GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Doomberg has done nothing to help the students of NYC.  He has the audacity to say that the union, and therefore the teachers it represents, are not there for the kids.  F*** you Mr. Mayor.  I do everything for my kids.  And my parents will attest to that.  I sincerely hope that when you visit the depths of hell someone is there to shove a pineapple (how appropriate) up your conceited arse.  You have done damage that will take years, if not decades, to undo.  You should be ashamed of yourself.

So the mayor thinks that he is going to be able to call every parent to tell them about the data. While he is at it maybe he can tell the parents that their child has been absent from school 50 % of the time, cutting classes, not doing his homework and making the class impossible to teach. That of course is assuming that he has working numbers to get hold of the parents and that they are home and that they can find someone to communicate with them in their native language. And them maybe he can make these calls on a regular basis and forward these correct working numbers to teachers.
He should worry about fixing the major education problems not passing off garbage information to parents as gospel.

Since our mayor seems to feel it is appropriate to express one’s negative opinions in public, allow me:  Bloomberg is a crook.  A crook who was fired from his job and used his criminal connections to build an empire based on disseminating false information in an attempt to manipulate financial markets.  He is of indiscriminate sexual orientation, short, and has been involved in numerous scandals both in private business and in public office.  During his tenure as mayor, his decisions to award contracts without a legal bidding process have resulted in the loss of billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars.  He has repeated hidden his financial and personal records in direct contrast to his “full disclosure” requirements of city employees.  He bought the last election by bribing public officials to endorse his candidacy and by using his illegally acquired funds to finance his illegal third term.

MB why don’t you add a question on your incredibly useless parent survey asking us if we want to be contacted about our teacher’s evaluation scores? I can’t speak for all 800,000 plus of us (clearly you can) but all of the parents I know are against any sharing of teacher evaluations with us. You are creating chaos for schools, teachers and students. Would you want your daughters’ teachers to be treated this way? How long would they have stayed at Spence or wherever you sent them? It’s disgusting that you have so little respect for teachers and their already incredibly challenging jobs. And that you feel so at ease representing parents who increasingly disagree with your every move on education. 

Our Mayor continues to live in his ivory tower, completely detached from the schools he wants to single-handedly control, and now his insistence on controlling what parents want.  As a parent, I was appalled that the TDRs were publicized, and now I’m incredibly offended at the audacity of a man who is speaking on my behalf.  Principals and parent coordinators have more to do than is humanly possible as it is, given the latest hoops they must jump through to manage their increase in paperwork, budget challenges, changes in Special Ed reform, testing requirements, SQRs, parent and student needs and the list goes on.  I had to laugh at the idea of utilizing ARIS for this purpose.  Ha!  A system most parents don’t even use in the first place?  Another brilliant waste of education funds.  If only Bloomberg would create a commission of real parents and real educators to set our public school policies, maybe we would actually have some respect for anything he says or does.  It is unfortunate to know the fate of our public schools, our teachers and our children’s education lies in the hands of this man for another 558 days…..

As an adult who went through the NYC public school system myself, who is currently raising two young children attending NYC public schools and who is the proud parent of a college graduate who attended NYC public schools before all this micro-managing-outing-of -not-even-accurate-data existed…I know what a good teacher is and honestly…so do my children.

A wonderful example of the stability the Department of Education has provided for our city.  The game of musical chairs keeps on going.

I wish this sort of aggressive communication existed to remind parents to buy school supplies for their kids, to come to conferences and pick up report cards, to support their kids and get them to do homework, to get them to school on time. Trying to do this on my own and at the school level is overwhelming. And yet I see parents in my school jumping on this because it will give them ammunition to argue with teachers. There was a time when most parents really wanted to work with us and only a few fought us and needed to be right. It seems to be reveresed now where teachers are always wrong and kids don’t have to adhere to rules. After 15 years I decided to throw in the towel on this system, and it’s not a moment too soon.

What is wrong with this man? Can he not think of better ways to help students achieve? How do his school experiences or those of his own children give him the experience/qualifications to make this the path to take? How would giving parents pathways to more constructive involvement in the classroom compare in the end to giving them pathways to getting teachers fired? 

P.S. — This is also a great boon to the crony system!  Principals who are “working on” (aka torturing) teachers they don’t like or want — that is, teachers who are not cronies to the principal, or teachers with more seniority who make more money than untenured newbies, or teachers who teach subjects that the principal would like to eliminate from the school (especially “too hard” subjects, like physics and chemistry, which lower the school’s test score average) — will now be able to add the clout and imprimatur of parents’ demands to oust the teachers subjectively rated unsatisfactory or “improving” (or whatever euphemism they now call it).

I say “SUBJECTIVELY rated unsatisfactory,” because Mayor B. admitted himself on the radio, a few months ago, that the teacher evaluation system is subjective!