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. One told me she seemed rehearsed, and that her crack about the 9 a.m. lunch period seemed planned. I was told she didn’t answer questions directly, that she gave “politician’s answers,” and that she didn’t have “the sense of an educator.” Another said she seemed sincere about wanting change, but in a business-oriented, and not educational, way. This student felt she was a bad choice for chancellor, and said she could not give one instance in which she had helped a student.

Faced with a question about undocumented students, she had no reply whatsoever. Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott answered for her, and the kids felt he was there to rescue her. They seemed to like him very much — one told me he should have been chancellor.

Still, the kids learned a lot. They learned that the incoming chancellor could come to the second largest school in the city, speak to a handful of kids who’d gotten on TV, and not bother with their teachers or parents at all. They learned that an utter lack of qualification makes no difference as long as you go to the same cocktail parties and gala luncheons as Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

On the other hand, they also learned the power of the press. I hope they remember that, because when the richest man in New York City is also mayor, it’s one of their most effective resources. Mayor Bloomberg can defy term-limit laws city voters twice affirmed. He can get fellow billionaires Eli Broad and Bill Gates to finance campaigns promoting what I’ve termed mayoral dictatorship. He can find ways to appoint his buds to jobs for which they are not remotely qualified.

He can downsize the sanitation department and act surprised when snow doesn’t get picked up. But when he and Cathie Black try to do the same to New York City schools next year, having learned nothing from either the snowstorm or the disasters that visited city schools in the 1970s, they’ll have to contend with not only outraged teachers and parents, but also young people like those from our school, who aren’t afraid to get in front of a camera and speak their minds.

We need more brave souls like these kids, and fewer fronts for hedge-funders and billionaires. Thus equipped, New York City could move toward real substantive improvements for not only schools, but also the city as a whole.

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? If my 14-year-old fails a test, I can point fingers at her teacher, or her school. Much as I adore her, I’d have to grant it might be her fault too. (I’ve personally known a teenager or two who’d neglected to prepare.) Still, if she brings bedbugs home from school, I’d immediately wonder why the school hadn’t warned me.

This might be a golden opportunity for Cathie Black to gain credibility as schools chancellor. She’s made a lot of controversial remarks about retaining teachers. With city class sizes already the highest in the state, it’s hard to imagine how fewer teachers wouldn’t cause them to explode. (Should city kids be in classes of 14, like her kids? Or will they be okay in groups of 50, like they were in the 1970′s, the last time teachers were laid off?)

Here and now, before even discussing that, we can do better. At PS 197, a DOE vendor botched a bedbug treatment, destroying books and supplies. Official DOE policy is to sit on their hands pending the results of an investigation. But PS 197 teachers took matters into their own hands, staging a carwash to raise funds for new supplies.

Maybe Black ought to roll up her sleeves and help. She need not wash cars, if that’s not her thing. But she could make sure the kids of PS 197 get all they need, even what the carwash failed to provide. She could get kids books now and investigate later.

I suggest before Black gets rid of teachers, she get rid of bedbugs, and do so with extreme prejudice. This will not only unite both parents and teachers, but also give her a real record of accomplishment. Perhaps future generations will sing her praises.

For now, though, at least we’ll have something positive to build on.

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.

Perhaps Pearson is unaware that ESL and special education students require extra time to take these exams. Thus, they will be around for hours after the native-English-speaking kids finish. It’s unlikely their teachers will be around long enough to grade all their papers (and I can tell you from experience it’s more time-consuming to read ESL papers than native papers).

What will happen? Likely teachers will need to come back very early the next morning to grade, and English language learners will lose yet another day of instruction.

But that’s not all. Kids in classes that focus on the Regents exam will have two weeks of classes that lead nowhere. Not knowing whether they passed or not, will kids be motivated to study for a test they just took?  Will they simply assume they passed and tune out? If a teacher chooses to do something wild, say, teach a book without simply focusing on terms mandated by the Regents exam, perhaps she’ll get written up by some overzealous supervisor.

It seems obvious the sensible thing to do is give the test after the class ends. Shouldn’t we give kids more, not less prep time? And doesn’t it make sense to give them additional instruction when it’s so easy to do? This is particularly true of an exam no one’s ever seen, and giving kids every opportunity to excel seems more important than making things convenient for the folks at Pearson.

I’ve been saying for years that it’s absurd to administer the English Regents exam to my ESL students; they require a very different kind of instruction and examination than those of us born here. Preparing them for this exam deprives them of instruction they will likely need to revisit in college remedial courses — courses they’d need not pay for if we were free to give them what they need in high school.

The nonsensical manner in which this test will be administered exacerbates an already absurd situation. And it’s just one more thing that happens when educational decisions get made without educators’ input.

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. I have seen many public figures say that teachers shouldn’t get raises because some of them are bad. It reminds me, frankly, of young racists with whom I grew up saying things like, “The bad ones spoil it for the good ones.” Sure, we’d like you to have civil rights, but some of you are bad. Until you are all perfect, like we are, we need to continue treating you like second-class citizens.

Let’s say teacher A sits at his desk, eating a bowl of Cocoa Puffs and reading the box, while his students throw chairs at one another. Let’s say he teaches English but doesn’t actually speak or understand it, let alone any other known language. Would that make him a bad teacher? Let’s say yes. To defend a bad teacher, you’d have to assert that teachers have the inalienable right to study Cocoa Puff boxes during class time, and have no need to know their subject matter. I’ve never said such a thing, and I’ve never heard it said, either.

Now let’s say teacher B speaks to reporters, and writes anywhere and everywhere that will post his ravings about the ineptitude of those who manage the school system in which he works. Let’s say he’s extremely critical of the preposterous shortcuts that masquerade as reform, and makes a huge stink over things that actually hurt kids, like overcrowding and class size violations.

Finally, let’s say both teachers A and B are brought up on charges. Either they have the right to representation, or they don’t. Either they have the right to present their side of the story, or they don’t.

When I hear the new breed of education experts like Davis Guggenheim and John Legend ranting about bad teachers, I get the impression they feel only good teachers should be entitled to representation. But who gets to decide who are good and bad teachers (particularly without hearing their side of the story)? Should it be Joel Klein, who spent years boasting of test scores gains that proved to be nonexistent? Should it be crusading ex-D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose notion of classroom control entails taping kids’ mouths shut? Should it be Guggenheim, who made a film that’s largely misrepresentation?

Personally, I’d rather not rely on the good graces of such individuals. I have a little experience with unreasonable supervisors, and I want them to demonstrate I did whatever they happen to be accusing me of. Because I have tenure, that’s precisely what they have to do (at least for the moment).

If school leaders like Michelle Rhee readily fire hundreds of teachers based on faulty methodology, what are they gonna do to Miss Crabtree? Without a union, who would protect her? I’m hoping my daughter, who dreams of becoming a math teacher, has better options.

In fact, I’d like all my students to have better options than those faced by non-union teachers. I’d like to leave a legacy of good schools and good jobs. I’m afraid demonizing teachers while ignoring outrageous discrepancies in “reformer” talking points will lead to neither.

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.

We made a mad dash to the front stairwell, rushed down two flights of stairs, and crossed the strip without incident. By the time we got to the back door I was a little out of breath, but so was Maria. (Perhaps I wasn’t as out of shape as I’d thought.) We rushed to the trailer, where a dozen kids were milling about, waiting for me to unlock the door.   I did, and Maria was the first one in. So despite what Maria had told herself, her parents, and me, it can be done. In fact, we’d scientifically proven it.

But Maria’s usually punctual friend Sylvia was missing. And when she showed up eleven minutes late I was sorely disappointed. “Oh, Sylvia, Sylvia, Sylvia,” I began, launching into some horrendous soon-to-be improvised lecture. But Sylvia said something about the number 25 bus, and looked so genuinely miserable and contrite I began to feel as though her lateness were somehow my fault.

Then Maria said something. I don’t know what. But Maria and Sylvia speak Spanish, I can speak Spanish, and for some inexplicable reason I turned and blurted out, “¿Perdón?”

This was a huge error, as I’ve trained my class to never, ever speak anything but English in the classroom. My kids are near-beginners in English, and eliminating other options is the only way to drag English from them. How could I, an ostensible role model, break my own cardinal rule?

I’d been teaching them things like, “My name is Maria,” “I’m from Colombia,” and “This is a chair.” But after my unfortunate utterance they stunned me, rattling off all the things I’d repeatedly told them when they slipped into their native languages.

“Oh, Mr., how could you?” asked Hye Min.

“Unbelievable!” said Hao.

“After all my hard work, all my years of sacrifice…”

“What do I ask?  Just a little bit of English.  But NOOOOO!”

“Inconceivable!” proclaimed Maria.

“You almost broke my heart!” said Sylvia, pointing an accusing finger (but happy to have it pointing away from her).

I’m not entirely sure these are the things you want beginning English speakers to know.  But my kids are now experts.

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.

One good example is former Education Secretary Rod Paige. Paige is famous for having engineered the 1990′s “Texas Miracle,” in which he managed to curb the dropout rate and get kids through school in unprecedented numbers. This became not only a calling card for future President George W. Bush, but also the predecessor of the prominent No Child Left Behind. So how did Paige manage to engineer this miracle? It appears he doctored the statistics. Using such methods, NCLB’s goal of 100 percent proficiency for all in 2014 appears much more realistic.

Another success story is Steve Perry, the principal of Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Connecticut. Perry’s claim to fame is 100 percent of the students who graduate from his school manage to go to four-year colleges. Via this remarkable feat, Perry’s managed to become a prominent CNN education commentator who blames teachers, badmouths the NAACP, and urges the use of vouchers. The question, of course, is how you meet this seemingly incredible 100 percent figure. Apparently, what you do is rid yourself of 43 percent of your students before they reach graduation. That way, the 57 percent who finish magically become 100 percent, and you become a working-class hero, celebrated by the media.

This brings us to Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. They brought us a campaign for continued mayoral control a few years back that aggressively boasted of their test score gains (a campaign funded directly from Bill Gates’s pocket). Critics have been saying these test scores were inflated for years, and it turns out they were absolutely right. It further turns out Mayor Bloomberg’s much-touted claims of having erased the achievement gap were utterly baseless.

At the moment, eclipsing Bloomberg and Klein is President Barack Obama. He rode into the White House promising change, but for my money appears to be taking marching orders from Bill Gates and the Walton family, cheerleading a direct continuation of George W. Bush’s policies. Obama’s deputy, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (who ran the Chicago public schools Obama deemed not good enough for his children) is adding some of his Chicago-style reforms nationwide via Race to the Top. How have Duncan’s initiatives affected Chicago’s all-important test scores? From the Chicago Tribune:

Scores from the elementary schools created under Renaissance 2010 are nearly identical to the city average, and scores at the remade high schools are below the already abysmal city average, the analysis found.

The moribund test scores follow other less than enthusiastic findings about Renaissance 2010 — that displaced students ended up mostly in other low-performing schools and that mass closings led to youth violence as rival gang members ended up in the same classrooms. Together, they suggest the initiative hasn’t lived up to its promise by this, its target year.

That hardly sounds promising. Yet here we are in New York City, closing and transforming schools a la Chicago, hoping for the best, and ignoring all aspects of education problems unrelated to unionized teachers.

But hey, if this is the game, this is the game. If teachers get to play by the same rule utilized by the reformers, we can’t help but win. Bad stats? Just change ‘em. Critics? Attack them personally on the city’s dime.

It’s another matter, though, if this whole accountability thing applies only to the little people. That would go a long way toward explaining why Mayor Bloomberg chooses to hold up Lady Gaga as a role model. Plenty of parents would like their kids to be famous singers or NBA stars. Those who depend on it, though, may as well blow the college fund on lotto tickets.

Despite abysmal results, it appears reformers, from Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg to Barack Obama and Bill Gates, are willing to take just such chances with our children. None sent their own kids to public schools. This goes a long way toward explaining why they see “full speed ahead” as a perfectly acceptable approach to clearly failed policies.

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.

So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”

I’m having trouble imagining a teacher who lights up only once every year. If you can’t teach, you don’t give a sterling lesson on command. If you hate kids, you don’t instantly learn to love them when the principal walks in.

Gates claims a top quartile teacher will increase the test scores of students by over 10 percent in a single year. Thus, he reasons, if all students had this teacher, we’d be doing fabulously. I don’t know if I’m in the top quartile, but I raise scores when I have to. Yet when I do, I’m not as effective a teacher.

I try to inspire kids. I try to trick them, for example, into loving any book I teach, with high hopes they’ll love not only that book, but another, and then another. Will those kids get higher test scores? Maybe. But isn’t it possible a love of reading might pay off in some as-yet undetermined future? Isn’t it possible they might make career choices, pivotal decisions, based on something gleaned in my classroom?

Gates suggests teachers lack motivation, perhaps because we’re not getting merit pay, or because too few administrators tell us how wonderful we are. Why, then, do we write glowing recommendations for kids, pushing for them to be admitted to universities, special programs, or new careers?

Teachers have intrinsic motivation Gates can neither measure nor (apparently) conceive of.  I appreciate money, and I’ll say thanks to praise from almost anyone. But I especially treasure it from kids. Last month I told my class I’d miss them. They shouted, “We’ll miss you too!” They asked me if I’d teach them next year. I was honored, far more than by anything Gates could do or say.

But Gates proves things with charts, one of which says:

Once somebody has taught for three years, their teaching quality does not improve thereafter.

That’s preposterous. Many societies value wisdom and experience, but if they don’t drive test scores, Gates’s charts are unaffected.

But charts don’t face 34 teenagers at a time. I do. You never know what can, what will happen next. Live kids do unimaginable things, things that constantly perplexed me in year three. Even now, I steal any trick, any tip, anything from anyone if it sounds practical.  My bag of tricks is considerably larger now than it was 22 years ago, and I learn new things every day.

Says Gates’s chart:

A master’s degree doesn’t raise scores.

But if I hadn’t studied bilingualism, language acquisition, and the structures of English (that we all know instinctively but have likely as not never thought about), I’d be unqualified to teach ESL. I’d also never have passed the grueling Board of Examiners test the city required back in the day.

For my kid (and yours), I want a teacher with the deepest possible subject knowledge. Teachers compete with cell phones, iPods, and Microsoft’s own Xbox 360 (on which teenagers play some of the most sordid and vulgar war games I’ve ever seen), and need all the help they can get.

Maybe you don’t need a master’s to move kids from 55 on one test to 65 on the next test. A more worthy challenge is developing a kid who derives joy from class, one who eagerly participates and will continue studying it even when force is not involved. I will give that kid a better grade than test scores indicate, even if charts disapprove.

Anybody who has access to a DVD player could have the very best teachers.

That’s because he wants to film what he considers to be good teachers, and amass a video library. But doing that would mean only that anyone with a DVD player would be able to watch the best teachers.

There’d be no interaction, and certainly no assessment of the kid’s work by these best teachers. It’s not the same as having someone in your face. Gates seems to know that when it suits his purposes. When he describes his experiences at KIPP, he becomes giddy with excitement:

The teacher was running around, and the energy level is high … and the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored and calling on kids rapidly, putting things up on the board …

… keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everyone in the classroom needs to pay attention.

Here, I agree with Gates. But in my school, these things happen every day. And of course everyone needs to pay attention. Were someone to make a statement like that to my 14-year-old, it would merit an unhesitating, “Well, DUH!”

96 percent of KIPP’s high school graduates go to four year colleges.

That may be true. Or it may not. KIPP hasn’t been around that long, and mostly runs junior high schools, so KIPP students in college represent a very small sample. More to the point, the 96 percent figure, if true on any level, doesn’t include kids who don’t finish the program — which at some schools could run to more than half. Who teaches the kids who fail KIPP, and who does Gates blame for that? (I’m thinking me.)

Why not give the high schools the kids attend after KIPP some credit? Are they the “normal” public schools, the schools in which Gates claims administrators are contractually forbidden to observe teachers? Maybe Gates should sponsor that contract.

Charts don’t show underlying problems with poor performers. What if the kid has interrupted formal education, shuffled back and forth from one country to another, and by high school cannot read or write? What if there is abuse, neglect, or who knows what waiting for the kid at home? Gates seems to think if only we could raise that kid’s test score by 10 percent, all would be well.

Gates’s employees can’t be bothered with rudimentary fact-checking, nor can American print reporters. They’re all too busy fawning over him.

It broke my heart to see 3,400 teachers in Seattle doing precisely the same thing.

Thanks to Caroline Grannan for her sage counsel and invaluable advice.

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.

Here’s why. Like many city teachers, trailer or no trailer, I don’t have a Smartboard, I’ve never had a Smartboard, and (except for the very first day of a word-processing class I taught for five months) I’ve never had a functional computer installed in my classroom. In fact, the only reason there’s technology in my trailer at all is because I pack my little Macbook Pro into my schoolbag every morning. A few months ago we read a dialogue in which a character referred to eating lobster.

“What’s lobster, Mr. Goldstein?”

I struggled mightily to draw one, to the great amusement of my class. Kids seem to revel in watching me display total and utter incompetence, endlessly amused by my futile efforts. It makes up for all the times I’ve screamed at them to come on time, to do the homework, to answer the question, to pass the test, and all the other countless atrocities I’ve perpetrated.

I had an idea. I opened my Macbook, went into Google images, and found a photo of a lobster. I walked around the room displaying my 13-inch screen to the kids like a first-grade teacher introducing the Cat in the Hat. Eureka!

If I’d had a Smartboard I could have projected it on the screen. Smartboards are slow to come to the trailers, though. The last piece of technology placed out there, a 19-inch Sharp TV and VCR, was immediately stolen, along with our last box of paper towels. With people out there pilfering crap nobody wants, no one’s banging down our doors to install expensive equipment.

However, I’m thrilled to report that, after having requested it for eight years, our current tech guys have glued white plastic over my chalkboard and I can now use dry-erase markers out there.  No more chalk for me. Let the people in the main building boast about their Smartboards, their computers, their heat and air-conditioning, and their solid floors and walls. I’ve got a whiteboard, and my years of complaining have finally paid off.

I’ll take my victories where I can get them.

On this, the last day of the school year, I’d like to wish a joy-filled summer to all Gotham readers-teachers, students, parents, citizens, wonks, and even principals. With a city full of vacant trailers, perhaps Tweed will send us some joy by blowing them all up for the Fourth of July.

I’ve got a lawn chair, a laptop, and a longing to cover that story.

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.

This notwithstanding, I’m very happy when my students pass the Regents exam. I’m also acutely aware that the only thing I’ve prepared them to do is pass an exam they will never again face in their lives. However, they cannot graduate high school without passing the exam, so I teach it if asked.

My friend Rena Sum teaches Chinese, and overheard the following exchange:

“I don’t know what to do. I’m having trouble with the English Regents.”

“Oh, you should take Goldstein’s class.”

“Is it good?”

“No, it’s awful. You write and write and write. But you’ll pass the test.”

The kid was right about how awful it is. Several times the principal walked in on me, saw me screaming at kids to write better, to write more, to write over, and walked out shaking his head.

This year, I volunteered to teach the Regents exam again, but our coordinator sat me down and explained she wanted me to teach beginners. She wanted to make sure they got a good grounding in basic English, and would I please do this even though I hadn’t asked for it?

The very first day I taught the beginners I called to tell her that class was the best part of my day. I knew in my heart that I was giving these kids a lifeline, that my course was the most important they were taking, and that I was their best friend if they wanted to thrive and be happy in the United States.

“My name is Mr. Goldstein. What’s your name?”

A blank stare. I try someone else. “What’s your name?”

“My name is Eun Sil.”

“Ask him.”

“What’s your name?”

Eventually they all get it, they ask you, and you build from there. You show them that English is a tool for communication, not simply something you take tests with (like many of them did in their home countries). You show them we use it to express love, joy, and humor. You show them that life is full of all these things. You show them that you are full of all these things, and that they can be too.

When the principal walks in to that class, the kids are walking around having conversations and taking notes.

“We’re asking questions,” you tell him. “Ask the principal a question.”

“What time do you go to sleep at night?”

“What do you do in your free time?”

“What do you do on weekends?”

The principal does his best to answer, what with questions coming from all quarters, and when he finally escapes the inquisition, you look, but don’t detect his head shaking.

More to the point the kids, rather than learning how to pass a test, acquire real communication skills they can use for the rest of their lives, whether they stay here or not.  Next year, I want to teach beginners again.

I only hope my department coordinator doesn’t persuade me otherwise.

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. At that time, there was no ATR pool, and no paycheck unless I found something else. The first time, I had been teaching four months at Lehman High School in the Bronx and wasn’t all that invested in it.

I’d had no training whatsoever, and had found the job via a subway ad. After I’d taught nine days, I was observed. My assistant principal said I didn’t know what I was doing. “I told you that when you hired me,” I protested, but it didn’t matter. However, the city was so desperate for teachers that year they simply shuffled me from Lehman High School to John F. Kennedy High School.

When I got to JFK, the AP for organization told me they didn’t have any jobs for English teachers. He asked me what else I could teach. Social studies? No, they were all booked up. Music? Yes, they needed a music teacher right away. They gave me two classes of guitar, and three in Survey of Music (with 50 students each). What should I do in those classes?

“Fake it until you make it,” suggested Carl Benjamin, the music AP. It was the first practical teaching advice I’d ever received.  But after three semesters, I was let go. I found out when I arrived the first day of school in September. This was very inconvenient, as I’d just enrolled to get my master’s in English from Queens College. Fortunately, I hadn’t yet paid.

To hell with crossing bridges to the Bronx, I decided, and went to the hiring hall in Queens. A secretary showed me a room full of tenured teachers in folding chairs. “I’ve got to place every one of those teachers before I even think about you,” said she.

I called the teachers union. “We’re sorry,” a rep told me. “We know it’s bad now, but when you’re a senior teacher you’ll be glad.” Then I’d be able to sit in that room and wait, I supposed.

I put on a suit and walked into every department of every high school in Queens. The special education AP at Hillcrest High School hired me. The woman at the hiring hall made her sign a pledge to have me teach only English. Minutes later, the AP assigned me to teach math. In fact, I got two classes in the regular math department. Two kids complained I wasn’t doing my job, but rather was forcing students to work out all the problems on the board themselves. The math AP observed me and told me that was exactly how he wanted the course taught. Who knew?

I was glad he liked my class, because I was able to use him as a reference a few months later when I got dumped again. After another visit to every high school in Queens, I landed at Newtown High School where they had me teach English as a second language. I felt lucky to know what ESL was. Fortunately, it was one of the five preps Principal Robert Leder had assigned me, a new teacher with no experience, at Lehman.

“You’re going to teach ESL,” my Lehman AP had announced.

“What’s ESL?” I asked. The job was mine.

At Newtown, I started to love teaching newcomers. But I wasn’t licensed, and they couldn’t keep me. I got an offer to be appointed, for the first time, teaching English at Springfield Gardens High School. I turned it down, took a weekend job playing guitar in the World’s Worst Wedding Band, and began working toward a master’s degree in applied linguistics at Queens College.

This set me on a path to be a real ESL teacher. So being fired (or “excessed”) worked for me. Of course back then I didn’t have a wife, a daughter, or a mortgage.

Lucky as I may have been, I don’t delude myself. Many of my colleagues were not so fortunate. If Mayor Bloomberg thinks firing, or even “excessing” teachers won’t drive them away from the profession in droves, he’s the one deluding himself. If “Children First” is anything more than an empty slogan, he’ll drop all thoughts of doing so.

I’ll be at City Hall with the UFT on Wednesday at 4 p.m. for a protest against school budget cuts. I urge everyone who cares about kids, teachers, or education to join us. Let’s tell Mayor Bloomberg this is an emergency, and he needs to do the right thing.

Our conversation started because I’d mentioned the frenzy to create more charter schools. President Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, created a program called Race to the Top, in which states compete for cash. What states needed to do, apparently, was subscribe to as many unproven educational programs as possible, and the more shots in the dark they took, the more chance they had to win the money.

The jewel on the crown of New York’s monumental struggle to kowtow to the feds was the raising of the charter cap. This was very important to Duncan, even though charters, with fewer English as a Second Language and special education students than those attending neighborhood schools, have still not managed to outperform public schools.

This amazes me because I strongly believe proactive parents to be the number one predictor of academic success, or lack thereof. When I call parents, which I do with great frequency, the ones who react the most vehemently tend to be the ones who effect the quickest changes. That parents could take the time and trouble to research and enroll their kids in any alternate setting is a sure sign they care about their kids. With 100 percent proactive parents, any school ought instantly to rack up better stats than its counterparts.

In any case, the new law says charter schools will have to serve the same population as public schools. After reading false accounts in the New York Times claiming they already do, I’ll believe that when I see it.

Lies are readily accepted here, said my foreign-born friend. Look at the Iraq War, and the complicity of the New York Times’ Judith Miller (now working for Fox News). Look at Jayson Blair. Here, no one questions talking heads, let alone New York Times writers. Americans, he said, don’t do their homework because they incorrectly assume the media has done theirs.

But who will get America to do homework when the TV keeps telling America not to listen to teachers? The faux-grassroots commercial, urging people not to listen to the teacher unions, has received massive airplay. Was it a bunch of regular folks who funded this expensive ad campaign? Actually, this particular “grassroots” movement seems to have roots in hedge fund managers and billionaires, the very same ones now pulling the strings of gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Cuomo (if the Times isn’t making that up too). Hardly the “just plain folks” you see in the glitzy ad.

These days, hedge fund managers have a big say in how public education should function. After all, hedge fund guys have contributed so much to this country lately, why not have them extend their expertise to education? If their ideas don’t work, we can simply have taxpayers subsidize yet another bailout.

The second important change Duncan’s gotten in New York is the new rating system for teachers, which is partially based on the new “value added” method of teacher evaluation. This method promises to find out which teachers are better and which are worse, and the fact that as a method its validity is highly questionable doesn’t bother Duncan in the least. Nor does the problem that test scores may establish little or nothing. Nor does the fact that the $700 million, should we actually get it, cannot be used to fill budget holes.

In 1984, I spent some time in East Berlin. An English teacher I met there showed me textbooks full of propaganda. We laughed about it, but it was disturbing. Now, of course, that Texas gets to decide what history Americans can and cannot learn, it’s getting a little tougher to laugh at those wacky education practices they had behind the Iron Curtain.

Another thing the East German teacher told me was that they sold propaganda-filled Pravda on every corner, but that no one actually bought it. A frightening difference here, though, is that people seem to be lapping up propaganda en masse. On any given day, the New York Times could be no more reliable than Fox News, or even the gossip in the local pool hall. (So why doesn’t everyone read GothamSchools instead?)

Despite charter proponents frequently touting “choice,” we aren’t getting a whole lot of it these days. Maybe a few parents will get to send their kids to a charter school. But none of us gets a choice about keeping charters out of schools our kids already attend. We get no choice about targeting more resources to support or improve our existing schools, thereby improving our neighborhoods and adding value to our homes. In fact, as the Panel for Educational Policy has demonstrated, New York neighborhoods don’t even get a voice in whether or not their existing schools continue to exist.

Worst of all, we get no choice in whether or not we get the whole picture from the overwhelming majority of mainstream media, and people who rely on the papers or TV to inform them may lack the remotest notion of what’s really happening, or why.

She surprised the kids, though, by establishing new and unexpected ground rules for her next test. One of the boys who’d confided in her almost cried when he heard them:

1. No water bottles. It’s fairly easy for a kid to manipulate a water bottle so that the test answers are just a twist away. What teacher would deprive a kid of a swig of water?  Probably one that wants the kid to study rather than cheat.
2. No electronic dictionaries. This one was not news to me. Kids can place as much text as they like on these little things. One year I noticed two identical essays on the English Regents exams, right down to the misspellings. A supervisor called them both in and asked them to reproduce the essays. One wrote nothing, and was disqualified. The other produced the first few sentences from the essay and was allowed to pass. I protested, telling the supervisor I could recite “Annabel Lee“ from memory, but that didn’t make me Edgar Allen Poe. I was overruled.
3. No flicking your pen.  I teach a lot of kids who can do incredible things with pens.  But maybe they’re signaling one another.  Or it could be one angle of that pen gives them the answers. In fact, whether or not they flick the pen this is tough to catch.  Maybe we should distribute our own pens or pencils and insist they be the only ones used.
4. No raising your hand. While a kid shouts, “Yo miss,” who’s to say he’s not raising fingers — 4 for part 4, 3 for number 3, and two for choice B? Students can make eye contact with the teacher to signal a question.
5. No tapping on the desk. Why raise your hand when you can signal with taps for either the answer, or even the answer you’re seeking?
6. No pencil holders on the desk. Because who really knows what’s inside those things?
7. No backpacks on desk, lap, or back. Admittedly this one, perhaps along with the last, is not that tough-everything other than pen and paper ought to be on the floor.
8. No fidgeting. Well, if it works in blackjack, why shouldn’t it work on an exam?

She also alerted me to codes consisting of coughing, sneezing, blowing noses, and even breathing. I was relieved to hear she’d refrained from ruling out breathing (risky though it may be).

Another teacher at our table told a story of a young man who was shocked to get a 57 on a test — the student he’d copied from got 100. The student approached her, certain that she’d made a mistake. Actually what she’d done was quietly distribute an alternate test with different answers.

The kid did not realize he’d just announced to her that he’d copied the entire test. She, being evil incarnate, had coldly calculated the numbers and knew instantly.

When she told him, he confessed that he’d been cheating since kindergarten, and that his father (!) had actually gotten him started with tricks here and there. He came from a country in which high-stakes testing was a way of life, and rampant ever-more-sophisticated cheating was the inevitable by-product. Everyone did it, so why shouldn’t he?

That brings us to this, New York State’s new agreement to rate teachers based on the test scores of their students. Some day soon my young protégé’s job may hinge on the scores her kids get. Forgetting all of the above could likely work in her favor. In fact, if she were to not only encourage cheating, but also actively participate in it, it could be a real feather in her cap. A few points here, a few there, and all of a sudden she’s a highly effective teacher, maybe even earning merit pay.

And really, who am I to keep new teachers from riches and professional advancement? Why should I inflict my quaint and archaic reservations about cheating on young people? Thanks to this new agreement, it’s a whole new world out there.

Perhaps I should have counseled her to ignore the whole thing and let the kids carry on.

But I hadn’t counted on fighting City Hall. Whatever City Hall wants, City Hall gets, and unconnected little guys like me, or the 4,500 kids attending our school, are routinely left by the wayside. 

It’s not only the kids, of course. When I became chapter leader I learned our school’s UFT chapter had a soda machine in the check-in room. We made some sort of profit from each can of soda, how much I had no idea. The company that filled the machine was kind of cute — they forgot to send checks when I took over.

We called. Nothing happened. Called again. Another excuse. We finally told our contact, whom we knew only by first name, to send us a check or move the machine out. No response. Then we unplugged the machine. Three days later we got a check. The only way to deal with these folks, I thought, is to make them offers they can’t refuse. But they’re small potatoes.

Both our chapter and the cute company learned that weeks later when City Hall rolled in and took over everything. Boss Tweed says there’s one company to do all the vending for the entire City of New York, and when the boss says who does business, there’s no discussion, no appeal, no nothing. Use these machines, and if dozens of mom-and-pop companies (many more honest than ours) are suddenly out of business, too bad for them.

It would be one thing if that line of thinking were consigned to frosty beverages, but it’s “our way or the highway” for pretty much everything. Rules? Wise guys don’t follow rules. But they always look after their friends. Eva Moskowitz has unusual access to the chancellor. Geoffrey Canada, who sat on the board of Learn NY for the Tweed gang, is getting a $100 million building while Queens high schools are short 33,000 seats.

Nowhere is that shortage more profoundly felt than at 250-percent-capacity Francis Lewis High School, where I teach. New kids walk in every day, and with nowhere else to go, and no one new to help, it’s 35 in this class, 40 in that one, and battle your next-door neighbor over that much-coveted extra chair on a fairly regular basis. 

To preclude such occurrences, I went to the American Arbitration Association this spring and grieved 34 classes that were in violation of the teachers union contract. We won the grievance, and Boss Tweed was ordered to correct its violations.

Two weeks later I counted over 60 oversized classes. Needless to say, I was not pleased. But when you deal with the bosses, that’s the way things go. Sure, they were ordered to comply. But why should they? What’s the upside in complying with agreements that don’t directly benefit their inner circle? Weeks ago, Lewis requested centrally funded ATR teachers to help cut class sizes, and thus far Tweed has sent precisely one.

Now one is admittedly better than none, but it hardly does the trick for us. So here are our options — we can go back to the arbitrator and work out yet another order for the DOE to ignore. We can then go to court and force an order of compliance.

Of course, by that time, what with 20-some-odd school days left, it won’t make a bit of difference. If you aren’t connected, fighting Boss Tweed is an uphill battle, and your kids are most certainly not among those fabled children who are “first.”

The Tweed gang does what it likes, rules and agreements be damned. Panel for Educational Policy members who defy its edicts might as well be sleeping with the fishes. Children of its favored friends get red-carpet treatment. The other 97 percent of school kids can all go fish, even in the best neighborhood high school in the city.

And fish they do in room 221A of Francis Lewis High School, where my fellow English-as-a-second-language teacher Sylvia Huh endeavors every day of her young life to teach 39 newcomers in a half classroom, in blatant violation of contract, an arbitration decision, and common decency.

No doubt it’s not personal, only business.

The Measures of Effective Teaching program, sponsored by the Gates Foundation, is now at my school and many others across the city. Teachers were told this study would show what worked and did not work in the classroom. They hoped it would give them ideas on how to reach their students more effectively. How long should you pause after posing a question? Did certain seat arrangements promote more interaction? Is group work always more effective than lecturing?

A young woman from the program came to our school and told our teachers that the study was actually examining newer ways to observe teachers. Traditionally, said she, there’ve been only a few ways to accomplish this. The most popular is the traditional observation, in which a supervisor sits in the classroom and writes up the results. She also cited peer observation, and the notion of test scores being used to determine whether or not lessons are effective.

However, she said, this new study had an entirely new element — the panoramic camera. This camera, specially designed, could observe not only the teacher, but also the students. Are they engaged? Do they understand? Are they texting their girlfriends during the final exam? Should we grant tenure to the teacher in question? Perhaps the camera could tell all, if only they could get it to work properly (there have been issues, and they’re apparently working on a newer version).

Three participants told me that learning about the panoramic camera caused them to question the sincerity of the program’s sponsors. Why would program officials say they were measuring classroom techniques if in fact they were working new ways to observe us? Was this observation or surveillance? And didn’t the cameras smack a little of Big Brother?

One of the participants contacted a higher-up at the program, who said the young woman was entirely wrong. In fact, this person said, the camera was simply a tool. The program simply aimed to evaluate a series of rubrics for effective teaching. Actually the program was planning to give a test at the end of the study to determine which high scores, if any, aligned with which rubrics. If any rubrics stood out, they would therefore be valid and could be used to measure effective teaching elsewhere.

One participant said this might be worthy of support, but nonetheless, it was not what the literature and representatives had said the program would be. Perhaps this was not “Measures of Effective Teaching,” but rather “Measures of Measures of Effective Teaching.”

We’re still awaiting a written response from the Gates Foundation. But if what our teacher was told is true, that would represent a clear bait-and-switch. Personally, I doubt the validity of magic formulas. The studies that support them this year will inevitably be supplanted by studies supporting something else next year. Such infallible studies tend to be discarded and replaced on a rapid and predictable basis. Gates thought small schools were the magic bullet, and he was wrong. I doubt his search for a magic formula for teachers will prove any more fruitful.

Closer to home, a handful of Francis Lewis participants at are considering dropping out of the study, despite the attractive $1,500 stipend attached to it. One teacher told me the literature said only researchers would watch the observation films, yet showed me a participation slip for students saying school administrators would have access. Why tell teachers one thing and students another?

In any case, participating teachers feel misled. Personally, I can’t blame them at all. How can you work with people who say one thing and do something else entirely? How can you have faith in an organization in which the right hand doesn’t seem to know what the left hand is doing?

Bill’s 1,500 bucks could buy me that iMac I’ve been thinking about. 

But I can wait.

If you’re Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein, you find one of the last remnants of vibrant unionism in the center of your fiefdom and ask, “Why should we put up with such nonsense? Unions? We don’t need no stinking unions!” After all, most charter schools don’t have unions, and you can fire teachers simply for telling their colleagues how much UFT teachers earn. You can fire them for hanging Picasso paintings in the classroom. 

So, how do you start this war? Well, a good start is to seek out some nervous and wacky senator facing an uncertain future. If he’s desperate enough for your support, maybe you can persuade him to propose an uphill bill demanding an end to reverse-seniority layoffs. You will demand this only for teachers, not for firefighters, police, or anyone else. After all, you haven’t invested years into sliming them. Also, you’ll insist this bill be restricted to New York City, where you have mayoral control and a fake board of education that votes for absolutely everything the mayor wants. If they don’t, they’re fired on the spot, and teachers should be fired on the spot too, goshdarn it!

By some remarkable coincidence, the very same week you unveil this brainstorm, two young teachers appear out of nowhere with a very professional-looking website and also demand an end to reverse-seniority layoffs. And the ensuing buzz is this — the system’s good, the system’s no good, the senior teachers are better, the junior teachers are better, the better teachers are me, the worse teachers are you, and no one is quite happy at all.

They’re not really supposed to be. It’s tough to fight 80,000 teachers. But maybe, if you can get 40,000 teachers to spend their time fighting with the other 40,000, you can divert them from what you’re doing, and you can sneak in your real agenda without anyone being the wiser. After all, you just ran a campaign ostensibly based on jobs, you fired 500 DC37 employees right in the middle of it (just after their union happened to endorse your opponent), and no one really saw any problem.

Did anyone notice when you took hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce class sizes, and then class sizes went up anyway? Only a few random crazy people, the NAACP, and oh, that awful UFT. Man, those unionized teachers are a pain in the butt.

And who really cared when you held public hearings to close 19 schools? True, every single speaker got up and condemned your plan. Sure, your statistics were nonsense. But you ignored the speakers and had your rubber-stamp education board, the Panel for Educational Policy, approve them anyway. What difference did it make that not a single member on the board could make an argument in defense of your actions? The papers ate it up and called you courageous.

But there are those uppity teachers again, ruining everything and demanding you follow the law! Outrageous! Where will it all end? Sure, you can pull a few more editorial writers out of your pocket, and have them scribble your demands for you. After the UFT Prez wins by a landslide, you can have them claim it’s a mandate for him to judge teachers by test scores. You can demand merit pay for the millionth time, and you can follow up by making sure the writers support your bill to end reverse seniority layoffs.

After all, those same editorial writers have been telling the world for years that bad teachers are everywhere. They’re in the classroom. They’re under your bed. They’re taking over the world! There’s that awful tenure system. So you preach from the rooftops that it awards tenure to far too many teachers.

The solution, your bill maintains, is to take the very same people you’ve ridiculed for awarding tenure to far too many teachers for no good reason, and allow them to decide which teachers have merit and which don’t. You can blunt that by setting up advisory committees and acting like you aren’t giving those administrators the final say. You can play it down in the papers and hope, as usual, that no one bothers to read the actual bill. The fact that you’ve repeatedly insinuated these administrators have the most abysmal judgment on earth, therefore, will be neither here nor there.

As long as you can pit the old against the young, the senior against the junior, teachers will argue in the comments at GothamSchools, duke it out in the hallways, stop speaking to one another, perhaps the UFT will take their troublesome eye off the ball, and then you can get back to the business of doing what you want, when you want, how you want, and with whom you want. Because that, after all, is how things are done at the PEP, and how things should be done everywhere.

This business of turning teachers into Willie Horton hasn’t worked out exactly as planned. Sure, it’s good when you can get the public to believe teachers need fewer benefits and less job protection. The media here are fantastic. In any other country, the public would demand more benefits and job protection for themselves, rather than scapegoating teachers.

But if you can get them focused on throwing stones at one another while you pursue your real agenda-well, that’s the ticket! Forget seniority. Let the public chew on that nonsense. There are bigger fish to fry. After all, you’ve failed miserably to improve test scores you can’t manipulate, your entire program is an abysmal failure, someone’s gotta take the blame for this, and it ain’t gonna be you!   

And that, in the year 2010, is what you call “accountability.”

The possibility that we teachers might be building on something, improving on something, or engaged in a gradual process is never acknowledged. It’s not as sexy as a cure-all, and certainly not likely to make people jump up and down and shout, “Eureka!” But when you’re trying to persuade the public, there’s a need to evoke that reaction, even if it results in a wild goose chase. After all, after this one fails, there are always other wild geese to make us chase around.

For politicians, the latest quick-fix is closing schools. According to them, it’s what we need to do right now to fix everything. Apparently, if we shuffle enough kids around from here to there to who-knows-where, eventually they’ll somehow find themselves in a better place. If their neighborhoods are left without schools, too bad for them. 

Of course, the messy part of closing schools is replacing them. We can replace large schools with small schools, because they are better than large schools. Except, of course, when they aren’t, and need to be closed to make room for different schools. Or maybe it’s charter schools that need to replace closing schools. Charter supporters point to studies showing they’re better than public schools so they must be right. Detractors point to contradictory interpretations, so they must be right too.  As long as we keep closing schools, why should politicians worry?

However they are replaced, closing schools grab headlines and focus attention on leaders, who at least appear to be doing something. And for leaders, that’s an important concept. Early in Mayor Bloomberg’s administration, I was sent to listen to Department of Education representatives speak of one or another of their absolutely vital reorganizations that would transform and improve everything forever. At the time, I asked one of the reps why they were doing these things, as it didn’t appear to me the changes would have any significant effect. “Well, we had to do something,” he replied. To my mind, unless you’re going to do something worthwhile, you may as well do nothing.

Unfortunately, that concept has utterly eluded our leaders. Locally, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein, and Barack Obama and Arne Duncan nationally, appear convinced, with no evidence whatsoever, that closing schools is the magic bullet that will transform everyone and everything. Bloomberg and Klein are so eager to close these schools they use false statistics and break laws to do so. That it failed to improve things much in Chicago does not deter them one iota.

Obama and Duncan follow the grand tradition of George W. Bush and his Secretary of Education Rod Paige. As you may recall, No Child Left Behind, the last cure-all for education, was based on Paige’s “Texas Miracle.”  Less discussed was the fact the “Texas Miracle” was an utter fraud, concocted largely by cooking the books. The primary problem with “miracles,” however appealing or heavily promoted, is they tend not to exist.

I’m reminded of the Keep it Going NYC campaign. We heard testimonials about the great improvements in a reopened school. The test scores had turned around completely. No reference was made to the fact that this was one of several academies within the building, that it represented only a portion of the redesigned building, or that the kids being compared were completely different from those who’d attended the closed schools. Nor did they mention that at first the new small schools were not required to take the special education or English-as-a-second-language students who’d kept the scores down in the first place.  To my mind, changing all the kids and getting a different result is hardly miraculous. But who, viewing the commercial, would have known that?

One consistent characteristic of closing schools is replacement of teachers. After all, according to our leaders, the only variable in education is the teacher. This fiction appeals to parents, students, and society as a whole, all completely off the hook for everything. Were there any truth to this concept, there’d be no need to issue kids report cards. According to the “reformers,” nothing kids do is of any consequence anyway.

That narrow and highly unimaginative vision — that there’s one way to magically cure our ills — is precisely what hinders real progress. Of course there’s room for improvement, but we all need to work toward it — parents, teachers, kids, and even politicians. While I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, real long-term and deliberate plans will not bear immediate results for the New York Post op-ed page. In fact, recent NAEP scores suggest our last decade of chasing miracles has been a complete waste of time, money, and effort.

We need to be wary of those who promise Houdini-style education fixes. Thus far, none has delivered, and there’s no reason to believe any ever will.

One year, a woman came and explained to us that portfolios were going to revolutionize schools. The kids would do work, it would all be placed in portfolios, and the portfolios would be available, right there in the classroom, for anyone who needed to see them. Anytime you wanted to check the progress of any kids, you could simply look in their portfolios, and there it would be. What more could anyone ask?

The following year, the same woman came around and raved about cooperative learning. The students would work in groups and help one another. Every day would be a marathon of learning. A teacher asked whether this involved portfolios. “Portfolios are out,” the woman responded curtly. Several months later, some Very Important People came to my classroom and noticed my kids were sharing books. They complimented me profusely on my use of cooperative learning, and I decided it was best to thank them without explaining why I’d embraced this particular methodology. Actually, I only had 15 books for my 34 kids and was doing the best I could under the circumstances.

A much-ballyhooed method is the workshop model, heavily favored by the city’s Department of Education. Teachers give a mini-lesson and then the kids work in groups to reach various goals. A colleague of mine recently complained, “I spent 20 years trying to perfect the developmental lesson, and they turned the tables on me just like that.”  If the developmental lesson works for him, and for his kids, why force him to drop it? 

Sometimes they take old methods and paste new names on them. Perhaps this is so appropriate people can take credit, or perhaps the creators just haven’t been around long enough to realize it’s the same old thing. It doesn’t really matter. The only thing all the methods have in common is that they are indispensable, and the only ones that can possibly work. Last year’s indispensable methods inevitably turn out not to work at all. The same research that proves this year’s methods are the only ones that can possibly work demonstrates without question that all others cannot.

There’s likely merit, and lack thereof, in all methods. I’ll try most anything once. However, if it doesn’t work for me I’ll hesitate to repeat it. In fact, some things work for me that do not work for my colleagues. And some things work for them that do not work for me. Doing any one thing exclusively, without variation or allowing for the possibility of change or improvement, is not likely to be the best teaching method for anyone.

Isn’t it possible that teachers have different voices, just as writers have different voices? Just because I love Joseph Heller, does every fiction writer in the world have to emulate him? Isn’t there a possibility that, since teachers have different personalities, we might be able to reach kids in different ways? One of my favorite colleagues endears herself to kids by calling them “honey” and “sweetie.” This works for her — I’ve seen it. Yet if I were to try it, I have a strong suspicion I’d quickly end up in the rubber room.

Why can’t we take a little bit from here, a little bit from there, find out what works for us, and then use it? The notion that any one methodology will supplant or replace all others kind of defies belief. As long as we reach the kids, and as long as they can learn from us, what difference does it make how we get from point A to point B? (Actually, I’d argue there’s more to teaching than getting from point A to point B, and this point seems to utterly elude those who push particular methodologies-but that’s another topic altogether.)

The problem, perhaps, is too many people are paid too much to figure out what makes things work. They need instant results or they’re likely to need real jobs in the very near future. As far as I can tell, few such experts are working teachers, and even fewer are smart enough to figure out there’s more than one way to skin an apple — or teach a kid.

But Mom was not happy.

She asked, through my ex-student, why I didn’t teach like they did in China. Why wasn’t I giving extensive vocabulary lists for her daughter to memorize? Why wasn’t I giving her daughter the SAT words she’d be tested on? Why wasn’t I giving books full of those words? Well, I said, she’s only just arrived here, and I don’t think that’s what she needs just now. 

“You can’t tell Chinese parents anything,” confided my young translator, her hand covering her mouth.

So I tried something else. I said the girl had only been here four months, and that she loved speaking English. I told her she was making jokes in English, that she was very happy, and that I didn’t want to change anything. Mom talked for a long time, and gesticulated wildly.

“Tell her the names of some books with SAT words,” translated my former student.

I said that was not what she needed right now. She should read newspapers, perhaps. Maybe she could find things that interested her and write about them. Does she like dancing? Singing? Playing Parcheesi? She should start by reading about what she likes.

My translator gave me a frustrated look. I was clearly a slow learner.

I turned to Mom and told her if her daughter were my daughter, I’d get big sandwich signs and walk down the street beating a bass drum, announcing to the world she was mine. My translator duly reported my comments. Then Mom talked for a long time.

My translator sat and thought for a moment. Then she turned to me. The hand went over the mouth again. “Tell her something bad,” she instructed.

I said the girl was doing great. Her test scores were merely good, but I gave her extra credit for enthusiastic participation. I love seeing kids love English, I said. She’s good, she’s wonderful, she’s excellent, blah, blah, blah …

My translator gave me a look that clearly indicated it was time for me to shut up. “If you don’t tell her something bad,” she informed me, “she will never leave.”

I got another idea. I explained to Mom that I was largely the grammar teacher, and that my student’s other teacher was actually the reading teacher. Mom thanked me and purposefully shuffled on to introduce her proposals to my colleague. We watched her leave.

“I know what Chinese parents are like,” confided my translator, nodding with great earnestness.

“Are your parents like that?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “My mother lets me do anything I want.” 

So much for stereotypes — and what does my young translator want to do? 

I asked her.

Turns out, she wants to be an ESL teacher, like me. She says she wants to teach the American way, not the Chinese way. She’s smart, quick-witted, and she’ll be a very good teacher. 

I’ve no doubt she’ll know exactly what to say at parent-teacher conferences.

For anyone who’s wondered where on earth Joel Klein dreamed up his “reforms,” look no further. A substantial source of inspiration appears to be a three-stage process — a New York City experiment that gave a false impression of success, a San Diego experiment that eluded success altogether, and a stubborn determination to replicate both in overdrive.

As both Bloomberg and Klein were business experts using business models, they used a “corporate model of tightly centralized, hierarchal, top-down control, with all decisions made at Tweed and strict supervision of every classroom to make sure the orders flowing from headquarters were precisely implemented,” Ravitch writes. It appears they didn’t squander their valuable time on troublesome input from teachers, parents, or any contradictory voices whatsoever. In fact, Ravitch points out that though the mayor had promised increased parental involvement, it was actually reduced. Parent coordinators were hired, but in fact, they actually “worked for the principal, not for parents.”

Ravitch calls New York City the “testing ground for market-based reforms.” She states Mayor Bloomberg wanted “full control of the schools, with no meddlesome board to second guess him.” The San Diego experiment of utterly disregarding teacher and parent input resulted in a community-selected Board of Education that eventually rejected the program altogether — but Mayor Bloomberg made sure his new board would be patently incapable of disagreeing about anything whatsoever. And indeed, Mayor Bloomberg has fired members of his board rather than allowing them to vote their consciences. Ravitch touts the NYC Public School Parents blog. But Mayor Bloomberg not only disregards their opinions, but sees fit to dictate which topics on which they’re permitted to have opinions at all.

Tweed’s philosophy may well be this — if NYC parents knew anything worth knowing, they’d be as rich as Mayor Bloomberg and his pals. Ravitch points out that the way things are going, the education of our children will be entirely dictated by billionaires — Eli Broad, Bill Gates, and the Wal-Mart heirs, the Walton family, to name the most prominent. She says the Walton family clearly wishes to “create, sustain, and promote alternatives to public education.” They encourage privatization and invest heavily in non-union charter schools. Ravitch concludes the Walton family is committed to “an unfettered market, which by its nature has no loyalties and disregards Main Street, traditional values, long-established communities, and neighborhood schools.” To those of us in New York, that has a very familiar ring.

Ravitch, with meticulous research, demonstrates how virtually every achievement of the so-called “reformers” entails selecting high-performing kids and extracting high-performance from them. This is hardly remarkable, and worse, hardly covered by the ever-incurious American press. Are charter schools miraculous? Are small schools a magic bullet? Are public schools as abysmal as they’re routinely made out to be in the New York Post?

Well, if you look at the coming films glorifying Geoffrey Canada, Michelle Rhee, and the founders of KIPP, you will certainly get the impression, as did Roger Ebert, that teacher unions are largely responsible for all the world’s ills. Ebert says he knows little about math, a mindset which might explain why he bothered to question nothing whatsoever in this so-called documentary (“Tenured teachers have a job for life”). It’s my fond but dim hope that Ravitch’s publisher sends Ebert a copy of her book, and that he actually takes the time to read it.

Ravitch states, “Once Tweed embraced charter schools, they received priority treatment. The Chancellor placed many charter schools into regular public school buildings, taking classrooms and facilities away from the host schools and igniting bitter fights with the regular schools’ parent associations.” Given the disparate treatment of neighborhood and charter schools, it’s hardly surprising some of them do well. The only surprise is how many do not. Ravitch provides chapter and verse.

I’ve no doubt, for example, that Geoffrey Canada’s kids do well, but I’ve also no doubt, with his annual budget, the city’s willingness to create space for his kids while ignoring ours, his activist approach to early childhood, and his ability to dismiss entire grades if they don’t meet expectations, many public schools could produce similar, if not better results. Of course, Chancellor Klein does not provide troubled schools with additional resources. He just closes them, and if the data on which he bases his statistics are utterly false, well, that’s just too bad. After all, why bother to re-examine anything? Under mayoral control, he and Mayor Bloomberg are always right.

Teachers of literature will be touched by the story of Mrs. Ratliff, who inspired Ravitch to love literature, to write with precision and clarity, and to respect the rules of written English. Doubtless today Mrs. Ratliff would be in the rubber room for insubordination. She’d be patently unable to wade through the rubrics of jargon and standards-based nonsense with which we train our children to pencil in circles nowadays.

Ravitch demonstrates how obsessed we’ve become with test prep, often to the exclusion of all else. This hits home with me, at least. I often teach ESL kids how to pass the English Regents, as most of my colleagues are too smart to volunteer for such a thankless task. I drill the kids to death, largely neglecting the grammar and usage they so sorely need, preferring to make sure they minimally answer questions so they can pass. After all, if they don’t pass, they don’t graduate.

As I read Ravitch’s descriptions of the test-prep factories we’ve allowed our schools to become, I realize that I’ve become yet another facet of the problem. She describes a phenomenon I’d been part of, with no notion it was so widespread. Kids learn from me how to pass one single test. They don’t learn how to write, and they don’t learn to love reading either (in that class, at least). Like many teachers, I haven’t got time for such frivolities when my kids need to pass that test. And since they really do need to pass that test, I’d do it again. In her conclusion, Ravitch makes numerous worthy suggestions about how we can address this issue.

Ravitch bemoans the preposterous demands of NCLB, which has asked that we make every child proficient by 2014. She points out how states can simply lower the bar year by year, and give the appearance of progress. That’s the essence of “reform,” as far as I can tell.

My only quibble would be Ravitch’s description of Green Dot as a union school. While Green Dot teachers are ostensibly unionized, they enjoy neither tenure nor seniority rights. Without tenure, like many of my colleagues, I’d have been fired years ago for reasons having nothing to do with my ability to teach (or lack thereof). Green Dot has a “just cause” clause to protect its teachers, but with neither tenure nor seniority rights, it appears to me that Green Dot teachers can be fired “just cause” their bosses feel like it.

Most of my views on education come from experience. I haven’t got any gift for analyzing data or reading endless reports. I’m always impressed by people like Ravitch, who can plow through papers and reports I’d read only if forced, and not only make sense of them, but also take the time to explain them to people like me, with extensive documentation for those who wish to double-check. She must be a great teacher, and from me, that’s high praise indeed.

Working teachers have come to many conclusions similar to Ravitch’s, drawn from just instinct and experience. It’s gratifying to see how many of our conclusions match those of Ravitch, and how strongly they’re borne out by hard data. And here they are, for all the world to see, in one convenient place.

I’ve only scratched the surface here. If you’re motivated enough to bother reading GothamSchools, you really owe it to yourself to read this book.

One of the social studies teachers in my school, trained as a lawyer, could not believe I’d gotten the term right. But there it is, in GothamSchools, the most reliable source for education news and opinion in the known universe. So basically, they can fire you for stealing pencils, and you’d have to prove to them that you didn’t do it. After all, it’s “Children First” in New York City. So if you’re an adult, falsely accused, too bad. No salary or health benefits for you. And when the children who “came first” grow up, the hell with them too. They get the same 19th-century-style jobs we just took away from their parents.

The DOE, of course, is now two years into its quest to fire more teachers. So far, they’ve only been able to build successful cases against three. It’s remarkable that, led by a noted attorney, that’s as far as they got. I’m sure they could’ve done better if they weren’t expending so much energy on personal vendettas and utter nonsense. Still, you’d think someone who so reveres accountability and spurns excuses, like Chancellor Klein, would have a better explanation than the one he’s got — that the rules and regulations are neither arbitrary nor capricious enough. But those are the sort of results you can expect when you send people to the rubber room for bringing plants to school or reporting administrative malfeasance. I personally worked with someone who spent time there largely for the offense of not wearing a tie.

As a chapter leader, I’m particularly fascinated by the clause demanding that chapter leaders do all their work outside school hours. I’m wondering exactly how that would work. If the principal calls me into a meeting that takes place during class time, would I have to teach my class after school? Would I perhaps be expected to tutor the kids in my home one at a time? If I get called into an arbitration over class size violations, would I get to ask the arbitrator if he could hold it off until after dinner? Or would we simply ignore class size violations, so Tweed could get back to its policy of doing whatever it felt like doing, with no consequences whatsoever?

With 300 UFT members in my building, when would I consult with them? Who on earth could handle such a thing? I suppose the goal is to leave union members without union representation. That’s a worthy and admirable goal in this administration’s continuing effort to roll back the 20th century. If they get what they want here they’ll have come pretty close.

I’m struck by their proposal to create modified contracts in phasing out schools. It seems they think they ought to be able to do whatever they wish in those schools. The fact that they close them arbitrarily and capriciously based on false statistics is of no consequence. Doubtless they’d like to make up contracts on the fly in all schools. In fact, by offering compensation increases based on whether teachers are “apprentice, practicing, mentor, or master,” they’re pretty much saying they ought to pay whatever they feel like as well.

Frankly, if they really want to be arbitrary and capricious, I see no reason why the UFT shouldn’t negotiate in kind. To hell with the 4 percent increase. Let’s demand a four hundred percent increase.  We’ll also demand that Joel Klein come to each school personally, every week, and pay everyone in quarters.

Let’s make sure there are fresh baked goods in every workroom and every classroom. Why shouldn’t kids reap the benefits of our new and improved negotiation techniques? Every school needs a state-of-the-art gym and spa for UFT members and public school kids, with personal trainers, sports drinks, and complimentary Starbucks drinks of every stripe. An Iron Chef in every school cafeteria. And for goodness sake, let’s demand a golf course to work off those calories.

Let’s make assistant principals subordinate to teachers, as it’s well-known we do all the work anyway. Let’s demand a huge barrel of cash in every department office, so that we can take handfuls of it and distribute it to our best students. Or best buds. Or Best Buy.

Finally, let’s make sure the mayor and chancellor are truly accountable.  The next time a kid, any kid, is left behind, let’s phase out Tweed.