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Incoming Schools Chancellor Cathie Black visited overcrowded Francis Lewis High School a few weeks ago. She came with her entourage from Brooklyn, and was therefore an hour late. She stayed only 40 minutes, as she needed to run off somewhere else. Admittedly, I lack the organizational skills of a publishing executive (let alone someone about to run the largest school system in the country). Yet even I know how long it takes to get from Brooklyn to Queens.

Ms. Black got a good look at the principal’s office. It’s a great office. There’s a desk, a computer, a sitting area, and a full conference room. She didn’t see the trailer. (The trailer is not so great, but after considerable effort, I got it a desk.) She didn’t see our dual-national champion JROTC program, or meet our award-winning science students. She didn’t meet our parent representatives. She didn’t see our kids struggle to get to class at peak time, the half-classrooms we had to create to accommodate the overflow, or the kids who run around in the cold and the dark because we haven’t got sufficient gym space. She didn’t see kids eating lunch at 9 a.m., but she joked to some kids about it.

Cathie Black was there, in fact, because those kids are student activists who got themselves on NY1 and invited her. It was good public relations for her to show up (and PR seems to be the one thing Tweed is good at).

This was a good opportunity for Ms. Black to reach out, as relations between teachers and the DOE grew absolutely toxic under Joel Klein’s tenure. Nonetheless, she didn’t ask to meet me (I was out teaching in the trailer), and she didn’t ask to meet any other teachers either. She did say she opposed tenure for teachers, but it’s unlikely that was her opening salvo at mending fences.

Having missed Ms. Black, I spoke to the kids who met her. (more…)

I’ve been a teacher for 26 years. I don’t much agree with Mayor Bloomberg, and I’m not altogether sanguine over Cathie Black’s prospects as chancellor. Truth be told, I’ve disagreed with UFT leadership from time to time as well. But you’d think we’d all find common ground somewhere.

For example, there are bedbugs — we’re against them. We ought to do all in our power to avoid them. Yet Department of Education policy toward bedbugs baffles the imagination; it will not provide lists of schools that have bedbugs. That’s truly disturbing, and the rationale, that schools have few beds, is plainly absurd. (If you aren’t Lou Gehrig, does that mean you can’t get Lou Gehrig’s Disease?)

Right now the UFT and the DOE are fighting in court over whether they should release the names and scores of teachers who participated in a value-added experiment. The UFT says the scores are invalid and inaccurate, and the DOE seems to feel they’re of vital importance.

We can debate that, but can’t we agree that parents ought to be warned when their children are in danger of blood-sucking vermin? (more…)

Every year in New York State, there’s an entire week in January devoted to giving Regents exams. Kids can study, prepare, and take tests, or if they’re really lucky, get a week off. Meanwhile, their teachers proctor, grade exams, and take care of whatever has to be done before the kids return.

This year things are different. One reason is that there’s a new English Regents exam. It’s been streamlined and there’s less writing. It only takes one day instead of two. And it appears to be largely regulated by a private company called Pearson, contracted for “performance standards revisitation.” I’m not entirely certain what that means, but perhaps how kids perform on the test will determine which standards need to be applied. Will the test be easier? More difficult?

No one knows for sure, and that worries those of us who constantly have Adequate Yearly Progress hanging over our heads. In fact, the conversion chart that will allow teachers to turn raw scores into actual grades won’t be available for two weeks after the tests are scored.

This brings me to another point — this test will not be given during Regents week, which begins Jan. 25. Instead, it will be administered Jan. 11. This means New York high school kids will lose, besides Regents week, an additional full day of school. But that’s not all. The geniuses at Pearson have decreed that all test papers be scored, recorded, photocopied, and prepared for UPS delivery by 2 p.m. on Jan. 12. (more…)

Poor Miss Crabtree. She’s getting married, and she has to leave her job. Such things happened back in the day, before anyone thought of equal rights for women, tenure, or indoor plumbing.

Nowadays we no longer insist teachers take chastity vows, remain unmarried, fill the inkwells, clean the coal boilers, or do whatever else they did in the good old days. Still, without tenure Miss Crabtree could now be fired for some more contemporary reason. Perhaps she told her colleagues how much UFT teachers earn. Or maybe she insisted they provide services mandated for special education students. Maybe she didn’t do anything and they took the word of an angry student over hers. Perhaps they posted her scores (despite an explicit agreement not to — how can anyone trust these folks?) and decided to discontinue her, rendering her license useless in New York City. These things happen when teachers don’t have tenure.

Yet, I keep hearing, tenure is evil. Why? Because there are bad teachers out there! If you watch “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” you may walk out thinking they all hide behind the skirts of evil AFT President Randi Weingarten. You might even think Weingarten recruited them and granted them tenure, but she did neither. People who think she did are confusing her with folks like Joel Klein and his merry band of administrators, who actually have such powers.

Say what you will about Weingarten, but she’s the most “reform”-minded union leader in the history of civilization. Weingarten most certainly does not defend bad teachers.

In fact, I’ve never seen anyone at all say we want more bad teachers, or that bad teachers need to be retained indefinitely. (more…)

Francis Lewis High School can be a tough place. We’re the most overcrowded school in New York City, and kids have only four minutes to make it from one class to another. In the case of my students, they have to make it all the way to the back of the building, then out almost to the street to Trailer 5, my workplace. It’s a formidable trek, but as a teacher you have to defy logic, set a tone right away, and frighten kids into arriving on time all year.

Maria had come late the first three days, and the fourth morning I called her mom.  Mom said she and Maria had discussed it, and that Maria has always moved a tad slowly. Maria had tried, but just couldn’t make it. I told Mom Maria was a joy when she showed up, but that I couldn’t allow one kid to come late while everyone else came on time. Mom was very reasonable and understanding, and we ended the conversation hopeful of an acceptable solution. The fact that Maria came from room 306, all the way up there on the opposite side of the building made this a challenge. I didn’t want to read Maria the riot act again. For starters, she knew very little English, and likely didn’t much understand it.

I got off the phone, grabbed my bag, and moved straight to room 306, Maria’s science class. When the bell rang, I walked in to find Maria leisurely placing things in her bag.

“Come on, Maria!” I said, gesticulating with all the urgency I could muster. “We have to make it to the trailers before the bell rings!” She was appropriately shocked, and began to move accordingly. (more…)

Teachers are panicked. I’m panicked. With the state’s new teacher evaluation system, I figure I have three years before I can be fired for factors beyond my control.

Next year I’ll be rated as usual. That shouldn’t be a problem — administrators who’ve judged me by what they’ve seen in my classroom have been pretty good to me. But come 2012 and 2013 they’ll look at my students’ scores. They depend not only on what I do, but also on what the kids do. I’ve been teaching teenagers for 25 years (and I have one at home). I know one thing for certain about teenagers — you never know what they will do.

On the brighter side, there are surefire ways to improve statistics. When you focus on that, you don’t need to worry as much about whether or not kids actually learn anything, or communicate in English (the language I’m paid to teach). Taking this broad view, it may be easier to create favorable statistics than actually teach. Instead of wasting time with actual classroom techniques, let’s examine a few individuals who’ve managed to look good under this up-and-coming paradigm. (more…)

It’s been a busy week for Bill Gates. While the NEA featured brilliant Diane Ravitch as its most prominent guest, AFT President Randi Weingarten and company chose Gates, who’s done many remarkable things.

I’m not an education expert like Gates, so I’ll comment only on a TED talk he gave last year that’s available online. My experience is limited to teaching 25 years in New York City. Still, several of Gates’ comments did not sit well with me.

How does that [KIPP charter school] compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that.

My principal can and does visit my classroom whenever he golly goshdarn feels like it. He offers no advanced notice, and walks around the building visiting my colleagues in exactly the same fashion. Gates’s version of what happens in a “normal school” sounds more like a crass stereotype than any contract I’ve ever heard of. (more…)

Years ago, the technical guru in our school was a guy who sat in an office running the school computer. No one knew what the school computer did, but all seemed well, and the guy pretty much never bothered anyone. Several times a year, he gave professional development sessions, and whatever he was demonstrating never worked. Things popped, fizzled, went up in flames. Pieces of important-looking machines fell off. People tripped over electrical cords and were rushed away in ambulances. Our presenter would leave the room for thirty minutes in search of a solution. You’d sit and talk, and wait, and by the time the session ended, you weren’t really sure what it would have been about if it had occurred.

After his retirement, technology became more commonplace, and professional development sessions began to focus on the Next New Thing. For some reason, I missed the first round of Smartboard training. Everyone was amazed, I was told. The following session entailed usage of tablets, which were very cool, and would quite possibly replace Smartboards (except they didn’t). You could write on them and your miserable handwriting would magically turn into computer fonts, just the thing for the teacher with awful handwriting (me). Unfortunately, by the time the session ended we hadn’t managed to turn on our tablets.

The next round of training was learning how to set up the Smartboard, which you apparently had to do every single time you wanted to use it. This took 10 minutes, during which time you had to trust the kids would engage in whatever meaningful activity you’d provided. I say “trust” because you’d be too busy fiddling with the Smartboard to check.

Last semester’s round of training utilized more advanced Smartboards, which were mounted to the wall and no longer required the ten minutes setup time. You could put all sorts of stuff up there, you could play games, you could illustrate whatever you were discussing, you could write, play music, maybe have it do a little dance — the possibilities were endless.

Smartboard training this week incorporated suggestions on how to use it to teach English. A young English teacher got up and showed us a PowerPoint presentation. Up until now, every PowerPoint presentation I’d ever seen was read aloud. I’d assumed, therefore, that PowerPoint’s prime function was to prolong life by cultivating boredom. However, this teacher used it to present questions that might serve to stimulate discussion. It seemed like a great idea.

But as good as the presentation was, I still felt like I’d wasted my time. (more…)

Every year, I fill out a form specifying which courses I want to teach and what time schedule I would like. Each September, I sit down with my department coordinator, and she calmly and methodically persuades me to do whatever she wants me to, whenever she wants me to.

Two years ago, she asked me to prep English learners for the English Regents exam. I said OK, and spent all year making the kids write until their hands were ready to fall off. Most of them passed, and for some, it was miraculous.  Of course, they’re fortunate that more stress is placed on content than grammar and usage (“conventions” rates the very bottom of the grading rubric). I showed them how to write highly formulaic four-paragraph essays that minimally met the requirements.

One technique entailed copying directions and converting them to first person. Another featured repeatedly rehearsing canned literary references, many of which could be trotted out to support virtually any quote about anything. No technique, in my view, much encouraged writing habits that would prove useful in the long haul. There was no time for such things and besides, half my kids could barely communicate in English. Sadly, there was almost no time to work on that either.

English language learners should not be taking this test at all. It’s designed for native speakers. If my kid couldn’t pass this in eleventh grade, I’d be very concerned. But a kid who came from Korea two months ago needs other things — including the grammar and usage that the state test doesn’t value that much. (more…)

Education is on a roller coaster recently, with unexpected twists and turns seemingly improvised on the spot by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. First, 4,400 teachers were going to receive pink slips. Then, the mayor unilaterally declared teachers would receive no raises for two years, and that layoffs would thereby be averted.

His declaration spat in the face of the Taylor Law, which “requires public employers to negotiate and enter into agreements with public employee organizations regarding their employees’ terms and conditions of employment.” Though the mayor has no legal right to unilaterally declare a conclusion to ongoing negotiations, the New York Times declared it was a “sensible choice.” Gabe Pressman called it a “wise decision.”

Then, wise decision or not, Mayor Bloomberg surprised us by reconsidering yet again. Apparently, he may give teachers pink slips anyway. Even if he doesn’t, the draconian budget cuts he’s imposed will mean fewer elective classes for kids, larger class sizes, and widespread “excessing” of teachers, dumping them into the Absent Teacher Reserve and forcing them to scramble for a rapidly decreasing job pool. Teachers have every reason to be nervous.

Having lost my job this way four times, I know exactly how they feel. (more…)