Saturday Rambings

I'm far too lazy to write my usual long post, so here are some things that have been on my mind.

There's a great article by Arthur Goldstein in the Community Section of GothamSchools discussing the Gates Foundation's efforts to reform teacher evaluation, all with the full blessing of the UFT. I was asked to volunteer by my CL but refused to have anything to do with Gates after his small school fiasco.

I'll be exiled the week after next to grade the ELA exam. Fortunately, it will only be for three days. Last year, I met a bunch of people who had been sentenced to grade for more than a month. It tells you how much they value you when your school ships your off for a tenth of the school year.

I wonder how much it costs to grade these stupid exams? From what I saw, the ELA tests in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades were about the same level of difficulty as last year, which is to say a mollusk could pass them.

Thanks to NYC Educator for pointing out Primadonna's blog called Queens Teacher. I've noticed her teriffic comments on other blogs for a while but didn't realize she had her own.

Thanks to Norm for mentioning a number of us and our efforts to weed out the truth about that website that shall not be named because it is run by a couple of newbie backstabbers and union busters. I wonder when some reputable news outlet will look into their funding. GothamSchools, are you listening?

The effort to shoehorn special ed kids back into the mainstream classroom is an education nightmare waiting to happen. And it's all about cutting services to needy kids to save money. Everything about education these days is about the money.

Enjoy the weekend! Let's go Mets!

Transportation Nightmare

There is an article in CityLimits detailing the disaster that will ensue should funding for MetroCards for students be cut. Many bloggers have been talking ab0ut this for a while but it's nice to see the issue getting attention in more traditional media.

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!"

If the Hat Fits...

When the Klan marches, the newspapers have to cover it because it is a newsworthy event, however repulsive and ignorant the Klan may be. While "Educators 4 Excellence" may not quite rival the Klan for cluelessness, they do their best to come close. I've tried to avoid covering them because they are outstanding attention whores all by themselves and they don't need any additional coverage from me. Besides, Chaz and South Bronx School have both done an admirable job of exposing the idiocy of the E4E crew. Still, there are two things that bother me that no one has addressed.

First is the E4E website itself. It's certainly nicely done, as it should be--it's powered by Media Mezcla Campaign Engine, which provides tools for politicians to run campaigns. I wonder how two low-salaried teachers managed to put up a website using expensive software that politicians use in their campaigns? A suspicious person might infer that these two fine newbie teachers somehow managed to hook up with powerful, moneyed pols, but we all know that couldn't be, could it? In any case, one of their goals is to join the "debate" on how to improve schools, apparently by eviscerating them. Toward this end, they have a blog that does not accept comments. So much for debate.

A bigger bone to pick with E4E is that they brainlessly list two contradictory goals on their "Declaration" page, to wit:

• Reestablishing tenure as a significant professional milestone through the use of a comprehensive teacher evaluation system and
• Eliminating the practice of "Last In, First Out" for layoffs

Perhaps these two don't understand that tenure is already a significant professional milestone. A teacher must produce results for three years, and can be fired for any reason whatsoever before that time frame elapses. How E4E plans to make tenure more rigorous remains unclear; it seems to me that getting fired for any reason is already pretty rigorous. Perhaps E4E would like those who fail to attain tenure to be drawn and quartered or slammed in the iron maiden.

What the E4E crew fails to get is that eliminating seniority for layoffs effectively renders tenure meaningless. What good is tenure when you can be fired any time the mayor declares a fiscal crisis? Fiscal crises happen in NYC with greater regularity than ethnic street fairs. Let's see how far tenure gets you when your principal hands you a pink slip and sends you skidding down the street on your hindquarters.

Of course, none of this probably matters much to the E4E crew. I doubt their ultimate ambition is to be great teachers. More likely, they want to be the Grand Wizards of education--superintendents or better. If layoffs were based on the ability to brown nose and kiss Joel Klein's wrinkled ass, these two would have jobs for life.

So the E4E crew get awarded a pair of matching dunce caps. Which, when you think about it, look kind of Klannish, which seems to fit.

That's What She Said

I was doing my normal test prep with one of my 8th grade classes. We were working on the Reading/Writing part, in which students read two passages and answer some short answer questions and then write an essay. I decided to give my students two brief biographies to compare--Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart.

They were somewhat challenging passages, as biographies often are. I was teaching my lower functioning class, but they seemed to be making progress. Until Michael raised his hand.

"What is it, Michael?"

"This Ameria Earhart," said Michael, with a puzzled look on his face. "Is he a man or a woman?"

I expected the rest of the class to laugh at him, because the passage clearly referred to Amelia as "she" approximately 4,639 times. Instead, they all looked at me, as if to say "Yeah...that's a good question!!!"

I referred Michael and his curious peers back to the story and pointed out the pronoun references. Michael eyed me suspiciously. "So that means she's a girl, right?"

I have no idea how a child can get to the 8th grade and still be so anatomically incorrect, so to speak. All I could think of at that moment was how my Teacher Data Report would be tied to Michael and his peers. Every year I am surprised by what kids don't know. You can't teach everything. It's impossible to get it all in.

That what she said.

Seniority Means Always Having to Say You're Sorry

I've noticed something strange. Whenever the discussion turns to layoffs, tenured senior teachers seem to want to apologize for having job security. "Sure, there are some bad senior teachers out there," we say, almost whimpering, "but most of us work just as hard as the newbies!"

Well, I'm sick of it. There are lousy doctors, lawyers, accupuncturists, and envelope stuffers out there, but you never hear the good ones making excuses for the bad ones. In other professions, it is assumed that the good ones far outnumber the few rotten apples. In teaching, we constantly apologize for the very few crappy senior teachers despite the fact that most of us with a few streaks of white in our hair are damn good educators. I think it's high time we stopped apologizing for the failures of a few and started demanding recognition for the fine work the vast majority of us do.

The myth of the great teacher persists in our society, but the myth of the do-nothing, feet-on-the-desk, waiting-to-collect-a-pension teacher has become almost as pervasive. They are just myths. There are only a few Mr. Chips out there, and probably just as few Buffalo Chips. The vast majority are neither great nor awful--we are just hard working, dedicated people doing a difficult job to the best of our ability.

The idea that senior teachers should be laid off is gaining traction as well. Yet, you almost never hear new teachers apologize the way senior teachers do. And the real, rarely spoken truth is that senior teachers are almost always better than new teachers. I was a new teacher once, and I was lousy in my first year. I was so bad that I didn't even know how much I sucked. By my third year, I had some idea of what I was doing. It wasn't until about my 8th year or so that I knew I belonged and that I could handle just about anything. Most teachers will tell you just about the same story. It took time for us to become the teachers we are today.

BloomKlein would gladly throw us on the dung heap if they could under the guise of keeping the "best" teachers. In my view, the best teachers in any school are the veterans. Many of the newbies will one day become fine teachers but that day isn't today. This is even acknowledged by the city itself in their Teacher Data Reports, in which new teachers are compared to each other and not to veterans. (Pardon me for using the reports for anything other than spare toilet paper. It shan't happen again).

Layoffs aren't about weeding out the few incompetents. Layoffs, when they truly have to occur, should be about keeping the workforce stable and making sure that those who have dedicated their lives to the profession aren't shafted. Those new to the profession, if they are truly dedicated, will return when the fiscal crisis ends.

In any case, I believe the current threats of layoffs are little more than Mayor4Life employing the Shock Doctrine. He runs arounds in a Chicken Little-esque manner, claiming that the educational sky is falling due to the recession. In the ensuing panic, he hopes to realize the mayoral wet dream of being given the authority to fire high priced teachers and all but end that nasty practice of having to actually pay pensions. I really believe when Bloomberg sees that we will not give in to him and he will have to lay off new teachers, he will suddenly find a way to avert most, if not all, the layoffs. Witness Washington D.C., where Michelle Rhee miraculously found a 34 million dollar suplus AFTER she managed to lay off 266 teachers. This layoff threat is just a Rhee-play on a grander scale.

Before someone demands an apology for anything I've said here, let me head them off at the pass. The answer is no. I'm not sorry for wanting to keep and protect my job. I'm not sorry for having learned my profession through years of hard fought experience. I'm not sorry for sticking up for the "last in, first out" method of layoffs, because I believe that to be a lynchpin of unionism that newbies will appreciate themselves one day.

The only thing I'm sorry for is that we all have to work under a mayor and chancellor who think that educational policy means wielding an axe and a machete.

Et tu, Mulgrew?

When was the last time you felt excited to be a union member? I don't mean excited as in ready to jump out a window or pluck Randi Weingarten's eyeballs out. I mean when did you last feel that, as a union, we really accomplished something? (Pause as Jeopardy theme plays.) I can't remember either.

But if you ask that question of Florida teachers, they will all have an answer for you: Yesterday. That is when the teacher's unions in Florida, in conjunction with parents and concerned citizens, kicked the ass of the Republican controlled Florida state legislature by forcing Governor Crist to veto a bill that would have made drastic and draconian changes to teacher compensation and effectively ended tenure.

They did it the old fashioned way--by rolling up their sleeves and protesting. A quarter of Miami-Dade teachers participated in a sick out. Governor Crist received 120,ooo phone calls and emails opposing the bill, to about 3000 in favor of it. They made it clear that Gov. Crist wouldn't be elected dog catcher if he signed the bill.

And the teachers won. I can only imagine how good they feel.

I can only imagine it because it doesn't happen in NYC. What I remember most over the last eight years is our union giving up seniority transfers, sending us back to lunch duty, extending our day, giving up our rights to file meaningful grievances, and standing idly by as the Rubber Rooms and ATR ranks swelled. We sit without a contract and without the even pattern raise that has been given to all other unions.

There was a slight glimmer of hope yesterday for NY teachers as well, when the closing of Rubber Rooms was announced. Still, there has been nary a word said about the bill introduced to the New York State Legislature that would allow layoffs of senior teachers and base retention on test scores, much as the Florida bill aimed to do. One early sponsor of the bill has already dropped out, but that's just not good enough. We should be picketing the offices of assemblyman Jonathan Bing and state senator Ruben Diaz, bombarding them with phone calls and emails, and generally making their lives miserable for trying to screw us over. The UFT should seize this opportunity to let NY politicians know that from now on, they'd be wise not to scapegoat teachers or try to erode our hardfought gains.

As Brutus once famously said in Julius Caesar, "There is tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." The tide is in, Mr. Mulgrew. Your troops are ready. It's time to lead.

After Randi's hideous tenure as our leader, we need to become a more radical, focused union. I hope we aren't all standing in the unemployment line a year from now saying "Et tu, Mulgrew?"