GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

1. 

   Jimmy Dunne

   November 21st, 2008 10:00 am

   Hi Linda, Please voice your opposition to corporal punishment in all U.S. schools See http://www.nospanking zone.org sponsored by People Opposed to Paddling Students. School paddlilng is legalized child abuse. Corporal Punishment is still allowed in 21 states and these beatings leave big bruises.

2. 

   Carolyn Jackson-King

   December 7th, 2008 8:18 am

   President-elect Obama, now I am impressed! Please place an educator in the Secretary of Education position. Dr. Darling-Hammond is awesome, a true educator with dedication and passion for our profession.

3. 

   john elfrank-dana

   December 7th, 2008 8:42 pm

   Yes, Dr. Darling-Hammond will be an excellent choice. She gets it, i.e., that relationships between students and teachers need to be the key focus. Klein in NYC wants to create a climate of fear to terrorize students and teachers into achieving. That doesn’t work. Dr. Darling Hammond will fashion a truly appropriate direction for education; one that enriches the students and not consultants and testing companies.

4. 

   Concerned.

   December 11th, 2008 12:43 am

   We voted for Obama so we could see reform. Ms. Darling-Hammond is not that. Education is the arena that could use the most transformation. Someone who has never been progressive can’t be expected to implement what is so dearly needed.

   I expect more out of the judgement I have come to trust so much.

5. 

   brooklyn mom

   December 11th, 2008 1:04 pm

   @ Concerned:
   Linda Darling-Hammond “never been progressive”? Methinks you have been drinking that heady why-consider-reality David Brooks’ Koolaid (aka Klein “I’m-a-reformer-because-I-said-so” punch).

   For years, she’s been at the forefront of insisting that good teaching is what makes the difference and that the way we recruit, educate, and retain teachers must be reformed. She’s also argued for empowerment (most would argue that’s progressive) of parents and careful consideration of the whole child (incl. health care needs, etc.)

   I voted and campaigned actively for Obama, too. And it wasn’t because I thought he’d champion a business model for schools.

6. 

   Dania Hall

   December 13th, 2008 9:10 am

   All too often the ulterior motive for carrying on performance reviews is for the purpose of disposing of the teachers, and carry out budgetary goals of overpaid administrators. They are too often carried out by principals that do not have the certification for the field that they are “observing”, and who are in cahoots with the superintendents, who have budget agendas as their priority, not education. They have the support of a whole education system to back up any “decisions” which are made by the superintendent in regarding to removing qualified teachers. This includes the unions, the board of education, politics and the media. They ignore education and civil rights laws of teachers, and bypass due process of law that would afford teachers a chance for justice.
   The belief that unions protect teachers is a myth. Now with Obama elevating minorities from the most oppressed in our society, I believe teachers now hold that position at the bottom of the food chain. Our stories will eventually emerge as a big story as did the scandal of abuse in the Catholic church, but at present we are still being effectively silenced.

   Yet people seem perplexed as to what the solution is, when the truth is that there is a whole sub-culture of qualified teachers whose careers have been destroyed by these people. They are experienced and committed teachers who have been forcefully retired. They are recently certified teachers who have changed careers who are terminated as they reach tenure eligibility, and they are qualified, experienced teachers who have taught for decades who are now languishing in the NYC rubber room. Many of these teachers have been falsely accused of crimes and misconduct yet lawful evidence is lacking to support these accusations. But it is the strategy used to efficiently remove teachers, by bypassing due process of law.

   There are already laws in place, the problem is, that they are not ENFORCED. Education administrators, unions and boards of education do not do their duty and are immune to laws, the way our education system is currently set up. Laws and requirements only apply to teachers. The solution is simple, and that is to demand accountability of school administrators, who have no oversight whatsoever. Why is accountability only asked of teachers and not the very people who are in charge? Education law right now is like the Wild West, in case anybody would really be interested in one of the major reasons that our education system is failing. But people seem to prefer to be in a state of denial, while our education system suffers and we rank somewhere around 40th in the world. Yet we have the highest paid administrators in the world!
   I hope that Linda Darling-Hammond is prepared to address all the criminality that exists in our education system that has been taken over by business interests.

7. 

   Susan Lee Schwartz

   December 13th, 2008 10:54 am

   I write this as I travel across the country to visit my son. In every place I stop, I meet people who tell the stories of teachers who are under attack by administration at their schools, but no where in the media or the government is there a word about this scandalous abuse of Americans who just happen to be teachers.

   The scope of this hidden insane war against teachers is staggering. Like the mortgage scandal, the loss– not of homes, but of human dignity and reputation, of distinguished careers, of the cream of our teachers - is beyond understanding. Once it begins to unfold, the nation will be astonished that such an abuse of our laws was kept a secret for so long. The conversation needs to move to the front page and into the national consciousness, before the total collapse of our public schools.

   Teachers are the target, as education is now a business, and the reward is not the education of the kids, but the profits gained by cleansing the system of tenured teachers, and preventing new teachers from gaining tenure. The bottom line in not enriching education, but the enrichment of the administration at the top.

   The impact of this abuse beyond its devastating effect on teachers, is the loss of the best, most experienced, dedicated and often talented professionals in our schools. The failure of the schools is a direct result of this loss. Silencing the voice of the experienced teacher has led to the deterioration of education across the country, but nowhere is its effect as apparent as in NYC. This city has lost its best and brightest — its faculty.

   In his on-line column in The NY Times, Stanley Fish continues his discussion on academic freedom,when he discusses the book, “For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom:” “It follows that the scope of academic freedom is determined first by specifying what that task is and then by figuring out what degree of latitude those who are engaged in it require in order to do their jobs.”

   The trouble is that our DOE in NYC and elsewhere have no rubric for specifying the task. Moreover, they give to principals the right to determine these ‘degrees of latitude’. This is because teachers are not respected as ‘faculty,’ but considered as staff, along with office and building workers. They are not considered ‘faculty’ as are the teachers at institutions of higher education, and are held accountable not only to public opinion, but to the personal opinions of petty humans who run their schools, I particularly loved this line: “a fundamental distinction between holding faculty accountable to professional norms and holding them accountable to public opinion. The former exemplifies academic freedom: the latter undermines it.”

   There are no ‘professional norms” in public education, so they are INVENTED by principals, supervisors, and the school boards. The schools are undermined and fail as a result. The managers ’staff’ the school with novice teacher-practitioners, and fire or harass experienced faculty. Imagine if the universities did this, and the expert educators were lost.

   The astonishing book, “White Chalk Crime,” by Karen Horwtiz, represents a decade of research, and it is a great place ‘to mine’ for the data, the really criminal aspects (the corruption by the interests, the loss of taxpayer’s money as they pursue teachers, the abrogation of civil laws, etc.). She wrote this book which she self-published in her own voice, in order to ” trap the monster that is so out of control” with the intention of finding someone to save our schools, not just our teachers. She is confident that this book will open the dirty, hidden secret. It is a brutally honest, detailed description of what is going on in education told via 140 first hand stories but unlike other books that detail and attack the corruption and incompetence of both union and school administrations, this book puts it together with its actual impact on teachers — the direct, intolerable, abuse such unchecked behavior represents. This is what makes it unique, In style, it is a cross between a narrative and an expose; using her experience and those of teachers from the NAPTA site, and relating it to her intensive research, she has woven a sad tapestry of the state of our schools, due to the destruction of its greatest asset… the professional in the classroom.

   There is never any investigation by legislatures or the media of the administrations that run the school system, nor their criminal abuse of the Constitution, which actually deprives a huge segment of our city’s population of legal and civil rights. McGeorge Bundy’s once said: “politics are the enemy of strategy.” As long as politics dominate the education ‘business’ there will be no real solutions, because the genuine strategies for success can only come from the teachers… the real faculty.

   Surely the financial crisis offers some insight to what happens to powerful managers when they are accountable to no one, especially not to any LAW. The union is the teacher’s representative of the law, but they are notorious for their destruction of the grievance process and the civil rights of Americans… who just happen to be teachers.

   The stories of hundreds of teachers on the NAPTA site (www.endteacherabuse.org) demonstrate the truth — the real reasons schools fail as the best are thrown out, but also, an abuse that no ethnic group, no professional group would tolerate. It is astonishing!

   It is testimony to the low status of teachers, that under the nose of the law and the scrutiny of the media –always on the lookout for a juicy scandal — such lawlessness is continuing.

   Teachers do not stand a chance in the courts when they sue, because they face batteries of lawyers who delay the trials forever (at great cost to the taxpayer). The expense for teachers of pursuing legal avenues is prohibitive, and the school administrations know this! Thousands arbitrate away all rights, and retire. Yes. Thousands! Moreover, because there is never proper investigation by the UNIONS, the only ‘evidence’ presented to the courts is the slanderous allegations of principals. It is pure fantasy, but it prevails.

   The public has no idea of these court cases! Why are the cases that are pursued, and even won, never the subject for the media? The silence is deafening and it is the reason nothing changes!

   Says Betsy Combier on her site, http://www.rubberroomreport.com/ “The New York City Board of Education decided in 2002 to rid the public school system of staff that interfered with their takeover and control. The criteria for a “good teacher” is now, more often than not, a “silent teacher”, a person who never asks questions, is younger than 40, is making a salary below $50,000, does not care about kids and what they learn, or whether or not money (books, supplies, equipment, etc) is missing. When a teacher or staff member of a school dares to do the right thing and speaks out about wrong-doing - this person is often called a “whistleblower” or “flamethrower” - or, simply is not liked for any reason by the Principal/NYC personnel, suddenly he/she is accused of something by somebody (”given a label of “A”, “B”, “C”, and so on) and whisked away to a drab room called a temporary re-assignment center or “rubber room”. Members of the offices of the Special Commissioner of Investigation or the Office of Special Investigations then start work on building a case against the person to justify their being thrown in prison, declared “unfit for duty”, or, as Mr. Joel Klein has said, characterized as “guilty of sexual activities and corporal punishment” against the children of New York City.”

   In NYC teachers, American citizens with professional degrees, are THROWN INTO DETENTION CENTERS, WITH NO RIGHTS TO DEFEND THEMSELVES OR TO HEAR THE CHARGES AGAINST THEM, OUR DEDICATED TEACHERS HAVE LOST ALL CONNECTION TO THE CONSTITUTION, AND ARE BEING HOUNDED OUT OF THEY SYSTEM BY THE THOUSANDS in a manner that should embarrass every American citizen.

   This has got to stop, and it won’t until someone moves this issue into the public eye.

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