My pod-mate, education reporter Joe Williams, is guest blogging at Eduwonk.com this week.
EduwonkMy pod-mate, education reporter Joe Williams, is guest blogging at Eduwonk.com this week. 9 comments to EduwonkLeave a Reply |
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Greenhorns Rule!
New York City’s veteran public school teachers have retired in near record numbers this year. At the most critical educational crossroads in decades, the average teacher is becoming less and less experienced in the more and more complex duties of being a psychologist, surrogate parent, and a dozen vocations beyond purveyor of knowledge.
This grim loss would be viewed with alarm in every other kind of serious work. But the corporate and college-based educrats see this as a robust sign. “Anybody can teach” is their mantrum.
“There is no evidence that senior teachers are more effective than teachers with at least three years of experience,” says Michael Podgursky, a University of Missouri cog.
If Mr. Podgursky ever needs a specialist for a high-risk medical infirmity, one as dire as the prospect of an ignorant new generation, may he refrain from buzzing those out-to-pasture department heads and bare his open heart to last year’s Residents instead. Let me know what happens!
Give the Dog a Bonus!
Principals are the Chief Executive Officers of their schools, and as absolute educational rulers, are accountable for the effects of their policies on student performance. That explains why principals who have presided over schools that have failed so dismally that the New York State government has jumped in to forestall total collapse, are showered with $15,000 bonuses anyway.
What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing, according to Peter McNally, Vice-President of the Principals Union. He thinks that “these schools deserve the bonus because they have definite challenges.” By “schools” he means principals, not the mortar of buildings, the students, or ( heaven forfend!) the teachers. Apparently the “challenges” are relevant only to his members, not educators.
In fairness, principals get bonuses not only when their schools do poorly, but even when they do well. When test scores are high, principals get bonuses. Teachers get nothing. So principals get bonuses even when their schools are the bleeding victims of their self-inflicted policy sickness, and teachers get nothing even when they have saved their schools from a gruesome academic death. Now that’s cosmic justice, New York City-style!
Strange Bedfellows
Lenora Fulani has credentials that would make a Nazi proud, maybe even blush. As an appetizer, she called Jews the “mass murderers” of Blacks. On the record for many years, and to my knowledge never retracted, are her diatribes against the Jewish Homeland and her tirades against those People of the Book who are just a generation removed from the unmarked ash heaps that are the nearest thing to tombstones of their martyred parents.
Whether to avoid association with such a dubious person ought to be a no-brainer. But when you’re the Mayor of New York City, and Fulani, as head of the Independence Party, delivered 59,000 votes to you in your last, narrow electoral victory, it ain’t that simple.
It’s not made simpler, though it’s made more disturbing, that the politician, Mayor Bloomberg, has so compartmentalized his Jewish faith, that he sees no problem in ignoring Fulani’s sins in exchange for her endorsement at the ballot box. He can’t buy her votes with the five billion dollars of change he has jingling in his pockets as he takes the subway to work each morning, but he can secure the prostitutional wiles of the City treasury.
The odds-on favorite Mayor wants to protect those Fulani-smudged votes, just in case the gap narrows between those who will vote for him and those who know what’s best for the City. So he directed personal and corporate donations to Fulani’s organization, and also provided them tax-free status for more than 8 million dollars to build a new headquarters for Fulani and her tainted disciples.
Could an honorable man commit to such a sullied trade-off for the promise of a mutually happy-ending?
Heartland Detox
Senator John Corzine (D-N.J.), who represents the “little guy” and , best as he can, pinpoints his personal wealth as somewhere between 85 and 261 million dollars, forgave in his heart a debt, even before he actually made the loan, to a girlfriend, Carla Katz, President of Local 1034 of the Communications Workers of America. She’s a Union organizer and had worked breathlessly on Corzine’s 1000 election campaign and is credited with having delivered the goods.
Extravagant wealth doesn’t rule out empathy with the 99.999999% of the world that are relative paupers, but even if it raises legitimate doubts, this is not the place I have chosen to spotlight them. Instead I direct your attention to the choice of words used interchangeably by the New York Post (8/8/05) to mean “union organizer” or “labor activist.” From their pernicious corporate thesaurus, they pick “rabble-rouser.”
Not in an editorial, but in a supposedly straight news story, they call Carla Katz a “rabble rouser.” They do not say why. To them, workers are “rabble” and those who try to awaken them to the dignity and rights of their labor, are “rousers” of class envy. This view is deep and widespread in heartland and boardroom America, where it has attached to the body politic and circulated its toxin like a disease-causing tic.
Don’t pack. Don’t say your good-byes. Just drop all and rush through the walls. It is time for de-tox!
Grisly and Immensely Popular
Why do newspapers, especially “tabloids”, use the same words to describe standard situations, especially human tragedies? Murder scenes are always “grisly,” victims are invariably in a “pool of blood”, and teachers who are caught up as innocents in disaster were previously “beloved”, or “popular”,if subsequently there is some newsworthy scandal attached to them.
In the case of Sandra Geisel, a teacher at a “prestigious Catholic school”, who is accused of rape for having. according to the New York Post, “bedded” students, including an underaged one, she was “immensely” popular. Does this mean she implemented curriculum mandates faithfully?
Papers like the Post delight in this kind of life-destroying scandal. If they had a London office during Jack the Ripper’s escapades in 1888, they would have boosted their sales with salacious words and scarlet graphics. It would he been almost as “grisly” as their attacks on public school teachers.
If Ms. Geisel were a member of a public school teachers union, the papers would have blasted her as a protected product of that “special interest.” Will she be represented now by “parochial” interests?
Classroom as Space Shuttle
Two years ago, a hole in the space shuttle Columbia’s wing, caused by the dropping off of some cheap insulating foam during liftoff, incinerated 7 astronauts as they were about to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. This tragedy happened because top management wanted to show how efficient they were by cutting costs, and ignored the warnings of scientific engineers. These deaths and blows to our national prestige and progress were due to callous, business decisions by ignorant or calculating executives who were able to supersede the sound judgments of employees with greater expertise but lower rank.
This phenomenon is endemic in many areas of our society: medicine, law-enforcement, military, and especially education. Teachers should make up 90% of the policy-makers in education; not bankers, Chamber of Commerce scouts, “think-tank” consultants, publishers, and mortar-board academicians.
In New York City, there is only one absolutely guaranteed disqualification to be chancellor of the school system: a recent history of being a classroom teacher
Back To School Cults
A Scientology fund-raising group called Citizens for Social Reform, has aggressively urged its members to donate heavily to the campaign of New York City Councilmember Margarita Lopez. This highly responsive representative of the people reportedly then shunted well over a half-million taxpayer dollars to a Scientology “detoxification” project, which treats sickened rescue workers from the 9/11 World Trade Center murders with saunas and ol’trusty “B” vitamins.
Scientology fits most folks’ definition of a cult. Of course, yester-millennium’s cult may be this weekend’s mainstream faith. So it is with educational theory also. “Ramp-Up”, “America’s Choice”, the Teachers College-whelped “Workshop Model”, and “Balanced Literacy” are all cults. I went to “training” for “Ramp Up” and it was exactly like the indoctrination I almost got snatched up by when collared on a street corner near the infamous Martinique Hotel in Times Square years ago by comet-clinging cultists.
Luckily I escaped from both before I could be processed into their maggoty,starry folds.
Y’know … comments are supposed to be a forum for discussion. If one person hogs the forum by posting seven comments in a row, it doesn’t work. So don’t, okay?
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