Among other things I would love it if he made it to the Dewey reunion next month. If you see this and you know him please send this his way.

Many thanks

Eric F Coppolino
John Dewey High School class of 1981

You make some good points, but I wish you had taken the next step and asked why this is so, and for whose benefit. As a public school parent and teacher, I can assure you it’s not for the benefit of students.

As someone with firsthand experience of the pedagogical and professional deformities caused by mayoral control, as well as a citizen who has observed corporate control flooding into every aspect of American life, I’d suggest that it’s about power and control of the few over the many. This is the case everywhere else in our society, so why should education be exempt, notwithstanding the Orwellian PR echo chamber that dominates most discussion of urban education today?

Bloomberg, Klein and the other supporters of mayoral control have neither classroom experience nor much concern for what happens there, so long as it’s under their thumb. Revealingly, the current head of the New Teacher Project is a former labor relations lawyer; even Michelle Rhee stopped in the classroom long enough to have a cup of coffee before going on to “better things.”

Central to their agenda is the need to impose on the classroom the neo-Taylorist control of the work process. Classrooms have been one of the last places where the people who do the work have been the one’s who had some control over it; the business model of eduction is largely about overturning that, centralizing power and policy formation while enforcing local responsibility for each school to “hit their numbers.”

Unfortunately, too many people following education play the ingenue when it comes to the (unavoidable) politics of it. And when we’re talking about politics, we’re talking about power: who has it, how they get it, use it and keep it, and in whose interests they use it.

Viewed from that perspective, what should we conclude about the current regime?

Why can’t both be done? Top-down accountability, and bottom-up attention to the massive amounts of qualitative data [the kind only observable through regular classroom visits] good principals review on a regular basis.

I’d like it if the mayor and the chancellor would not tell principals and teachers how to do their jobs. Just come up with a strong set of outcomes that we can all agree on (that’s a huge sticking point right now of course, and the national trend seems to be finally moving away from standardized testing as the sole purpose of education), provide the necessary resources to execute, and, yes, hold school leaders accountable for making it happen. And stay out of the way.

I can’t help but comment that my vision here sounds like the way a good charter school board functions.

Oh, yeah!