you actually accused
me of this, but I want to be clear.
Getting back to it, nobody wants to kill and drill or just teach to the test. But look at
this 4th grade ELA test.
Are we really saying it's okay for students not to meet this level?
Every year, I grade the US and Global History Regents. These tests are
jokes. There is a multiple choice section that is vaguely challenging
and then there are essays in which they
actually give students the answers. And if they look like they are failing, just
run their scores through the conversion table (PDF),
which will almost always yield passing results. And yet despite all
this, students were still failing the Global in droves--so much so that
they almost
ended the exam. (Apologies for linking to the NYPost...)
To me, these are major problems that need solving.
I don't think it's right or fair to wait for a white knight to swoop in
and end poverty.
You
attack on the union was Bush-like, and bush league. If you really want
to help children, you'll advocate for an end to poverty, and not take a
sledge hammer to your colleagues.
