Murder on the Reform Express

If you're a frequent reader of this blog, you may recall that I recently compared the way a teacher at my school was being hounded to The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie. I mention it because today's fiasco, brokered by Michael Mulgrew, that will effectively end tenure, seniority, and due process, reminded me of another Agatha Christie tome, called Murder on the Orient Express.

In that story, a man is murdered on a train called the Orient Express. There are 12 suspects who could have done it. The twist of the book is that all of the passengers are guilty. Each took a turn stabbing the victim, resulting in the twelve stab wounds that took the murdered man's life.

The irony is that the passengers all took a turn stabbing the victim so that none of the individuals could be completely guilty--yet of course they are all equally guilty of murder. And that's what reminds me so much of the current situation in which Michael Mulgrew effectively sold us out and gave away what little shreds of protection we had left. Initially, I was mad as hell at him for this, and I still am. He is not, however, the only guilty party. There are plenty of culprits to go around, and all of them are equally guilty.

Bloomberg and Klein were never our allies and strove from day one to sound the death knell for public education. They were, however, far from the only guilty parties. The charter school people have stuck the knife in as well, hoping to privatize a public system so they could pilfer their share of the education pie. Obama, who was supposed to be a friend of education, has tried to shank us with the Race to the Top funds that rip a page from the Republican playbook. Rookie teachers like those cretins involved with E4E slashed us and got praise from the chancellor in return. Randi Weingarten, Richard Ianuzzi, and David Steiner ran us through as well.

The reason today's betrayal hurts so bad is that it seemed to some--even me at times, that Michael Mulgrew was different--that despite being Randi's handpicked successor, he just might have some backbone and stand alone as the person who would stay his hand. And then he plunged the knife in and twisted.

Public education is now effectively dead, and just about everyone has blood on his hands.

The DOE Murders

I'm a huge fan of whodunits. One of my all time favorites is Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders. It's about a sociopath who tries to collect an inheritance through murder. To throw the police off, he convinces a man who suffers from headaches that he is a psychopathic killer.

I mention it because I made one of those text-to-world connections that we're constantly telling kids they have to make and which take all the excitement out of reading. In the book, the immortal detective Hercule Poirot is disdainful of the murderer because he tries to pin it on the man with the headaches, who will forever have to live with the guilt of crimes he did not commit. The line that jumped out in my memory was when Poirot claimed the crime was not sporting, indignantly saying, "To catch a fox and put him in a box and never let him go! It is not le sport!"

I was reminded of that line when I had a talk with a teacher at my school. He has been U rated for the last three years. No one seems to know why. He seems competent, at the very least. Certainly he keeps his students in order and they learn from him. Yet, he keeps getting U's on his annual review. He is headed for his fourth U this year, because he has already collected a nosegay of unsatisfactory observations. I asked him how he had escaped the rubber room, given this litany of stinkers from the administration.

"I'm too useful," he replied. "They keep me around as a kind of warning to other teachers, that it can happen to them. It keeps teachers scared. If they sent me to the rubber room, I'd be out of sight. They need me as a reminder to the staff that they'd better not step out of line."

As I said, from what I can tell, he seems like a good teacher, so I think he may be right. They could have sent him to the rubber room on incompetence charges a year ago, but they didn't. They will U rate him again this year, and offer him us as an example of what happens to recalcitrant teachers.

It's a disgrace, really. If they guy is incompetent, they should charge him, and if not they should leave him alone. They caught themselves a fox and put him in a box and they plan never to let him go. All part of a sequel to Christie's classic, called The DOE Murders, in which no one is killed but someone's soul dies a little bit every day. Hopefully, this installment will never make it to your school.

As Poirot would say, "It is not...le sport!"