An unpopular topic at the moment, I realize, though, increasingly, one that is much more crucial an item to pay attention to than the recent Obama fly swatting incident that has surreptitiously dominated the airwaves:
Just in case anyone is not tracking the bipartisan acrobatics currently unfolding in Albany, it’s a highly unusual, precariously choreographed waltz in a very baroque masquerade ball, complete with sceptres sporting dual masks. One of the most eggregious errors of our time would be to allow the previously touted as revolutionary bill conferring mayoral control of the city schools on Mr. Bloomberg set to expire in the immediate future. This seems to be less of a hot button issue than obviously I believe it should be. On the battle front are the educational lives of no less than 1.1 million children, the interests of their parents, the teaching lives of the educators responsible for their instruction, and the administrators whose purpose it is to ensure that the entire affair runs smoothly.
Of greatest concern is the high stakes testing program in which hizzoner has put absolute faith, a failed and utterly unrealistic regime of exams and statistics gathering that is not only easily, but frequently manipulated to tease out only the most favorable of representations for those collecting the data. This holdover from the No Child Left Behind legislation was an educational paradox that produced innumerable dissatisfying, disparate, and disheartening results in the state of Texas under Bush Jr.’s governorship long before it ever was enacted as a national policy. Now seven years old and flagging, the policy is underfunded by many billions of dollars (and, according to whom you believe, that figure is either two or three digits following by nine zeroes), a fact that current US Education Secretary Arne Duncan seeks to do something significant to resolve. This program’s reflection in the City of New York is something that has caused those of us in the trenches to have heard far too often from APs and Principals: “…see if you can find any more points for this one”, or, in extreme cases, reclassifying a student entirely so that their participation in an exam is not required (reclassifying meaning, for example, that a student -at exam time- is subsequently labeled ‘Learning Disabled’ or some other particular edu-speak moniker in order to avoid the particular embarassment of having them participate in an exam that they are quite obviously going to fail).
But, the testing phase of the mayoral control protocol is not the sole cause for vitriol. There is further need for concern regarding the entire small schools initiative and how that unfolds in terms of treatment of teachers, students, and parents. The entire small schools initiative is something that has created nothing less than ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision, confusion, dissension, nonproliferation, and deunification. It has forced a paucity of resources for the classroom because the supply departments simply can’t keep up with the needs of dozens of new schools opening up annually, not to mention the fact that in formerly large schools that are now cordoned off to create uniquely branded (much as a large corporation does with their proprietary product) environments, often entirely eschewing already warehoused supplies, n’est entire storehouses of curriculum materials: books, audio cds, transparencies, workbooks, and manipulatives, from the recently deposed status quo that, in my experience, simply get shoved unceremoniously into a dark and rarely visited closet space where there is such a discombobulation of the aforementioned content rich portals of wisdom and culture that it takes a dedicated, unyielding professional sometimes years to tease out the three class sets of Lorca’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba (which I attempt to teach every year to the advanced classes), or an entire collection of the workbook and supplementary system for ¡Dime! (back when that series was still available,) and order them accordingly inside of a classroom library. Likewise, the overt, exclusionary, and frequently derogatory to other disciplines concentration on the ‘core’ areas of Math, Science, and English has created a public opinion, as well as one inside of the student population, that anything unrelated to these three basic topics is not only unnecessary, but tantamount to a pathetic waste of time. Nothing at all could be farther from the truth. In point of fact, Foreign Language classes are the only hour of the day that students can unify the knowledge they are acquiring in all their other classes, and create a mosaic of understanding unlike anything else they’re doing in the 7.5 hours their in class (for more on this, see my post on Technology in the Foreign Language Classroom). Lastly, a hyper-constrained focus on three of potentially seven or eight class subjects that a student could possibly take in a day results in a student that takes on the appearance of those in the following picture:
Mayoral Control - just say no.
In reality, some of the most egregious deficiencies are in the way Mayoral control causes treatment of teachers to be even less professional than the situation that already presents in the current paradigm. In creating a ’small schools focus’ their has been a wholesale bloating of the ranks of administrative personnel, frequently by those who are educators with just slightly more than two years of teaching experience. The smaller faculty sizes have not increased collaboration between educators, but in fact increased territoriality and left teachers much more exposed to the legendary derision that is the hallmark of a freshly minted power figure that lacks the benefit of the worldliness that can only come with age and breadth of practice. The minting process is likewise one that is indicative of a term that we collectively had hoped went the way of the dodo with the ousting of the previous leadership – pork barrel spending. Each new administrator’s salary (if the freely available published figures are to be believed,) rings in to the tune of some $90K+ per annum. At no less than three new administrators per new faculty, that is a significant chunk of a small school’s budget before the teachers even get in the door. A distinct lack of support personnel (exam schedulers, class schedulers, etc.) many of these responsibilities are shifted onto the newly minted administrative staff, who in turn foist the hot potato onto the laps of one teacher or another in the hopes that they will be capable of being adept in their new comp time position. Faculties of 25 professionals or less are also incapable of creating departments such as were previously known (which might have included a total of 25 teachers for just one subject!) in turn creating a difficulty if a students needs to be shifted into a different level class in the same subject, between classes to find a teacher who is a better match, or simply to reschedule their day because they need to complete a course for graduation.
I could, quite obviously, go on and on and on all day regarding this situation, but I believe the point has been made. Mayoral control has to end, and for the time being it is stopped in the State Senate, pending further review. Those who know, say no. So should you.
